the year approaches a close — media layered on media layered on media — radio reporting on blogging; radio reporting on others having television programs; radio interviewing other people who have been to movies and what they thought about the movie. what can this be about? does it make a difference in how life is actualized, lived, exercised? is it the same as this travelog — which is media showcasing mediated living. it can’t show that which is in between the moments of mediation, that which is, only that which is re-presented.

Orchids come from the mountains,
And to the mountains they should return.
Orchids housed in pots in the mortal world,
Are not as beautiful as those which accompany the mists and clouds.

in the midst of Frieder’s piles of books and papers to-be-dealt-with (meticulously organized, to be sure), is a copy of Mark’s new book on MIT Press, meta/data. a remix auto-biography of his last 15 years or so.

comparing/contrasting to my own traces is a strange flux of feelings. where practice is sampled (how, what, and into what form) and translated (re-mediated) into another form. it is only the form of the mediation that determines the relative fed-back social efficacy of the individual (or social sustainability of the individual’s praxis). the books points to, alludes to, hints at, expands upon, posits, and invents a praxis, part of which is the reflexive re-creation of a praxis. but does it engage in an authentic praxis that is not about pragmatism and social role-playing?

it is clear that it is the choice of propagation channels that ultimately determines how the Self is or is not rewarded by the larger social system. it is also clear that these choices will also have a profound affect on the human relationships that ensue.

how to select those forms? Mark’s book and documented practice seems optimized, pragmatic, and formal (that is, formed to optimally integrate into an existing social reward system). the question of form returns again and again. along with the embedded-ness within a social system that has strictly limited pathways for reward and punishment.

I understand the principle, but choose to engage in the praxis which supersedes the documentation of the praxis. although I continue to write, make images, sound and video works, and so on — none of which garner any attention whatsoever.

the presence of the personal network of a handful of deep supporters is the only plus to the path of the praxis. otherwise, might as well be living on the streets. or simply finished off with the whole thing.

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

Where did you study and work as you reached adulthood? What are your strongest memories of encounters with nature during that period? Were there any landscapes that you especially connected with your intellectual and creative development?

What aspects of nature are important to you now? How do you engage with it in both physical space and virtual space? Prompts for this question might include: Do you grow plants at home in a garden or indoors? Do you live or vacation in the countryside? Do you wish you did? Have you built ‘natural’ spaces in virtual places such as Second Life, MOOs, game spaces etc?

This question is about any connections you may have made between the way you experience computers and the internet and the way you experience nature. Do you find yourself noticing similarities between the two lifeworlds? Prompts for thinking about this might include the way you experience the passage of time; connection; travel and movement; spirituality; physicality; emotion; abstraction etc. I’m interested in any synergies around this area that you may have noticed in your own thinking or that of others.

This is a very loose question — feel free to skip it if it doesn’t attract you. If the internet were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?

Joe Nasogaluak of Tuktoyaktuk created this amazing piece (2 meters wide!) carved from a Bowhead whale skull in 1992. it’s a work about Sedna, an Inuit sea goddess who rules over the Adlivun, the Inuit underworld. I note that we are the same age.

on the road. by the time I post this I’ll be in London, safely ensconced at Joanna’s place. only the mediation of hours in hard-shaped public spaces lies ahead. and indeed, the system seems ever so fragile. needing constant invigoration, construction, maintenance. the 767 scheduled to take me from Vancouver to London breaks down. forcing an ancient 747 recently arrived from Toronto to be pressed into service for the long haul. somehow the seat I had selected online got translated from a aisle one to a window. despite there being some 1/3-full three-across rows, I just stayed where I was. too tired to change after the 4-hour mind-numbing delay. (the sound of) public null-spaces. grind the senses to a fine dust, leave them, particulate, ready to be disbursed by a Light breeze.

Canada. last time I was in Canada was for ISEA 1996 in Mon’real where I shared a room with Leslee and a couple other folks, or vaguely recall something like that. at least it was the same hotel. ever since going to the Calgary Stampede back in 1974 on the way to Alaska along the Al-Can Highway, and some summer camping trips with Aunt Mary to the Maritimes and PEI, Canada has always had special status in my psyche. despite the funny way of talking! a niece who is homesteading there in BC now, too. O Canada! eh?

another Furtherfield review:

walking down Bedford Street I meet the lady with the lime green brolly briskly on her way to the wine shop, kitty-cat in a tote bag, and stories about winning over the boys in the community garden. dinner with Amanda and Stephanie, at Amanda’s place in Brooklyn. along with Mr. Tiger, Amanda’s new cat who seemed easy-going and sociable despite battle scars from street life in Brooklyn.

earlier I was able to get together with Eric, a sharedj activist among his many other talents. at a cave-like cafe in Brooklyn he showed me some of his keyworx-based work which immediately brought to mind Stan Brakhage’s aesthetic which could easily be described as the precursor to much vj work in the present time (including my own). although my contact with Brakhage was, on a film-production level, limited, the discussions, and more importantly the simple exposure to his vision through screenings of his and other’s work was moving and formative to the inner eye. he had his little cubby-hole office next to and half the size of mine when I was a grad student, so we got to know each other better through informal chats — life is short art is long…

Imagine an eye un-ruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’ — Stan Brakhage

anyway, back to Eric’s output — he also collaborates as a tenor and lutenist on an entirely different plane in Asteria, a Medieval/Renaissance music duo. he passed on a copy of Soyes Loyal, their latest album featuring Burgundian chansons of courting and love from the 14th century. Eric’s divergent interests and skills are incongruous on the surface but stand as a strong example of how personal energy transmission does not have to be closely tied to form but rather to the efficiency with which one finds the projection of such energy through a chosen material mediation. Eric is attentive, concentrated, skilled, and definitely efficient transforming his energy into a variety of forms of inspiration.

you can test track their two albums at magnatune.

Outi, a former student sends this link http://www.liveherring.org, a project she’s been working on.

and more iDC mailing list commentary

hunting more background on the ‘structural holes’ issue that Burt raises in relation to the geometry of links in a social network. Goyal, in laying out the question of whether or not connectivity is a sustainable strategy, formulates the ground conditions.

We develop a simple model of network formation to address this question. We consider a setting where interaction between every pair of individuals generates a surplus. If two individuals are directly linked then they split this surplus equally, while if they are indirectly connected — there are other players in the ‘path” between them — then the division of surplus depends on the competition between these intermediaries. In this setting, there are three types of incentives for individuals to form links with others. The first incentive is the desire to create surpluses: individuals would like to join the network so as to create exchange possibilities which in turn create surpluses. The second incentive is related to the rewards from intermediation: players would like to place themselves between others in order to extract rents from intermediation. The third incentive arises out of the desire to avoid sharing surpluses with intermediaries; in other words, individuals will try to circumvent intermediate players to retain more of the surplus for themselves. — Sanjeev Goyal

this allusion to a surplus in the connection between two individuals is one of the first uses found in network theory that is in the direction of my research — where a core outcome of the series of bi-directional connections that occur in an open network is a surplus of energy. back to the 1+1=3 theory. the extraction of ‘rent’ however brings up an entirely different mechanism. the mechanism is the applied attenuation of social strictures (as applied through the full range of ‘technological’ mediation) that extracts energy from the pair of engaged individuals — in this case, the third party happens to be in control of the ‘spending’ of energy from that immediate social energy bank. so, two separate and very different dynamics happening, not degrees of the same mechanism.

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

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

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

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. (more …)

see Come and See by Elem Klimov — a movie that pressed certain icons into my awareness a year or so after it was released (1985), at the International Film Series at CU-Boulder. I think I went with Chris to that screening, almost 20 years ago. but the imagery of the film remained present and powerful. long, continuous single shots always seduce my eye. like the opening shot in Schindler’s List — impossibly long and powerful. Klimov ends Come and See with an incredible steady-cam movement through a dense forest, following the marching partisans. films should leave images in the psyche. that’s what mediation does, finds a means to impress the eye, and so the soul. guard this with care.

see Come and See by Elem Klimov — a movie that pressed certain icons into my awareness a year or so after it was released (1985), at the International Film Series at CU-Boulder. I think I went with Chris to that screening, almost 20 years ago. but the imagery of the film remained present and powerful. the machine of war. long single takes and shots always seduce my eye. like the opening shot in Schindler’s List — impossibly long and powerful. Klimov ends Come and See with an incredible steady-cam movement through a dense forest, following the marching partisans. films should leave images in the psyche. that’s what mediation does, finds a means to impress the eye, and so the soul. guard this with care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks)

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. (more …)

naming of location is an old social process. it is an association of place with event (long- or short-term). event may be natural or social. the naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. local means that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. embodied means that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global — it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people.

located story-telling

physical signage is the first step in externalizing the naming process. as social structures become more and more global (de-localized), naming structures have evolved that are more and more universal. (exactly the same process as any kind of socially-driven standardization in engineering, language, and such). GPS, as a numeric cataloging of discrete points on a socially abstracted mathematical surface is a specific form of representation. why do we struggle to associate events with those places? are we continuing the inexorable alienation process that separates us from non-standardize be-ing? is there a praxis which can bring these two systems together without the seeming inevitable separation that the deference to standardization promulgates?

when I lived in Iceland, I quickly grew frustrated with the cultural system for locating ones-self in the landscape. coming from a long experience of DMA (Defense Mapping Agency)-based mapping and location activities — Boy Scout orienteering, geological and geophysical mapping, remote sensing (low-altitude to satellite-based) — reading, comprehending, and making the leap from the ‘coordinated’ map to the territory was a learned but very comfortable process. approximating distance, direction, and azimuth vectors from paper to topography was practiced. watching the stars and sun and making accurate estimations of location and time based on those observations was also standard. Iceland presented a radically different paradigm of location.

when I would come back to town after a weekend hiking trip, the occasion might arise that I would need to describe where I had been. a typical description would be: “you know the Hellisheidi road?” “ja” “well about four kilometers past the turnoff to Thorlákshöfn we turned due north and went along a valley on the west flank of a ridge for 6 kilometers and then crossed a small river and followed it west about 1 kilometer to the top of a valley leading southeast towards Hvergerdi.” This kind description, one which would have been enough to locate one quite accurately in the landscape of the Rocky Mountains, never elicited much of a response. It was not until after some years of traveling in the remote landscapes of the country with native friends that I realized that I could simply say that I went to Grensdalur. That localized naming precisely located a particular place in what is often a disorienting fractal landscape. and indeed, the more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location — creek, molehill, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm had a specific name. the more local the people one traveled with, the more precise the located naming (where each name itself represented a more-or-less comprehensive story that ‘mapped’ the human occupation of that spot). the names came out of embedded human occupation of that exact place at that exact time (or over a period of time).

the key to this anecdote is that this system cannot be simulated except at a loss. the loss comes from the separation by greater degrees of mediation between the embodied experience of the place and the means of social transference of the experience that ‘names’ it. it would seem that the embodied, lived experience is the primary source of placement, but equally important is the propagation method that locks a nam(e)ing / story to the place in the collective memory.

using one system will not allow a Utopian ‘return’ to another system. they exist in parallel to some degree, but they are different paradigms and ultimately different living practices.

the sheer indeterminacy of ideas about things and actions and events:

Bohr was the first to recognize that the new quantum theory presented us with a view of experience in which different interactional arrangements resulted in complementary perspectives that need not be logically consistent, compatible, or commensurable, and in many critical cases could not be so. The reductionist trick was predicated on the assumption that the different ‘pieces’ or views from different perspectives could always somehow be neatly fit together. But we now know that material processes cannot be comprehended, cannot be exhaustively described within any one single self-consistent formal discourse. They always overflow the limited possibilities of our semiotic models of them. It is only by building more and more semiotic-discursive models, each internally self-consistent, but not limited by requirements of mutual consistency with each other, that we can, by adding together such ‘complementary’ views, attain to the most complete possible account of material phenomena, including semiosis itself. Thus we still come back to a version of ‘assemblage’ but hopefully a more sophisticated one, one that takes into account our own role and perspective as observers, as well as the material means by which we observe, compare, and assemble — the material mediation of our semiotic practices. — J. L. Lemke, in Material Sign Processes And Emergent Ecosocial Organization

the first day: the feng shui of the room is complicated by rafters, skyLights, and the orientation of the bed. will have to think about that. meeting Milos who is terribly sick with this flu epidemic sweeping across central Europe. I am hoping it is the same bug that is in Bremen, so that there’s no further risk of infection.

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

landscapes: social, cultural milieu shift in range of eye and ear. Amurika, what it is, what it should be, what it imagines of itself, how it synthesizes its face, how it acts, how it predicts, within the full depth of its deepening un-sustainability. to surface through the fragile impossibility of material wealth. it’s confusing. no critique, rational or irrational, will have any effect. teevee shows of crying parents and wives, reading last letters of soldiers gone in Iraq. what is this for? why this mediation of grief. what is this? presenting the lined faces, the tears, the quavering voices, and the simple expressions of life now gone, erased through some destined fate, whatever that is. sustainability is erased in the same way the youth is erased from the soldier’s face.

check out this 10-minute farewell speech by an outgoing US president. and you might understand better the position that we are in today with the US internal (and consequently, external) politics dominated by the military-industrial complex. pretty surprising, considering who it is coming from. General Dwight Eisenhower. but the mapping out of the consequences of allowing a society to be under the shadow of this conglomeration is chillingly prophetic. the situation is grave. and I DID cast a vote in this election, after some years of not doing so, based on my experiences in the 1980 presidential campaign which was a farcical face-off between Carter and Ray-Gun, with John Anderson making the most credible and successful campaign as an independent candidate to date. I worked as campus rep for Anderson, met him a couple times, and saw clearly that the electoral college system was stifling democratic expression in the country. it’s good to see that the whole structure is under deep scrutiny these days, now in Colorado and California (Maine and Nebraska already award proportional electoral college votes based on popular votes). scrapping it would at least bring a superficial element of democracy back into a system that is hardly democratic in the sense of one-man-one-vote. instead, direct or indirect cash reserves are the true test of a candidates viability (not intelligence or fitness for the job), and campaigns burning up billions of dollars in media propaganda confirm that only those with access to extreme wealth have any possibility of acceding to power. that base fact along with the rapid evolution of the realities of life in the US to a psychical space of absolute fantasy through the power of wholesale mediation of what once was direct human connection.

real-time notes, uploaded later (Sophea): invite someone to listen. permission to listen. what to do with sounds around? move them, trans-locate, transform, remix. real-time. mediation does not occur in real time. it occurs in a second time. cancellation. spatial elements. additive easy, subtractive difficult. control of acoustics. presence of observer. hear-er. location, pathway. subtractive relates to filtration of input energy. humans use a variety of devices for sonic filtration. cupped ears, ear plugs. psycho-acoustics. withdrawing information and re-configuring it. based in pure harmonics and resonances. (acoustic properties). absorbtion, reflection, reverberatory. waiting for lunch. existing resonances. hearing works. Bill Fontana — back when he was in Boulder, waiting to set up a project with CU, with live sonic connections from a field at high-altitude to a network space. but he never got funding. live, not-live. what about real-time?

Ken Nordeen comes to mind. as does the stomach’s desire to consume. lunchtime.

the workshop continues.

wishing to implement some kind of content management system. for this site. having an interactive blog instead of this. maybe I switch over to that when year 8 comes to a close. issues: edit-ability, portability, stability of server, interface design, customize-ability.?

winter storm looms, hyped by the weather channel and other means of mediation. forgot to sniff the air to see what’s coming. or so.

following the kitchen remodel story that Ellen relates, with a cross-cultural perception gap. thinking that I could do that kind of work. wood-working, after the process of gathering my grandfather’s tools together in his single massive redwood toolbox — my namesake, Charles B., who, for some time in his life, built houses for a living — all the work done without electric power. so, the toolbox full of an array of devices for creating all the forms of wood one would need to construct a house in the late 19th – early 20th centuries. how to do that now. and how time and care is a constitutive mode to arrive at energized wooden objects.

cable teevee. hotel living. the Manhattan Project. massive draw-down of resources and energies to compress into the small object to kill thousands — the largest engineering infrastructure in the history of the world to that time. called a modern marvel by the propaganda machine, sucking into the mind with interest — interest in what? in the hunt, moving prey, what? mediation?

the end of this year approaches. I jot down some definitions for class:

keeping to several centers, not comatose in any of their distributed flows. understand that now the up-springing source for the publicly “creative” work is something of a distortion created in the fabric of childhood (listen good parents) — that reverberates in the fractured pattern of shot-gun-fire in a rock canyon, each present de-formation of being expressed across the local social matrix is a hard surface that often will reflect and repel energy of any kind. the curling whine of ricochet as peeled-sheath bullet changes trajectory and spins to a sonic resonance within ear.

surveying cable media. Nixon, Clinton, news anchors, auto wrecks, fires, and shopping, media about media, that self-reflexive idolatry seems to be a fave. gripping mellerdrammer, my father used to say. as he would pause for a minute in the room where the teevee was located, some of the family potatoed out long before consumers were tubers. jeep adventures, rally sport. things that SUV’s will never do in suburbia. mediation. cut, cut, cut. ad. cut. dumb-ass stuff, without a doubt. no use even watching with volume on, or eyes open.

okay, so, comments are flying with such volume and intensity from live and mediated connection. that what is the point of this page? when so few even have seen it, will see it.

throw away your troubles and dream a dream with me. — the Mills Brothers

twists and turns. waking before the early dawn to see the cloudless sky painted in many colors. silence broken by the furnace, and the cat who, once she realizes anybody is awake, begins to yowl for food until she is fed. Sage, on the other hand, waits patiently in her kennel until liberated for a morning potty. go potty, Sage! and she races out into the back yard, bounding over the catclaw and prickly pear to find that right spot in the morning chill. dawn. getting up before dawn is special. it’s easier when dawn is at 1100, but here in the south lands, it means getting up at 0630. in the quiet.

chapter has changed. this text probably has to end in the form of a travelog. as I will not be traveling much in the next months. 12 years of European holiday behind me. now back to the reality of life in Amurika as I have often quipped. the media portrayals in Europe of the US situation are extreme and narrow. just like the views of the rest of the world here. the only difference is that re-presentative imaginations dominate people’s lives far more here — giving a distinctly shifted absence to every thing and every event. and every facing of the Other.

shopping defines much of being. I shop, therefore I am. walking by the bell ringing Salvation Army guy. I am already digging into my pocket before I get near. 27 cents. I catch his eye, smile, and as I turn away, he says, bless you. I go shopping. I missed yet another chance. the substitution of money for less mediated (and less socially structured) exchange is a loss.

it has begun. working after school. 1700 or so. Sanna sends me an SMS if you are not watching teevee, you should be. a bit strange message. I surf to BBC, but can’t raise the site. keep working and a bit later try CNN, can’t raise that one either. hmmmmm. odd. I leisurely pack up and make the 15 minute walk home and flip on BBC cable when I get to the flat. the rush of images, a bit incomprehensible at first, completely incomprehensible, mediated. half a world away. a place where I just was a few short weeks before. impossibly brilliantly horrible act.

day online. run to the pool. otherwise, not talking to anybody except via highly mediated means. like through language. oh for chrissakes, if I only…

snow in the morning, heavy at times. like the throbbing Nor’easter in New England, simultaneously. goodnight.