class discussions about creativity spin wheels when they cycle through the endless threads of mediative agents instead of concentrating on the origin of energies that subsequently bring about the entropic transformation of any mediating substance.

what happens when language is no longer understandable? can it be any longer the tool that it once was? or does it wedge like a piece of corned beef between the teeth, only gotten out with wet-nailed picking that leaves politeness behind, or by jamming a lucky stiff toothpick right in there to pry it loose. otherwise it sticks only to disappear gradually through the the digestive action of salivary juices.

I finally meet Kenneth, from Haparanda, across on the Swedish side. he’s the editor of a culture ‘zine called N66. we came into contact last fall when he was trying to find some support and information to support a Millennium project he was doing linking the cities of Tornio/Haparanda and Arkangelsk in Russia. he interviews me with the mind to juxtapose my view of creativity and technology and that of a Russian artist that he knows. in our conversation, I restate many of my views concerning the dangers of technology versus the real possibilities of using technology as just another mediative tool that stands between the self and the Other. life rolls on and then doesn’t.

this entry is added in retrospect, in a strange retrospect of distance, surprise, and chagrin. that notice of the passing of two close relatives was communicated only weeks after the fact. that the moment of death was forgotten and by the time it reached my ears, the fact was cool and detached. and more sad. My Aunt Winifred passed this month (6 April 2000). My Uncle Howard, two months into the short future (June 24, 2000). I suppose no surprise in the synchronized passing, as they lived close as far as I ever knew. and now, gone. recollections, remembrances are the best way to prolong the energies that they spent in this incarnation. and I shall construct a few in the next weeks to fulfill this need.

we come to a moment of making history, or moving beyond history, or making a gesture at least, standing at the edge of something, anything, but it is an edge a precipice. and raising an arm to the height of the shoulder, we sweep the air, palm out. it’s done. over. gone. but never really forgotten if the state of being is like it should be. might be, one day. and it happens within every nano-second.

sparrows and crows are loudly meditating on the possibility that there will be a warm time coming soon. no conclusion. so it goes. caught between a rock and a hard place, caught in a play, caught in a spider’s web. acting, struggling, carefully extricating the body, centimeter by centimeter, to allow for a more full life. electric god dogs. and other titles flicker by in the analyzing mind, cars idle, accelerate, idle, looking for parking. warm air leaks out the top of the window, cold air flows in at the bottom. books, books, everywhere books. this is Europe. the land of Gutenberg. kingdom of the letter. domicile of literary expression. this is what Europe runs on. books, the word, the letter of the law, and religion. what is the obverse of the Word? the image? it is again the intersection of Ikon and Logos. but both are equally mediations. they are only carriers of energies.

this morning a step was taken, leading somewhere. away, towards. not clear, as mind is not clear, but the need to move toward clarity is not in stoking time so full of actions and opportunities to meet and greet with a long-term result of spreading consciousness over spaces so vast and convoluted that the totality of psychic and biologic energy is stretched thinner than the skin that holds meat and frame together. skins, surfaces, interfaces. creative action wells up, and the machine presses it into forms that do not release or flow. these times have been corrupted. following lines that are not straight, wending through secret geometries that are reflections of reflections of reflections of Silicon Dioxide mediations. this space here, text-mediated, papered, peppered with repeated and repeated structures. grinds itself to a standstill. constantly, and revives with each successive letter, comma, and line. the death of the text is in the interstices between words, between the minimal elements of its meaning. between the granularity of its sense. the death of digital is in the total vacuum of the interstices. the null set, the Dirac-delta function. zero-to-infinity in NO time. discontinuity. a mirror of life-cycles without the relief that they repeat. no illustrations to add smooth relief to this linguistic torrent. separated from cafe9.net as content coordinator. but the double scheduling of things just makes it impossible for me to do the job and it just didn’t work, like I have never walked away from anything. ever. but when the energy isn’t good, I do it. and indeed there has been a pearl of liberation buried deep in the act of walking away, gritting sand, grinding into flesh, and flesh responding with defense mechanisms of great beauty. the pearl is buried, though, so deep in the act, that for it to expunge itself, to surface in view, into ocular reception, life has to be lived with a slowness that is not a slowness of time, but a slowness of being. time is irrelevant. it is transcendence that must be surfaced without regard to social favor or safety or security or even presence. curvilinear. rectilinear. geometries. mechanics. quanta, critical media theory, the newest shows on teevee, software, code, code, DeCode. Loki arrives tomorrow, to visit me and his old haunts. well, me and Aaron, his best friend. he wants to hang out with both of us at the same time, wants me to get to know Aaron better. such a jewel a child can be. I busily try to re-map the spring to ensure regular times here in Iceland, strange to think of that. but it is clear for me that Loki needs his Pabby around at least some of the time. it can’t be all the time, and that makes my heart ache.

the day is a blur. truly a Monday morning. late evening phone calls, full of silent pauses, where each are trying to catch a psychic breath, letting heart gather stillness, let chest push beyond closing constrictions. somehow, I have come to a different point in life these past months. not sure whether it is a crux, juncture, discontinuity, a crisis, turning point, simple chance, a result of earlier mis-calculations, whatever. curious how isolated I feel. again, in another foreign country (looking around, how’d I get HERE?), talking to stranger after stranger about esoteric and aesthetic things. or nothing at all. the explorations of energy transfer between humans becomes theoretical and somehow less than real. it is subtracted from what should be a reality, leaving only a dried husk of presence. ‘nuf said.

As in any well-functioning totalitarian society, the inhabitants of this automated prison believe they live this way by choice, having long since developed an aversion both to the surface of the earth and to direct experiences, unmediated by the machine. — E. M. Forster

into the NextFiveMinutes conference. I have been burned out for much of the time for some reason, almost catching a cold yesterday evening, then this morning, spraining my back with the most minimal movement zipping up my suitcase, I wasn’t even bending over. scared the shit outta me. my panel presence (Tactical Education/Media Competence) was shortly after, and that went quite well, but by mid-afternoon I hobble back the the hotel, barely able to walk because of the sciatic pain. missed an appointment with Nan which I was quite looking forward to, not to mention several dialogues with new contacts. really don’t believe it, that I have done something serious. been stretching all afternoon and evening between bouts resting in bed. nothing else to do! Faugh! miss a dinner with an interesting artist. following are notes for the Tactical Education presentation (on the neoscenes occupation project):

in Rovaniemi. bus to bus to bus to plane to bus to taxi. underway for four hours already, and still have a plane, bus, taxi to deal with. just to get from Tornio to Helsinki during an Air Traffic Controllers strike. without reading Finnish, it is outside possibility to understand the detailed dynamics of the negotiations. how can anyone, experienced in cross-cultural and linguistic situations, have any real faith/trust/belief in this monolithic stance that journalism and the media somehow have a corner on the truth market. knowing the slippery interface between two persons speaking the same language and having similar backgrounds, and the zoomed-in intensity of crossing even the most basic cross-platform linguistic barrier. in all cases, meaning is stripped to its essential lowest-common-denominator packet-form. in the worst case, it is lost. and in between these two translation polarities, there is a massive area where few things can be pegged, many data-feeds mis-routed, and substantial interstitial gaps in the matrix of human expression. travel makes me stress — all the time. can it be? that a human will undertake to set a daily condition of being that MOST stresses the core neural network of the organism itself? being human. chomp down on some Ibuprophen and aspirin dragged along from the last visit to the US. never am able to get the right over-the-counter drugs outside the US for some reason — just don’t know which ones to get. though I hardly ever use any medicines stronger than Tiger Balm or so. faugh! so I try to rewire language. adding contemporary terms to replace the ancient. but it is all the same — using cross-platform instead of transformative. while language is being constantly fed by the media, by writers (script-writers, mostly, and technocrats and geeks), its core senses do always reflect ancient knowledge-bases. one of the greatest challenges is educating across a language barrier — at the same time, reducing ones own knowledge and experience base to packets that can be shunted across this formidable interface gap. especially useful is a reliance on pure energy, force-of-self to heave these things across. and a very quiet, sensitive ear for hearing where the receivers place these energies within their experience. and sensing what these energies engender in the Other. mapping both the generative and reflexive energies of the Other. I don’t push this hard enough in the Art-Context, though. or with the mediations I have used for so many years. relying instead on the ephemeral, the transient, the sole ambient experience. un-documented, face-to-face, momentary. back in Helsinki. again. and again. sitting in a hotel room. watching cable. media-child, show about fashion. reflecting on the few times at Studio 54 and the Palladium in the Big Apple. knowing the underside of THAT business. images of Manhattan, photography, art directors, designers, fashion houses, headliners, mainliners, winners and losers.

nine more days in the north for now. quickly the darkening comes. and days are filled with the radiation of monitors. partly Tornio becomes synonymous with staring into screens. the extreme of virtuality. when I take a slow walk to the store for food this afternoon, thoughts crowd my head: IS there a way to use media, mediation that is FOR life? IS it possible to use these things without leaving life, losing life, or missing life? what of the people in this time now who have no use for these image machines? they are tough, hard, and will have little trouble dispatching those soft ones of us who couch in front of screens. I have little use for discussions of this and that aspect and detail of the mechanics of culture. the Utopians, the distopians, the doomsayers, the academics who end up saying nothing after long-winded forays into the depths of their particular tribal language. I can hardly bring myself to participate in these exchanges unless.

spend several hours in the National Historical Museum with Viktória. I needed to receive Light from the royal crown, scepter, and orb. now, strangely, I am thinking of several more complications with this concept of mediation via silicon dioxide. VERY often, intensive pieces of art (in the majority of cases, the MOST intensive ones) are encased or shielded by SiO2. no exception, the royal stuff here in Hungary. what, if any, is the significance of this simple observation related to the thread of thought about VR, mediation, and the two most abundant materials in the earth’s crust? no real clue, but directions for exploration should be towards examining the theoretical/scientific views of the material composition of the Earth — below the surface, specifically, as it relates to gravity. (oh yeah, the scepter was INTENSE — topped by a 8-cm-in-diameter sphere of rock crystal (there is that SiO2 stuff again) engraved with a lion and some other icons, polished, and encased in a frame of gold with some short gold chains with gold disks about a centimeter in diameter.

Emailing begins to dominate my daily existence — planning the logistics of future movement — 13 plane flights in three weeks or so. I am tired in some ways that must be reflecting the arrival not of spring, but of SUMMER to Colorado. Here, in Lapland, there is something of spring in the Light, but nowhere is there grass to crash onto and stare into the platinum sky glaring with the blue Arctic sun. And besides, the intensity of the ultra-violet radiation of the Arctic is of a kind which drills small, hypodermic-sized holes through my cranium immediately around the edges of the eye-socket of my right eye, where subsequently blue-white-hot Light leaks in or is even injected to burn directly the optic nerve, no mediation through the crystal lens, but direct electromagnetic radiation of raw receptors.

I arrange my things in the room that Terhi just vacated, looking forward to six weeks of not too much movement and a fast Ethernet connection only a meter from the bed. ain’t no slackin’ gonna happen! not that it will affect my dreams, memories, but there is something of a fear that I will nerd out here. gotta remember to go out and dance with students some, even though they have hardcore patterns of sleep deprivation and such where bands don’t start ’til one in the morning and people party all night (thank god the nights are shrinking daily!). push-ups, recollections, replays of fragments of this and that memory, and I am not losing my hair except as it is SO long now, longer than it has EVER been, that it gets tangled, and for the past year I rake a handful of it out each couple days. still plenty. how is it at this AGE to have long hair. retro hippie that I never was because I wasn’t old enough to do those hippie things like Free love and stuff. (more …)

There is snow. Hard pellets strike the flank of the X2000 train racing on slick steel ribbons across the land. NORTH NORTH NORTH. No chances now of spring in the near future. Almost horizontal, this wet frozen water. Snow on the ground. No chance. At all. And yet another 30 hours further north to go. This last stretch to Lapland will be bus, hydrofoil, train, bus, boat, train, train, bus. Past an unfrozen lake. Is this reason to Hope? Can it be read as a reviving, slipping from the dead to the green of living? Having been there before, alive, once, recently, and now moving negatively into backward time. Where trees are shorter. Flat Light, no snow now, land looking dried out and dusty, air Light blue, nascent pale. Birch trees cluster and cross trunks at low angles. Moving very fast at this second, and hours later, bus, and now the boat, I discover that one of the bars has Guinness. Good. I sit for one, joined at the table by the window by an elderly Finnish man who has two pins on his lapel, one with a silhouette of Kekkonen, the former Finnish president, and the other appearing to be an oak leaf cluster. I stare out of the window and REFLECT. It hits me, that the form of our imaginations at the moment we reflect are parallel to the universe of meaning and intention around us. As I am absorbed, watching out the window, watching the world, mediated by glass, my thoughts are fluid and in motion just as the scene playing by the window, rocky islands, wooden houses — we never have an open window, do we? Always our sensuality is mediated. Can we move through this condition in this presence? Or is it against the Spirit of the presence? Should I (in dreams) explore my presence? Does the mediation actually give us a small possibility, a small distance on the world that we can step back and SEE what we are (in Spirit) and … A call comes on the loudspeaker in the room in five languages if there is a Doctor on board, please contact the bursar’s desk as soon as possible…

writing the wrong dates, and so on. things shift from particular to general and back again with a clarity that threatens to consume any parts of social habit previously recognized as (unbreak my heart is sung) acceptable. shifting, shape-shifter, desirer, one who desires. needing, providing, giving. 2100, looking out on the harbor which is haven to submarines, ferries, sculls, yachts, destroyers, tankers, container ships, research vessels, kayaks, and so on. it is still gray-blue sky. on the fringe of entering the Nordic gateways. a few days more and into the realm of Light. alles ist in. fragments, telling, speaking, MEDIATING. interview with a free-lance writer for the local newspaper, tomorrow. where is the most powerful connection of the body to the spirit? it is not necessary to identify this particular interface, but many are concerned about this. images can be shed like skin.

today is the last day I am using words, they’ve gone out, they’ve lost their meaning, they’ve gone out … let’s get unconscious, let’s get unconscious, let’s get unconscious… — Madonna

huh? Jörg, a writer from the local Kieler Nachtrichten, comes to interview me in the morning, we talk at the computer for a couple hours, looking at some of the website. wonder what he will write? he was at the public lecture on Tuesday.

public lecture tonight, one of two video projectors decides not to work, the one connected to my PowerBook. I can only then speak, speak through language, through the mediation. this situation places me in the crux of the entire issue, so I can speak from that point, that moment. the window metaphor comes into the Light, glass, amorphous silica, and the abundance of materiality around us, we are swimming in oxygen, standing on silicon. silicon dioxide. someone is videotaping the talk, another is photographing me. the image-makers I train my dis-awareness upon.

I send a proposal to Christa for the Ars work coming up:
word-dialogue-Light-revolution-action: breaking the glass

The history of mediation is also the history of humans seeking to lessen the impact of raw nature and human aggression on their physical being. Language may be thought of as a primal mediating technology, and in that sense, the further mediations imposed on communications between humans — those mediations that are more commonly referred to as technology, are merely additional obstructions to understanding that overlie language. None-the-less, in this moment, it is still possible to speak, and to listen. At the very same moment that mediation stresses our attempts of attentive presence with the Other, it becomes more imperative to engage in Dialogue and in the creation of spaces in which Dialogue might flourish. Dialogue stimulates genesis, transformation, and revelation in life — it is a revolutionary art itself when in critical juxtaposition to silence. Dialogue, as pure expression of heart and soul, is the core of all meaningful activism.

This talk will explore the be-ing of Dialogue, the stresses of mediation, and our presence in the noumenal world.

There buried in the rushing blare of thoughts that are happening even at this instant when I pull a string of words from head to fingertips, buried in it all, not as another character speaking, but the self-sound, comes the flicker (I MUST change!) or (Give energy to the sounds of the heart, give to others, give up the self!) or (rush, LOOK, see that, no need to reduce anything to material consideration, leave!) or (cold that eats, cold that eats, feeds on waning darkness) or (out of sight out of mind is lie, pure lie — within sight of mind is all that mind knows and has known, sight is insight, foresight, hindsight, far-sight, near-sight) or (fear) or (saying) or (be) and the body under it all. Trains of words move so many directions, desire to be loved and to love drowns in the desire of the ego to be filled with attention, and all writing is mediation (why state the obviously occurring thought). Actions cluster in certain areas: i.e., volunteer actions are the deviation for the self… they should be the standard, the norm, the average. Time to recalculate.

home-coming football game yesterday made sense only after leaving it and going to the Ace with Erica and Max, then Sally, Rick, Karen and the kids show up. Nothing like the Ace Hi Tavern in downtown Golden, Colorado. A certain type of energy vortex and situation that is an unbounded whole. I make some cultural video footage as I go along. Thinking of the future, but suddenly I realize that the archivist in me has bloody well documented all but a wipe of the ass (well, I guess that, too) of friends for 20 years long about now. I scan in negatives from around 1982 to 1986, there are many, why I scan them I do not know. Just to have them digital, have copies for posterity, whatever, but I have so little connection to things that I have aggressive sensibilities to just burn it all. go for the Taoist solution, the unruffled path, and the unwobbling pivot. bull shit! that’s what it all is, just a crock of shit. any kind of mediated action. like this here, dammit. Being immersed in a historical context, and seeing faces brought into juxtaposition in former ways, age vanishes, or becomes relative. I sit with a friend for an hour on a park bench in the sun, the waning sun. energy wanes, boredom sets in, I faced the consequences later. I am not ready for entanglements, I suppose confusion is the key factor to set alarms going. confusion. what the hell is happening. those whom I know, their lives are plateaus of flux, burning to varying degrees, slipping, engaged, floating, whatever metaphor of being one could want. the spectrum that spans from unsaturated living to saturated being, the range, the range floats. And I can hardly care anymore, did I ever? chant chant chant, come we go Chant Down Babylon one more time. if only.

measured sentences today marked the passing of time, I quit writing real sentences because. now frequently I see reflections of other frames of reference (deja vu — such a weak word, unable to pull itself into English, and yet these instances dog me daily now). meta-verse, meta-contact. always mediation always the insurgency (no rapt attention) injecting. only little hopes (we shall overcome). shouting at cloud riots straddling a bicycle seat talking to the wind and wishing I had watched the sunrise without sound background of house news noise. silence would have been the direction to flow into. words built up the day, words scattering across the way, words and looking at what there could have been behind them. in a position of leading life and following life, there is always the element of confusion that greets each successive moment. to be able to have possibility and nothing more than the fullness of it. Dar-es-Saalam comes up in conversation today, so does John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk (his birthday), and Guattari, the Thousand Plateaus, (more …)

My workshop at MUU MediaBase began this morning. It has the title Dialogue and Technology and will be addressing issues where the power of individual dialogue intersect the mediating forces of technology. My own introduction runs something like:

At the home of Rikki and Sólrun and their two teenagers Rosa and Kári. I worked with Rikki at the Icelandic Academy of Art for some years, he is an Austrian native (actually from Bolzano which is now in the Italian Dolomite Alps) and is a print-maker. Sólrun teaches in the local school in this small fishing village of around 350 inhabitants. Rikki is still in Reykjavík finishing up teaching at the College. The drive today is long and cold. We finally get out the door around 1030 and head east to Myvatn where we happen to run into the President of Iceland and his wife who are touring the north this week. My back is not doing too well, so I give up driving and lie in the passenger seat for most of the day. We make stops at various places, tourist spots, and locations that I think might be interesting to film. The Hi8 video camera that I have with me is making something of a challenge. I have so long carried my Nikon with a 28mm lens and nothing else, that I am having trouble adjusting my seeing and pacing when using a time-based medium suddenly. One nagging feeling is the dilemma of what I will do with the material once I have gathered a number of hours of raw tape. I rarely have access to decent editing equipment, and even if I did, would I have the time to do the significant editing required to make something interesting out of it. The camera is on loan from my nephew, so I won’t have it on a continuous basis either, which limits the time for experimentation. Of course, I have used video extensively in the past, and audio also, but it remains a challenge to see creatively through this new mediation. I did happen onto an expression of an old idea that I worked with a decade ago in a photographic project with Bill, that of the “infinite half-space” of geophysics and math, where a theoretical space is divided into two half-spaces by an infinitely extensive plane. This is the beginning point of mathematical modeling of the earth and its surface and the various properties of and reactions to changes introduced by external sources. One half of the space is the earth, the other is the atmosphere or space above the surface. Anyway, this idea pops into my head as I am watch the incredibly varied earth-sky interface rolling virtually by outside the silicone-dioxide car window. I make a short video work (to be finished off with titling and all the formalist details in, Finland) called memory of three infinite half-spaces simply by filming with the camera rotated 90 degrees from the horizontal while moving and attempting to maintain the left half of the screen as sky and the right half as earth … a second short video comes from that single day — mama, where are you going? starring Loki with his expansive style. The landscape is bleak and snowy, and there is Light snow falling almost all the day with the exception of an hour spent in Egillstadir at the house of Steinnun where it was warm and sunny.

Juggling mental images, virtual being-ness, weather impressions, family, others, water, body, rain. I saw a coyote loping along the road this morning on the way over to Jim and Janet’s for breakfast. Angelique made biscuits and gravy. Jim was out waiting for a javelina to show up at a friends house — I guess you could call it vermit huntin’ — inside the town limits, and a big javelina it was rumored to be.

The Stupid Bowel, as I named it, was today. I was pleased that during that spectacle of spectacles, the internet was FAST! Like, Blazing! Wish it was always that way … Alexandra and I finally touched base with an IRC test this evening for something over an hour. I am having difficulty putting some kind of deconstructive take on this whole eight dialogues project. It is carrying energy, of that I am certain. The energy is real time, but the effect of the text mediation, the time lapse, the technical interface, and the perception/manifestation of physical presence. I have been having trouble typing all day, too, inverting letter order. Don’t understand that. I wouldn’t mind a better keyboard and working situation here at the house. I work standing up for my back and then my feet and legs just go crazy. I have never been so conscious of my body and its limits as I have these past weeks here in Arizona.

Time spins more and more. Now here as visiting artist at FSU, courtesy of net-worker Paul Rutkovsky. Last night Robert, one of the faculty, had organized a group moonLight canoe trip on the Wacissa River, about 20 miles from Tallahassee. The moon was full, and there were about 20 folks, mostly students, two to a canoe, some with flashLights. We put in with a guide, Fred, at a small parking lot on the river and slowly paddled down the river a few miles to a side-stream that ended up in a 50-meter-wide underwater sink-hole which was the source of the stream. Sink-holes are earth-surface phenomena — where the ground waters under a place have eaten holes in the rock — in this case, limestone, which is very soluble in water — and occasionally these holes are so large that the very ground above them collapses and caves in … Leaving holes that can be many tens of meters across and sometimes hundreds of meters deep. There are instances where houses have been swallowed whole by one of these beasts… In the case of the sink-hole on the river, it is fully immersed and actually is a spring source with a large volume of water welling up from the hole which is connected through underground channels to a lake about ten miles away. The water is about 20°C (70°F), chilly by local standards, but in the middle of the circular pool, someone had moored a small floating platform. Being the mad fool that I am, I had to go swimming — despite not having a swim suit or towel. I tried to talk some of the others into it, but they were too shy … ach, these Amurikans … So, I hopped out of the canoe and undressed on the platform and dove in. Moonburn! OOoooooo. Cold, but totally refreshing! Magic. All tiredness left my body.

It reminded me of a personal motto that I used to frequently quote to my friends — along the lines of:

I mean, trying something new once will never give a real taste of the undertaking, so twice at least allows the possibility to saturate the self. And, hey, if it is fun, than that third time, well … and I don’t mean that I necessarily stop at number three … But maybe that would be an interesting path to follow, stopping — so that one does not become too attached to the material process of pleasure gratification… It is marvelous, the power of the natural world. Despite all the mediation that is a daily fact of the world that I inhabit, despite the critique of the romantic vision of the natural world, despite all that, there is still massive healing power within the synergistic interaction with the physical world … My body and my eyes were totally relaxed by the water and the moonlit darkness. I cannot explain these things otherwise than to attribute them to the power of that natural physical force. Winter is miles away from my thoughts, here in this tropical locale. Kati sends me a fragment of E. E. Cummings, the English poet. She’s in Finland, so it has heavier meaning for her (and will for me when I head back north in a few days)…

I get chills, sitting here in the Mac Lab in the Visual Arts Department. memories of Finnish winter… Air conditioning. It’s warm outside, and here my eyes are burning from the dry chill of conditioning and the blast of charged electrons in my face. Where are we in this mediation?

Here for one more day. A picnic in the afternoon. Still no time to retrospect on the full events of the last few weeks. So it goes. But always this preoccupation with the theme of mediation. It seems rooted in the basic tendency of humans to use the material world as a cover, a carapace against the eventual confrontation with the spiritual — that which is not material. There is a balance that must come. An acceptance of the material, acceptance of the hypostasis — the coming-into-the-material-world — existing as a being-in-the-world. (As John Coltrane jams from the CD-player). Always astonishing music comes from him. Long after his death, his spirit rings around the world. Mediated or simply impregnating, quickening, the material essence of life with spirit motions … The studio recording of 26 September 1962 of In a Sentimental Mood with Trane teamed up with Duke Ellington on piano, Aaron Bell on bass, and Elvin Jones on drums is a piece that has resonated in my heart for years. The poignant emotion brimming through the sounds from the opening to the uncertain ending holds an entire life in its brief 4 minutes 15 second duration. Always a pleasure listening to Miles, Trane, and other jazz with Randy — he is an accomplished jazz pianist himself, and even was playing with a band back when he lived in Chicago … Speaking of which I found out that I share the birthday of the late jazz great Lester Young.

Well. Entries got thrown off in a massive way following the complete crash of my hard drive on the evening before I was to fly from Arizona to NYC. The 18th of August, Loki’s birthday. Ten absolutely hectic days later I am returning to some equilibrium, although something critical has been broken in me head. The ten days have been full of all kinds of mind-twisting events including a weekend of memory mounting — my 20th high school reunion (Gaithersburg High School, in a suburb of Washington DC), plane, bus, van, limo, taxi, and car travel, frantic action to attempt recovery of data from my crashed drive, a long hike into the National Forest near my parents, a long day of interviewing for the position of either Director or Photography Resident at the Peters Valley center, an art/craft center about 70 miles outside of NYC in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation area, attending a show of the Prescott Cowboy Poets Festival, … I hardly know where to begin. The crash surely is front-line to my steadily increasing angst with this life-style. As I put so much stock in my lap-top, investing the full roles of studio and office and personal living space in it, it has become incredibly important a tool. I do regularly back up, but don’t carry an extra medium to backup to all the time. I did a partial backup around 7 July, but in that, I missed my entire email archive. That I lost back to May. Along with all the writing and image work I had done in Arizona. But there have been plenty of things that I would like to comment on. So I will simply retrospect on what I can. In the form of fragments… At the moment I am sitting in Amy and Randy’s apartment in Stamford, where I have been except for a few nights for the last ten days. Randy is on his way home from work, and the three of us will head for a movie. Friday evening beginning the last holiday weekend of the summer, and, in most peoples minds, the last weekend of the summer, period. Schools begin next week in most places, and, well, frankly, it is getting colder. I ended staying at my parents place for three more days beyond Monday the 19th. I was scared to death to get on the plane having my data is chaos and oblivion. I lost at least four hundred images scanned in and all my teaching notes. Somehow the whole event threw me off so badly I can hardly understand it. Losing memory. Like I will forget what was written. Again, it goes directly back to mediation and all that. Like I mediate my memory with the memory of the machine. Remembering all the 700 telephone numbers and emails and addresses of those in my address database. Like I could recall them myself? And all the thousands of words I have typed to people around the world, and thousands received. the sheer volume. Quality? Quantity? I am left at an impasse. Straddling a fence. Part of me thinking it would be better to simply bag the whole way-of-going. Forget. Or push myself to better my memory. Like picture my son. Don’t carry pictures of him. Remember his face, his way of laughing and smiling. The feel of hugging and kissing him and holding him. Watching him sleep in the bright summer twiLight of that land of Ice. I do not know. The effect of Machine. Of mediation. Loss of memory.

When you are young you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead. — Douglas Coupland

Late in the evening I drag out my father’s smaller telescope (a four-inch reflector) and set it up on the built-in pedestal on the small round flagstone patio to the south of the house. It has a tracking motor in it, and actually is quite a good device. Marvelous to look at Jupiter and Saturn, and simply cruise along the Milky Way. When they moved here 13 years ago, the Light pollution was practically non-existent, compared to now where even the small town of Prescott has thousands of bright street Lights. Although it is beyond the near horizon, there is a substantial glow. My father chose to live here primarily for the clear night skies for optimal viewing. Progress impinges on dreams. He doesn’t do too much observing anyway, as he is too busy maintaining the house and trying to finish his larger 14-inch computer-driven telescope. The means obscure the goal? At any rate, I enjoy scanning the heavens, and I highly recommend the activity — if you ever have the chance to use a telescope, do so. To see the rings of Saturn crisp and clear. The planet hanging like a cut-out mobile with its moons. Jupiter massive, striped, accompanied by many moons, the four major ones can be seen as planets in their own right, disks lit by the Sun and the reflected glory of their huge partner… I got another good swimming workout in today. Two more days of it before hitting the road again. I like getting into half-way decent shape before jumping back out in to the world. Wish I had my mountain bike with me here — there are so many place to ride, and I have hardly done any hiking. Mediated by speed! More mediation. Telescopes. All this material intervention! It is everywhere!

Just got back from Phoenix where I stayed overnight with Tom and Dawn after dropping Aunt Mary at the airport and visiting with Jason and Angelique for a couple hours and running some errands around town. It approached 115F yesterday, the heat making everything vibrate and shimmer. Getting in and out of the car, into and out of air-conditioned spaces has always bothered me, and this day was no exception. Yet another example of how we mediate what the world begs to impress us with — the weather. I find life in air-conditioning is hermetic, and leads to short-sightedness and isolation. Combined with all the other amenities like the new 300-channel-plus digital teevee systems, automated coffee-maker and lawn sprinkler system, and the separation from the environment is nearing completion. It seems the only time that real life impinges is in the form of a natural disaster or through the random acts of violence that are inflicted by other humans or even by some level of technological intervention like the automobile. This idea of mediation is beginning to make me more than a little crazy. I would seek to live an authentic life on this planet, at this time, for myself and those around me, yet each day I encounter more and more ways of being cut off, isolated, and separated from the milieu of existence. How is it possible to begin stripping these filters away without becoming socially isolated from those other humans around? It just dawned on me that something in what I say hearkens back quite some time to the laments of St. Augustine. His solution was to simply pull out of the race, the rat-race, the gaming, the spectacles — whatever separated him from authentic life…

Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee. — St Augustine

The past few days have been spent around Köln and in Rösrath with Volker, an old friend from Avantière days in Aachen in 1990. I had just made a rather long entry here, but inadvertently erased it. Hmmm. Talking about the fragments of dreams, and the paradox of travel. I shall try to reconstruct it for the moment… Chris sent email from Colorado, following his return from a mountaineering trip in the Alps. He suggested that travel is a catharsis.

Yes, so it goes. I spend today and most of yesterday dealing with correspondance — email, snail-mail and so on. I got a package of post forwarded to Volker’s NetArt box here by my sister, Janet, who checks my post box in Prescott, Arizona. Good to see things like job application rejects and the like, eh? And my bank statement which reads a shrinking balance each month … Being on the road like this keeps me on edge for better or worse.

They shall not tame him. — The Lion of Flanders, Hendrick Conscience

The dream of building a house in Crestone, Colorado is no closer to reality than last year, although I do collect fragments of ideas and things to think about in the design. Of course, one of the primary things is simply to have a place with enough rooms that it will comfortably house a good number of folks who will surely visit me there in that beautiful place. Any suggestions?

Here we go. And so on. In the west of London, not far from Shepherds Bush and Ravenscourt Park on the District Line Tube. Hanging out with Joanna Buick, a friend from ISEA94 days — we met at the Symposium in Helsinki. She’s presently a tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art which is part of the University College of London as well as a tutor-counselor at the Open University, the largest open learning institution in the UK. She is running a class called “Living with Technology” which encompasses an innovative scheme to familiarize students with the impact of technology on daily life. The class is run using the internet, audio and video tapes and hard copy materials, as well as occasional tutorial sessions for students who live in the area. The Open University has tens of thousands of students studying around the world. Pursuing her own work, Joanna been doing developmental work on Virtual Reality systems.

I did get by The Photographers Gallery yesterday after lunch with Katrine and Juan, but was not impressed by the work of German photographer, Michael Schmidt. Not that there was anything wrong with the work, on the contrary, I personally find it difficult to engage with dead objects and words these days. Recently I have been going through a kind of opening awareness about my own work, that this travel ritual and emphasis on the action of Dialogue is becoming core to my thinking. It has always been important — the sustaining of focused Dialogue with both new and old friends — but I never considered it either a product of working, a goal to work towards, or a means/medium of work. It just was. As I was describing to Juan and Katrine in the noisy Chinese restaurant Wong Ki just off Shaftsbury Avenue, I am realizing it IS a means and a highly effective unmediated means at that. I am rather tired of objectified mediation and thrive on the most unmediated contact with others that seems to occur while engaged in attentive and genuine Dialogue. Gallery and Museum exhibitions — while, to be sure, they do occasionally contain inspiring (inspired?) objects and such — seem to be locked in a struggle with entangled and intertwined corpses from which they are unable to escape. The public discussion here in the UK these days centers on the calamity visited upon the Beef Industry for better or for worse. Not to delve into it deeply, I would only make the observation that it seems it might be a foreshadowing of more global crises in the coming years as we approach the millennium and the further crowding of the planet. I am reminded of the British science-fiction writer John Brunner’s book “Stand of Zanzibar”, which portrays the microscopic turmoil of a world culture gone mad through the pressures of the Global Market and overcrowding.

There’s a belief still current among British school children that you could stand the entire human race on the 147-square-mile Isle of Wight, elbow to elbow and face to face.

Well, that may have been true around the time of World War I although nobody was keeping records accurate enough for us to be certain. However, right now in the 1960′s you’d have a tough job packing us on the 221-square-mile Isle of Man.

And by 2010 — the time this book takes place, you’d need an altogether larger island — something like the 640-square-mile surface of Zanzibar! — John Brunner

back to Mad Cows — it is hard not to be pessimistic when cows are being forced to become cannibal/carnivores because of the greed of humans. No wonder the disaster.