Leaving aside the refined mapping of experience-once-removed. And instead, gathering experience first hand, in the moment, where circumspection is wistful, wasteful, or even dangerous.

Music on the road. Traveling minstrels, buskers, harmonica-playing hobos. playing for people on the road, or playing whilst on the road. Meeting at the roadhouse. Beyond the city limits. What goes down when humans engage beyond the control of the proper social order. What goes on outside the ordered flows of town. Interstitial in the sense that between towns lie the open roads. bandits, women and men of loose moral fortitude, and wild animals. The space of chaotic flow.

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” — pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.

As a matter of fact, we don’t just “suspect” it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

What is the nature of what is feared outside the purview of human controlled flows? Is it merely nature? It is the presence of (or the risk of) death — that singular element that lies completely beyond human control, for ever? It cannot be erased from the wild kernel of being. Some seek the thrill of facing it, some hide in states of paranoid control to keep it as far away as possible, backing away only to fall over a precipice unseen behind. Religion is the construct that irrationally rationalizes the presence of the unknown, of death, and of corrupt social order.

… back to the road …

The body of speed. (hunt and/or be hunted). Movement is the first escape from death. Running to safety, to the nearest tree. Running to fetch the weapon that you left at home. Running for the crowd so that the odds of getting eaten are marginally lowered. Running fast. Running to change places. Running to make a moving target. Running for help! Running to the Library!

The Book as fuel for keeping warm and The Book as weapon: dictionaries and encyclopedias work best for both purposes. Book as pillow. Book as door-stop. Book as object sensed orbiting centers of cultural gravity. Textual asteroids and debris. Escape that field.

The Book as tool for enhancing procreative potential and staving off death. Rather, Books on how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading about how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading-while-driving. Speed. And then it comes. uuuuuhhh.

nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…

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?

The road novel: a tracing of the displacement of the embodies Self across the Greater (or Lesser) Unknown. The road journal. The road. What is it about the road. It’s not merely a metaphoric interpretation of life, it is life. blah-blah-blah.

(in clipped phraseology)

Writing the fluid movement, framing encounter, hopeless task except as is comes closer and closer to the asymptotic point of writing-while-be-ing. It’s not a wall to break through, it is a separate reality. Talk about parallel universes! Writing and be-ing. Writing-in-be-ing.

Writing is the pen/cursor traveling across the page/screen. A locked dialectic of eye-to-2D-surface. Smoldering neuronal fire slogging between.

Writing what is(was) is always the case.

Back to the idea of the performative expression. That of telling the stories from the road. I did this in an annotated form in the performance at the Ultimate Akademie in Köln, Al Hansen’s old haunt. But how to do that in a way that is meaning-full in the context of this thesis project?

Obviously, there are many domains where verbal language is not useful or sufficient for description, and the many alternate systems used by humans, like mathematics, music, chemical symbolisms, graphics, maps, etc., show that this has been addressed since a long time. But some aspects are not covered yet. The main missing factor is dynamics. All notation systems are static and don’t cover the essentially dynamic character of life. This is a possible problem for a civilization that commits by far the largest part of its cultural memory to a system of static representations. In many non-western cultures, there is (or was) a strong tradition of non-verbal, dynamic cultural transmissions and it needs to be noticed that western civilizations have lost “the science of ritual” to a large extent (Staal 1982). There is the large field of cultural movement patterns that are not amenable in principle to static representations, since movement, when frozen in a static form, simply vanishes. Dynamis is incontrovertible with Stasis. This essential lack of all the static CMM that are so widespread in western civilizations alerts us to the possibility that perhaps there may be some very essential factor that civilizations are losing when they commit the bulk of their cultural transmission to written, static representations. — Andreas Goppold, Criticism and defects of writing and language

back at yet another airport — north, east, south, west? future or past?

The Past Let no one say the past is dead.
The past is all about us and within.
Haunted by tribal memories, I know
This little now, this accidental present
Is not the all of me, whose long making
Is so much of the past. Tonight here in suburbia as I sit
In easy chair before electric heater,
Warmed by the red glow, I fall into dream:
I am away
At the camp fire in the bush, among
My own people, sitting on the ground,
No walls around me,
The stars over me,
The tall surrounding trees that stir in the wind
Making their own music,
Soft cries of the night coming to us, there
Where we are one with all old Nature’s lives
Known and unknown,
In scenes where we belong but have now forsaken.
Deep chair and electric radiator
Are but since yesterday,
But a thousand camp fires in the forest
Are in my blood.
Let none tell me the past is wholly gone.
Now is so small a part of time, so small a part
Of all the race years that have moulded me.
– Oodgeroo Noonuccal

\

gah, it was twenty years ago (today)… how that refrain has activated this year. seems I was busy, very busy in 1989. in August, Stefan, Debra, Magga and I headed for Kassel from Köln and then on to Berlin. through the huge Charlottenburg checkpoint, past the Soviet tanks, after the surreal drive on the lousy autobahn where, if you stopped the car, you could be shot. We had a nice flat somewhere in the West, don’t recall where. through Checkpoint Charlie we entered the East for a long day which started out at the Soviet Culture Center, went on to a impromptu visit with a photographer, Micha Brendel, (who I learned about from my gallerist in Lyon, France, Raymond Viallon — and whose work resonates with the presence of the Stasi State) and finally ended up at a youth music festival somewhere up the river on an island. the high-point was trying to find food to eat and only locating one restaurant which of the handful of items on the menu they had only one. much more could be said, but I just want to the get the images up (a couple days too late, but).

earlier that summer I had noticed several things — the first was the not-insignificant fact that the super-sonic overflights by the US military along the Eifel region (and Köln) had ceased since the previous summer when one would hear them on a regular basis. Germany had reclaimed its airspace from the occupying power. and secondly — and easily as profound as Reagan’s tear down this wall Mr. Gorbachev stunt — I saw, but regretfully did not document, posters in the Vienna underground featuring Mr. Gorbachev in his fedora and heavy winter coat with a hand raised, palm facing outwards, and the simple text Lay Down Your Arms. as far as I noticed, there was no other text or attribution, and I did not remark about it to my friends who I was visiting. I thought to myself — this is profound, and more profound things are on the way. My German friends would not accept the idea that a major paradigm shift was on the way. I was not surprised in November 1989 when it happened!

The language is based on joining and dis-joining, you see. That is, it’s a perfectly good language if we could use it properly. It has to be used as an artistic form and not as a rigid tool which is supposed to reflect reality exactly — reflect what is exactly. It’s like the notes in music. They look quite separate, but when they’re played, they’re not separate. — David Bohm, dialogue with E.Nada

A necessary feature of the thesis project is inconsistency. For it to be a rich learning experience, it should be variable or stochastic. How to achieve a creative inconsistency, then? Where changing perspectives and voices and models and worn pathways exists in profusion that is at the same time, not overwhelming. A sequence of statements (each a consistent sound-bite), with threads of difference demarcating their extent, applicability, and style.

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).

such a massive issue in a trans-disciplinary space. listing everything or nothing or SIPs (Statistically Improbable Phrases). maybe the SIPs would be the best phenomena, as it is a tangible mapping of non-standard word usage … mapping out new conceptual spaces. kind of like those emails from a few years back, spewed out by random text generators (or a thousand drunken monkeys reading the confetti of paper-shredded copies of Naked Lunch and pausing at spontaneously proscribed intervals to jot notes on where precisely those confetti-signs sent their proto-humanoid minds.

Ich bin mit meinem Dasein zufrieden(?)

oder

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. — Samuel Butler

heavy shuffling through the digital archive and web links to assemble something meaningful via zotero. heavy work, reading reading reading. some semi-classics to remind, and enjoy the luxury of reading to gain or revivify knowledge. Kittler, Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter; Latour, Reassembling the Social; Vygotsky, Thought and Language; McLuhan, Understanding Media, along with reviewing the already substantial library/bibliography assembled on my hard drive from the last 20 years of info-filtering in the media-sphere. dragging copies of all that into Zotero, slowly, along with hundreds of bookmarked sources, and then the keywording begins, starting the cycle. plenty of SIPs there.

such a massive issue in a trans-disciplinary space, etc…

Zotero, an open-source project, by-the-way, a victor today when a Circuit Court judge throws out a law-suit coming from Thomson-Reuters, makers of EndNote, the monopoly research/thesis writing/citation tool out there in academia.

radio aporee ::: open – 48 stunden neukölln ::: flickering wastelands III
———————————————————————-
Klangspuren aus der bewohnten Welt und angrenzender Gebiete: akustische Expeditionen zu ausgewählten Orten, begleitet von stündlichen Live-Interventionen internationaler Künstler.
———————————————————————-\rsound tracks of the inhabited world and contiguous regions: sonic expeditions to selected places, accompanied by hourly live interventions of international artists.
———————————————————————-

### PROGRAMM (may change…) ###

freitag/friday 26.6.
——————–
19:00 uno / radio aporee
20:00 benjamin laurent aman
21:00 Adam Thomas – Preslav Literary School
22:00 john hopkins / neoscenes (remote) (stream archive)

samstag/saturday 27.6.
———————-
17:00 jonbo-n’jovi – Seiji Morimoto, Francesco Cavaliere (rehearsal)
18:00 uno / radio aporee
19:00 open
20:00 Henrik Schröder
21:00 James Edmonds
22:00 jonbo-n’jovi – Seiji Morimoto, Francesco Cavaliere (dress rehearsal, maybe…)
later topmodel, maybe…

excerpts of elusive movies and other fragments on both days.
———————————————————————-
Preslav Literary School (Adam Thomas) makes tape music and fragmentary fiction using lost, forgotten and repaired sounds and words. For Flickering Wastelands he will perform using multiple cassette players and tapes found in the streets of Berlin. http://preslavliteraryschool.bandcamp.com
———————————————————————–
Henrik Schröder: belastingdienst / belastungsdienst / taxforce improvisation für präparierte schallplatten, mixer und stimmen die arbeit basiert auf vorgefundenen oder bearbeiteten sounds von computerstimmen der website der niederländischen finanzbehörden (http://www.belastingdienst.nl). dort kann sich der besucher sämtliche informationen vorlesen lassen, die sich auf das niederländische steuersystem beziehen. und zwar in englischer, deutscher und niederländischer sprache. während der improvisation werden die generierten stimmen miteinander konfrontiert, um ihre unzulänglichkeiten (insbesondere im umgang mit fremdsprachen) herauszuarbeiten und sie in kombination mit nach dem zufallsprinzip präparierten schallplatten in eine neue poetische form zu überführen. ein spiel mit sprache und deren akustischen unwägbarkeiten…
————————————————————————-
james edmonds – is a painter who works closely with photographs and processes that describe a kind of mediated human consciousness. A residue of the real world is flattened by the recording medium to produce a mysterious other reality/material existence. Through exploring sound recording and improvisation, his work has formed a coexisting musical language which reveals a similar atmosphere and resonance to these images. http://www.oilrigcatering.com/wafflecotton/
—————————————————————————
experimental setup of a new system by Jonbo-N’jovi. J-N-J is a duo made by Francesco Cavaliere and Seiji Morimoto, playing with automatic instruments, aleatoric motors, vibrating speakers and different percussive setups. http://www.myspace.com/jonbo00njovi
—————————————————————————

john hopkins / neoscenes
fresh back from many weeks on the road in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona, neoscenes will take you, with hydrocarbon flaring, on a drifting trajectory through spaces that dwell restlessly between ears and leave traces of soot, soil, and water. http://neoscenes.net/travelog/ (stream archive)

————————————————————————-
topmodel – from http://www.myspace.com/topmodeltopmodeltopmodel : “mireia sings, rinus plays broken tunes and clumsy percussive fragments on cheap instruments, magnus plays broken tunes and clumsy percussive fragments on cheap instruments, too. they tried to cover serge gainsbourg’s je t’aime once, but they failed.” (we succeeded later on)
————————————————————————–
Benjamin Laurent Aman, french visual/sound artist involved in different noise, concrete/collage projects (poldr, Crystal Plumage, Lucie Huck Palace..). He will perform Lucie Huck Palace’s *visit#3*, on-board listening among traps, through loading places. http://www.benjaminlaurentaman.com/
————————————————————————–
radio aporee: sound walks with fingers on the map. global mix mode listening sessions from contributions to the radio aporee ::: maps project
————————————————————————–

09-0320

Wow, the lid is blowing off the formerly staid and sheep-like Icelandic society. Following the collapse of their entire economy from top to bottom, side to side, Icelanders are finally making a vocal and physically critical look at the excesses of the political and business leaders who they have supported without question over the last couple decades.

News from Iceland usually centers around glaciers, volcanoes, whaling, tourism, or in more recent years, music. But all that has been displaced by the spectacular fall from fifth highest on the world’s standard of living index to International Monetary Fund-ed pauper-hood, all in a couple months.

And of those same government officials, politicians, and business people, not one has paid any public price for their despotic (nepotistic!) greed (aside from some of their Empires collapsing, surely, though, after they have secreted away the cream). The Chairman of the Central Bank and former Prime Minister David Oddsson — nicknamed in the 1990s Little Hitler by the few who saw his rule as one based on enormous reserves of ego rather than economic expertise — has refused to resign or even admit any errors in judgment while the entire national economy has collapsed.

Not prone to display dirty national laundry in the international arena, Iceland has been ridiculed with an unprecedented vehemence in British and other international press outlets, often at the hands of expat Icelanders who are so fed up with the whole scandal that they are breaking the public self-critical taboo. Several leading international economists, familiar with the Icelandic situation are reminding the public of the warnings that were proffered months ago of the possibility of impending crisis, all which were ignored by a government who, in the run-up to the crisis, repeatedly claimed the economy was sound.

In private conversations, I frequently pointed out the deep nepotism in the architecture of power that suffused Icelandic society as well as the reciprocal sheep-like obedience of the general populace; especially among the government politicos but really everywhere in a system that sustains perhaps only three of the possible six degrees of separation. Everybody knows everybody.

At any rate, I had wanted to post some links to pertinent resources in this fast-developing situation if only that it might be an object lesson on the excesses of a system that Iceland was very talented in upholding — that of consumer capitalism in all its vain-glory.

There’s the Iceland Weather Report by native, Alda Sigmundsdóttir. She has taken some major strides over the history of her blog, most recently doing interviews with voices critical of the current regime including one with the Icelandic economist Thorvaldur Gylfason.

Another voice which I concur with strongly based on my long experience with Icelandic culture is voiced by New Zealand economist Robert Wade. Small dribbles of news in the more traditional style of Icelandic media (passive echoing of officials) may be found in English at the Morgunbladid (the main national newspaper). They have been absolute supporters of the Oddsson regime and the reactionary Independence Party that he represents.

I could relate many stories from Iceland, and, indeed, have done that here over the last 14 years, but these days, my attitude is that they deserve what has happened. The broader population accepted uncritically the fiscal direction of the Independence Party and the incredibly greedy business elite (very very large fish in a very very small pond). Some Icelandic voices have recently pointed out this very sheep-like behavior on behalf of the public — as something that hopefully is in the process of being purged through increasingly violent protest actions that are both long overdue and at the same time completely not disturbing the equilibrium of the ruling elite.

Background for Research

While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.

Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation. (more …)

the beat-masters of the high school marching band attempt to get their mojo on.

head from Bedford by train into the Big Apple, through Grand Central, cross town to Port Authority, and catch a bus to Glen Ridge with all my stuff. but despite the material over-load, managed to make a few nice audio samples from deep in the city. along with a phone pic or so.