“If the profession of an engineer were not based upon exact science,” he said, “I might tremble for the result, in view of the immensely of the interests dependent on my success. But every atom that moves onward in the river, from the moment it leaves its home among the crystal springs or mountain snows, throughout the fifteen hundred leagues of its devious pathway, until it is finally lost in the vast waters of the Gulf, is controlled by laws as fixed and certain as those which direct the majestic march of the heavenly spheres. Every phenomenon and apparent eccentricity of the river — its scouring and depositing action, its caving banks, the formation of the bars at its mouth, the effect of the waves and tides of the sea upon its currents and deposits — is controlled by law as immutable as the Creator, and the engineer need only to be insured that he does not ignore the existence of any of these laws, to feel positively certain of the results he aims at.” James B. Eads, engineer, quoted in “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee

versus

“One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver — not aloud but to himself — that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, ‘Go here,’ or ‘Go there,’ and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced; cannot bar its path with an obstruction which it will not tear down, dance over, and laugh at. But a discreet man will not put these things into spoken words; for the West Point engineers have not their superiors anywhere; they know all that can be known of their abstruse science; and so, since they conceive that they can fetter and handcuff that river and boss him, it is but wisdom for the unscientific man to keep still, lie low, and wait till they do it. Captain Eads, with his jetties, has done a work at the mouth of the Mississippi which seemed clearly impossible; so we do not feel full confidence now to prophesy against like impossibilities. Otherwise one would pipe out and say the Commission might as well bully the comets in their courses and undertake to make them behave, as try to bully the Mississippi into right and reasonable conduct.” — Mark Twain in “Life on the Mississippi” quoted in “Atchafalaya” by John McPhee

from The Control of Nature: Atchafalaya — John McPhee, 23 February 1987 in The New Yorker.

and this from Bill Gammage in a precursor of his recent book “The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia” (Allen & Unwin, 2011)

I suggest that people turned to crops, herds and stores to protect them from other people. The reason farmers stepped onto the road to civilisation was military.

Aborigines ensured that usually they had plenty of food by controlling their population and by maximizing their resources. But their truly great achievement lay in how they protected their resources — not by military force, but by religious sanction. Even under extreme duress Aborigines rarely took food that was not theirs. That may have been so in early Europe and elsewhere too — most societies attempt to sanctify property. If so, it broke down. Farmers were led to protect their food, thus lost the predictability and security that widely dispersed resources gave hunter-gatherers, and thus had to work hard and make hard work a virtue. Work, sedentism and storing generate individual and collective strivings for surplus, for wealth. That is the road Europeans took, and Aborigines avoided. In August 1770 James Cook could not have known whether Aborigines were ‘far more happier’ than Europeans, but he was right to see that they were content in ‘all the necessarys of Life’, which we Europeans, ever restless for more, can never be. — Bill Gammage, 2005

Martin Buber and David Bohm — German-speaking Hasidim Jew phil-theo-logist/sopher and Anglo, McCarthy-black-listed quantum physicist. Unlikely combination, but in my practice, my pathway, they elicit a resonance unlike any others, although there are Legion sources of energized engagement that have made my trajectory a rich experience. All those Others who share the way(s). But I will work with these two as they both resonate. Simple, complex. One provoking an imaged-cosmos where there are no things only activated orders of manifestation, and this condition of being directly informing the way of interaction and relation between the Self and the Other. And the other thinker, sketching a cosmos which itself comes-to-be in the reality of relationship: within the encounter lies the source of all things.

Both these worldviews are highly idiosyncratic visions of the cosmos and also, consequentially, of human relation, but neither of them are mutually exclusive of the other. I find my own worldview shares at least this characteristic with both of them. But there are other ways in which our models overlap, and it is these areas which will stimulate the thesis.

The image of humans and their view of the cosmos that I always describe in a classroom setting is: (this after getting to know the students at least a bit) — “it’s as though we are dancing around the Void, each of us, in groups, pairs, alone, catching glances out of the corners of our eyes of it, calling out what is looks like in throat-tones frantic with fear, joy, and wonder. Sometimes a whole group will shout out in unison, the agreed-upon vision. Others stay to speaking the wind. Occasionally we turn to face it on, or are rudely pulled by the shoulder by another who is straying close to the edge. It has no name, yet we all insist on calling It something. Even when we turn our backs directly to it, we can feel it, perhaps even more than when facing it.”

So, idiosyncrasy is a way of movement (as point-of-view needs change), which leads to a clear albeit self-relative experience (impression) and consequent expressions regarding that. Springing from these two pathways (im- and ex-pression) is a third which dictates, in part, the motion of the point-of-view. It is a feedback mechanism which generates, gradually or quickly, a worldview which touches on the Void if only by discrimination against what cannot be directly named.

Okay, working (or “working”) in the office much of the week and weekend, not too effective, but I think I did finally begin to imagine a framework to hang all these words on. And it feels like one that will work. Norie gave me a couple other theses of former students of hers — very interesting works. My intuition about her seems well-placed. And it’s a funny expression of the morphing social network that I’ve participated in the last 20 years. Connected.

And swimming. Hope to hit 100 km/3 months by the time I move on. That’s attainable, easily if I take care of things.

The first short narrative illustrates a single dimension of Patel’s multi-faceted and very readable treatise that covers the connection between politics, economics, human rights, and democracy. He maps out a set of powerful view points on the blighted and complex landscape of the contemporary social milieu. Somewhat harsh, especially in juxtaposition with conventional ‘wisdom,’ Patel makes a strong argument for a more humane pathway to an egalitarian society.

A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy which are antithetical to its existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. (more …)

Again, back to voice. Given the process of coalescing. In order to bind threads of disparate disciplines, different socio-cultural systems, and idiosyncratic paths, a voice which allows some transcendence of localized protocols of communication is necessary. That voice must needs to be poetic in a fundamental sense. It need not have a particular density or timbre, but it does need to be located somewhere within and without any and all those disciplinary spaces.

Is a poetic voice immediate or is it cumulative? It is supposed that the smallest increment of uttered language, the phoneme can hardly be a poetic vocalization. So, maybe language is generally cumulative, accretionary, in that geologic sense of layered erosional deposition, reification, burial, uplift, and consequent re-erosion. In this instance, it is then possible to find a shiny-smooth cobble of, say, cloudy quartz. Well-balanced, raising expectations of imminent knowledge of something when in the hand, pleasing to the eye. What are its origins since arising from the heart of stars: silicon, oxygen. At one point following the gravitational accretion of the planet, the silicon was oxidized by some environment rich in oxygen. Silicon dioxide. Under pressure, super-heated, igneous differentiation allowed masses of these molecules to collect and form crystalline agglomerations within a cooling batholith. Uplift and erosion brings that raw mass to the surface where it is shattered slowly, washed by waters, and dragged downwards by gravity. The cobble is smoothed with many others, and buried with all those, pressure cementing them all again into a single mass, a conglomerate. Another uplift and erosional cycle breaks the conglomerate cement and releases this smooth stone into a creek bed, into a river, where it is further polished. Holding it in the palm, what is its voice? What does it say? How does it speak to its temporary holder? What does it say other that the mute message of gravity to be let down, to be given back to the earth? If the holder knows, they might read signs in the surface, in the raw presence of the thing-ness of the cobble. The signs point to histories and pathways. The reader has to understand the basic elements of those signs in order to create their own understanding as to the origin of the object. But of its pure presence, nothing need be known, but only the immediate experience of the Self in juxtaposition with this thing. Naming all this is the root of language.

As the poetic, the transformed erosional product of language, the cobble might be heaved through the wall of the proverbial glass house of culture, period. Howl.

The amplifier/road difference would sound something like this:

I defined the amplifier as a concept which exists at many different scales and in both ‘natural’ and human-dominated systems (though that particular dialectic is a problematic one). It is a system which concentrates (and by default attenuates) energy flows. It is a defined set of pathways for that energy to flow along. (a life-form is an amplifier!)

(As an example, fundamental physical laws, such as the set of principles (gravitational attraction, strong/weak nuclear forces, EM radiation, thermodynamics, etc) that ‘govern’ the process of stellar evolution ‘supply’ the ‘protocols’ for the ‘expression’ of Light energy (radiation) in a highly specific and concentrated form (compared to the availability of that same energy in any random location in the universe).
(more …)

The official blurb for the workshop:

This workshop will draw on Hopkins’ international experience in facilitating creative encounters in the context of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. With an open structure for engaged and focused dialogue, the workshop will explore a powerful energy-based worldview that can open up new awareness of social, cultural, and natural systems. The dynamics of collaborative human relations confined within an attentive space is guaranteed** to generate provocative and inspiring outcomes. Creativity is, by definition, about the formative flow of energy between living organisms. We will move through a variety of environments (including on the river by waka) as we share life-time in the workshop. The workshop will augment the processes of any creative practitioner with a profound, situated, and practice-oriented conceptual toolbox that address the following areas and more:

(Keywords in no particular order): energy, creativity, thermodynamics, technology and techno-social systems, art, attention, entropy, learning, media, networks, participation, process, virtuality, creative action, human presence, Light, human encounter, mediation, concentration, optimization, pathways, meals, sustainability, simplicity, synchronicity, auspiciousness, and serendipity.

**on the condition that you bring along your entire Self, not merely your body, mind, and spirit

Qi follows the will. (The will is an imposed pathway on the movement of Qi.) If the heart is centered and in balance, the clarity of eye is complete.

But otherwise, if the heart is misplaced, distortion of everything seen and sensed occurs.

cross my heart and hope to die. opening the heart. set someone’s heart at rest. heartless. cold hands warm heart. near someone’s heart. broken hearts. cry your heart out. heart-broken. he’s got a big heart. to one’s heart’s content. a man after my own heart. have one’s heart in the right place. absence makes the heart grow fonder. affair of the heart. heart and soul. bleeding heart liberal. after your own heart. be still my beating heart. by heart. beating heart. change of heart. steal someone’s heart. a man after my own heart. have one’s heart in one’s mouth. open your heart.

absence makes the heart grow fonder. take heart. after my own heart. at heart. break her heart. by heart. change of heart. cold hands, warm heart. cross my heart. cry her heart out. cut to the heart of the matter. do his heart good. eat your heart out. find it in their heart. from the bottom of my heart. get to the heart of. gave me heart failure. half a heart. harden mine heart. have a heart. have no heart for. heavy heart. in her heart of hearts. lose heart. lost her heart to. near to my heart. not have the heart to. poured out his heart. set her heart on. sick at heart. steal someone’s heart. steel my heart against. take heart. take to heart. to her heart’s content. warm heart. warm the cockles of his heart. wearing hiss heart on his sleeve. with all her heart. young at heart. with half a heart.

heart attack.

Any path is only a path, and there is no affront, to oneself or to others, in dropping it if that is what your heart tells you. Look at every path closely and deliberately. Try it as many times as you think necessary. Then ask yourself, and yourself alone, one question. This question is one that only a very old man asks. My benefactor told me about it when I was young, and my blood was too vigorous to understand it. Now I do understand it. I will tell you what it is. Does this path have a heart? All paths are the same: they lead nowhere.

They are paths going through the bush, or into the bush. In my own life I could say I have traversed long, long paths, but I am not anywhere. My benefactor’s question has meaning now.

Does this path have a heart? If it does, the path is good: if it doesn’t, it is of no use. Both paths lead nowhere: but one has a heart, the other doesn’t. One makes for a joyful journey; as long as you follow it, you are one with it. The other will make you curse your life. One makes you strong; the other weakens you. — Carlos Castenada

I know now which is the path that I find myself upon…

Arendt‘s tripartite approach to the sociopolitical — Work, Labor, Action — in “The Human Condition” suggests the expenditure or the flow of energy. All three are intertwined within the do-ing, the be-ing of life, and in the sense that they are all embodied expressions of life-energy, they are equal, divided only by the particularities of the pathways of expression of those energies. She begins, I believe correctly, with viva activa as her source: the active, activated life. However, she does not explicitly posit a connection between viva activa and the source of the possibility for an active life, ones life-energy (sourced in the energized thermodynamic flows of life itself).  These impulses towards the social structures of collective life must have a source, an activated well-spring that drives the cumulative social (and life) dynamic.  The question of the source is perhaps more important than the ultimate expression of the source.

It is in the interpretation of work, labor, and action as mappings of social relation where she initially frames difference as emerging from an expression of material “durability.” She frames the “durability of the world” from this materialistic sense, a durability that “gives the things in the world their relative independence from men who produce and use them.” I think this is precisely where she makes a mistake: a core flaw in Western thinking lies in the fundamental disconnect of that which is ‘out there’ to that which is ourselves. Although those externals of ‘what man hath wrought’ appear to have the “function of stabilizing human life,” it is this precise separation which, while offering an objective relationship with “the environment of nature,” conceptually and perceptually separates us from nature.

Durability is a metric which is immersed in time and related to the structural/material characteristics of an energy configuration. It also relates to complexity and the thermodynamic qualities of the human-constructed configuration. To be durable is must be able to persist in time: to resist change, in Latin durus means “hard.” Change, as the enemy of durability, can only be resisted or counteracted by an influx of the ‘correct’ or reinforcing form of energy. By correct I mean an energy that promotes the persistence of a particular configuration versus the dissolution of the configuration. Energy may cause either or both to occur.

For example, with prototypical techno-social persistence in mind, think of an object, a building, fashioned from stone. The energy necessary to re-configure raw, in situ stone into a building is significant. The intermediate (human) source is embodied energy, or a wide techno-social infrastructure supporting machinic augmentation of the body. It is no coincidence that stone structures are often co-located with the central hubs of significant techno-social civilizations. The high initial pay-out is rewarded by a longer-term persistence compared to, say, wood which requires a smaller initial pay-out of energy. Clearly there is a direct correlation between the durability of human configured situations and the initial and continuing availability of energy input into various configurations of expression.

A ‘separated’ approach to activated life denies what is quantum ‘fact.’ The ‘material’ substance of whatever constitutes the self is completely connected, embedded, not as reified and ordered crystal in a matrix, but as merely another expression of a continuous field of energy. It is perhaps correct to imagine that one of the only things that distinguish ‘us’ from ‘out there’ is the difference in thermodynamic state (negentropic) and state of complexity. Of course, somewhere within that complexity is an intentional consciousness which seems to demand “subjective control over our physical circumstances” (King, 2006), but subjectivity needs to be thought of differently. Or just not thought of at all.

Why?

Instead of hunting for subjective patterns in the flux of energy that is the substrate of everything, maybe it’s better just to experience the flow: to work, to labor, to act.

Ach, so much to read, so much to understand. Fifteen months into the process, and the prospect of applying a metric to progress: just to see, feel, is it doable? Is it worth it? Is this stressful immersion into the removed praxis of paying life-time-attention to the sometimes resonant remains of prior lives a good thing? Can immersion in the past be a good thing? Wallowing, submerged in the resonant archive of other times and places, people.

The view that technology may be represented as a human constructed/refined pathway for the limited sense of controllable ‘natural’ forces (energies, power, flows) seems to be productive, but it needs to be tested more against deterministic or Utopian views of technology. I’m pragmatic about the outcome being an overlooked pathway hidden among the trillion-plus unique URLs in the webiverse.  Oh well. Ultimately technology is a set of (often socially-proffered) choices that the individual makes as to where to channel his/her life-energies. The channels or pathways are multiplex and are influenced by collectives of Others (both dead and alive), but ultimately are there for the individual to engage or not. Of course, there are social systems which have set rigid command-and-control systems in place to radically limit the choice of pathways available. Other social systems have evolved elaborate methodologies for persuasion so that the participating population will feel compelled to utilize certain technological pathways rather than others — often not even being aware that their ‘choice’ is an illusion.

There is a precursor situation which influences the development of external shared social protocols and that situation is within the refined evolutionary structure of the body-system. The body, as with any life-form, is itself a powerful system for the (consumption and) directed expression of energies, both internally through various sub-systems, and externally as a unitary and singular body. It is the primary technological system (and then all life is a technology…!).

It’s hard to brightly imagine that when we decide to retreat to the desert or to the mountains to walk, it is a process deeply colored and, literally, in-formed by relatively recent cultural contingency.

The retreat is steeped in a socially constructed reality that began to emerge around William Wordsworth and J. J. Rousseau’s time and was sparked, in part, by their actual perambulations and especially the writings that welled-up whilst they were on the road (The Excursion, by Wordsworth, for example, and Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker).

But in a completely different sense, walking (and be-ing while walking) is ahistorical. Because the present moment is never to be repeated, nor is a life-time to happen twice, the momentary events of that particular movement are unique, and uniquely inspiring. Embodied movement is a passage through the flux of difference, regardless of the pathway. And although I cannot anymore go to the delicious extremes of span and height and endurance that so many others have done and will do, it is not extremity that brings the timeless essence of movement. When all is change, the senses can be taught to more sense the minute difference of the everyday. In this, the near becomes just as exotic and inspiring as the far and less reachable places.

What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.

The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. (more …)

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. the presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. (more …)

ed: This short note is the epilogue for the Migrating:Art:Academies: book. Otherwise because the heavy duty editorial tasks, I didn’t have time to write something more comprehensive on the ideas surrounding movement and learning, maybe next time!

head towards Livermore via Amboy and Tehachapi. somehow over-conscious about this being a road-trip as I follow former pathways, familiar, horizons both distant and near are recognized at many various moments, rocketing down the defense inter-state. and the emblem of Route 66 stenciled on that pathway between Needles and Ludlow. the once-abandoned Roy’s gas station and motel in Amboy now a neo-post-modern stop-over, huh? and seeing a few monuments to the patriotic dead along the way. and finally, closing in on Tehachapi near sunset, a major fire happening in heavy wond immediately south of town in rugged hills not two miles from where I camp for the night in Tehachapi Mountain Park. hardly anyone around, surprisingly enough. the road in is steep as are the individual campsite slots. I set out a bed on a tarp on the powdered and dusty ground. nose is aware of fire all night, it Lights dreams, though the wind is carrying the force of the blaze to the north away, away, towards Death Valley. houses burn.

Two days here in Echo Park already. Three nights, one night alone, Friday and Saturday there were a couple of people in, then tonight, Sunday, no one around at all. A bit creepy, especially with the mountain lion kill I just discovered over in the middle of the walk-in camping site. Saw that on the way back from Mitten Park this afternoon. Been thinking of the cougars the whole time I’ve been here. Seeing evidences of kills scattered widely across the entire space. Wondering what the total range in for a single cat? I just don’t want to meet one. Having fantasy imaginations, and on the way back from Mitten Park had composed an Ode to the Puma, not able to memorize it sufficiently to record it, but recite it loudly on the way back.

The trail is choked with small purple flowers where it starts from Echo Park. Then there are the vague petroglyphs, then one set of rafters float by, small against Steamboat Rock. Looking at things great and small, it’s all relative to the eye, and the unfolding context.

Eight years ago, I leave a stone from Iceland in a cavity of the standing carcass of a burned piñon, the stone is now gone. Where?

Have an incredibly erotic dream with Jennifer D., back from the Culture Capitals 2000 project in Prague. Will have to email her. Otherwise watery squint-eyed watching of rotating the stellar field.

This morning, a raptor circles a hundred meters away with its mate hidden in the trees along Pool Creek, making a creeeewing sound. It’s the same noise it made when I wandered over to the creek earlier in the morning. All the birds are noisy — it makes a multi-dimensional flow which lies on the ear with pleasing insistence. No need to move the head, as the sources are in motion and occasionally in sight.
(more …)

Some final words on the residency period:

Energy of Situation

Rather than the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were, the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).
(more …)

Finally depart, making last-minute passes across all the place. Ship-shape, single-wide shape. Good enough for the next artist coming through. Head out by around noon, tired of waiting on the road to Echo Park to open after these repeated waves of late spring storms rolling through. Head south to follow the southern boundary of the Dugway site, through Gold Hill, in that frontier mode, rough, and the mountains have all been dug up, mined out. Some tough looking abodes, apparently there are a few people who live there year-round, it’s gotta be tough. Join the Pony Express Route at Callao, head east to the Wildlife area, windy more or less, mostly more. Callao is really a frontier outpost. About 8-10 ranch families. No store, no gas, no nuthin,’ just the ranches clustered around some arable land at the foot of the spectacular Deep Creek Mountains (which are higher than the Wasatch in Eastern Utah! The Pony Express Route is an even more strange communications artifact, but one that resonated long in the US imagination, though it lasted only a couple years in actuality — made obsolete by the telegraph cable. But the idea of riding across this landscape in 12-mile spurts (a healthy horse has to stop after that distance when running full-tilt), well, it’s something.

Over night at the Dugway Geode Mines, pick around a bit in the gathering twiLight, but am pretty tired after the drive. Quiet night, though there are threatening clouds rolling through from time-to-time. It’s always tough to pick a place out there to camp at there are no accessible trees, nor even vegetation above the knees, hardly the ankles! Always have the feeling of being exposed.

There is a large (black) raven (Corvus corax) who is in residence in the Enola Gay Hangar. There are some major areas of the roof and sides of the hangar where the corrugated sheeting has (surely!)been blown off over the years, so the interior is exposed to the elements and to natural energies. This raven (or two) is in residence somewhere high in the iron girders. Much of each day, especially during morning and evening, the raven is seen flying very purposefully between the hangar and a spot some 200 meters east of the hangar where there are some low scrubby bushes and open ground. (S)he flies back and forth not far from the window that I look out from on occasion as I work when inside the residency unit. Movement out the window catches my attention and about half the time it is the raven making this low and very determinate transit between the hangar and this spot. Occasionally the movement will be from the ground squirrel couple who has taken up residence in the underbelly of the Airstream, and otherwise, the few lizards will do their peculiar dances across the gravelly yard when it is warm; and lately, a handful of very small birds will spend the early evening hours, before sunset, picking aphids off the salt brush bush growing in the yard. But it is the raven who is most compelling. Back and forth. Before I leave, I want to hang out in the watch-tower and simply observe the flight cycle. I reckon (s)he’s gathering sticks for a nest, but I haven’t clearly seen anything in his/her beak on the flights back to the hangar, so it’s a question: what’s ‘e doin’? Actually it could be a pair of them, they are know to find a partner and mate for life. Hmmm, novel idea…

The ground squirrel pair is another matter. They’re gaining access to the otherwise pretty solid and gapless lower framework of the Airstream via the fold-out step area below the front door. There are also areas for critters to enter via the electrical and water hookup doors. One of those has a broken latch, so I think I will tap and screw that one down semi-permanently as the vehicle isn’t going to be moved anytime soon.

Neal and I head out to the Bonneville Flats towards evening. I want to cycle and he has some filming to do. Amazing Light. I cycle for about an hour, going about 8-10 miles out and then back. Hard to tell, dimensions are reduced to time alone (and body metrics). About five miles out there is a cluster of vehicles, apparently a photo shoot happening. Cycling down the ‘main drag’ of the speed-test area is a singular experience. Speed becomes necessary to overcome the lack of Cartesian cues, no pathway. Got to get somewhere. Got to approach those little specks in the distance. Oh, those are cars, sure takes a long time to get closer. Hit some areas where the salt is wet and there are loose crystals which splatter all over me. It mostly appears like ice, so brain is thinking danger! slick!, but it is quite the opposite, sticky like climbing on limestone.

The accompanying images are suffering from more digital camera woes — dust on the CCD. Absolutely disgusting. I don’t have a proper removal kit, and this Nikon model doesn’t have one of the vibrating sensors that can dislodge that extremely irritating blobs that end up on the sensor despite me never taking the lens off. Yet another disappointment with this Nikon (D200) — for the price paid it is real garbage compared to the old analog F2as and even Nikkormats from the 1970′s. I never had dust-on-film problems like this, ever! Neal has a nice Canon SLR system from his university, along with a HD 3-CCD chip DV cam. I’m jealous.

A few notes on techno-social systems:

In analyzing the affect of technology on a social system it is critical to identify and understand 1) what actors or protocols are determining the pathways of energy flow, 2) ultimately how individuals in the system interact with the pathway(s), 3) the resulting benefit and who receives it, 4) the mechanisms by which benefit (energy) is accumulated by those controlling the protocols. Prior to this it is probably necessary to map the general sources of energy that are being re-purposed (directed) by the techno-social system.

By tracing in detail 1) the relations of power, 2) the pathways along which energy and power flow, 3) the sources and destinations of the flows, the entirety of human relation may be positioned at both a macro scale and a granular (that is, human-to-human) scale: with the implicit understanding that all relation is permeated by the affects of the wider system.

For a techno-social system to be successful, by definition, it has to capture a certain minimum of the life-time/life-energy of participants in the system: this is a technology’s ultimate function within its social system/context. What is deterministic is the absolute need for life (human and elsewise) to continue, and in this continuance, to refine pathways of energy flow to aid in that continuance via the collective augmentation of the techno-social system.

(Are there technologies which do not concentrate energy within a certain subset of individuals to increase their ultimate life-extending pro-creativity? Are there systems which re-distribute widely their concentrated sources?) What about the struggle of certain individuals for a greater level of personal autonomy — those who would seek to either not participate in prescribed flow pathways or would seek to alter those pathways to suit individual desires? The inertia of the techno-social affects the personal trajectories of adoption or imposition.

In a wide social system, a techno-social system, technology is generally used as a means for concentrating energy for a subset of elites of the system. The balance of the participants, the drones, the prolls, the slaves, are inculcated from birth with the fiction that they are receiving more than they actually surrender to the social system. In the case of slaves, this balance reads: your life for your embodied labor.

Spending the night in the cab of the truck is no fun, but the snow is coming so hard and fast that there is no way of getting out and setting up the back to sleep without getting soaked and cold. So, park in Milford behind a stranded Hummer. Cold and uncomfortable, but good for toughening the constitution, eh? By the way, the image links now will initiate an image album for the entire month to come, higher-rez images (900×602 pixels) and a nice presentation interface. Comments welcome!

This is the result of our trajectory, what we have done to this point, how we have proceeded: or is our trajectory a result of this? The cumulative affect we have as a form of life on this place. With the messy convolutions of relation that accumulate, stratigraphically, on be-ing. No flat-lying sediment with seasonal and measured pulse. Glacial, tectonic, up-heaving fossil be-ing exposed as scarified, reified tissue. How to excise, release, revive once fluid dreams from these frozen remains. Or is it impossible that once laid down from embodied flow, these traces contain only the form of life gone, drained of all strength, all presence, and any forward driving impulse.

Feigning indifference when chunks of life are covered over, awaiting the slow micro- crystallization of silica replacement. Rendering to glass all that came before. Glass to look at, to look through, and to see refracted life; to see the myriad pretty and terrible colors of it all.

Upheaving, upheaval. Testing dependence and independence. Just when the path looks stable, where the knowns gradually coagulate to staunch the in-and-out-pouring stresses of un-knowing; the flow is not turbulent, the road is straight and wide, with interesting terrains somewhere up ahead. Then one finds a dip, through a desert wash, unseen just a short distance away. In this dip is a mess of flash-flood debris, and a double-fork in the road: change comes along with deep choices to be made between diverging pathways. One is obscured by the morning fog of oracle’s lack, so that what lies ahead cannot be distinguished; the other way may be seen, but with curves that carry it quickly out of sight. The third apparently climbs out of the one dip, and is the road that one perceived from a distance to be the straight and wide, but turns out that there are many dips, as when crossing a wide alluvial fan spreading out from the base of a mountain canyon.

Then there is the idea of the bush-whack. A process that forgets the roads and launches out into the countryside, a self-determined goal in sight or hinted at by the terrain to cover. The bush-whack presumes a base, often, with measured forays out on a daily basis, rather than a continuous and wearing, un-remitting confrontation of the unknown. It is the frontiersman, one who stays at the edge of stable regions, the fraying or un-formed edges. One foot in, one foot out. Solitary. Progress not determined by forward motion, but rather by the growing determination to remain in motion at all. That is progress, in the Light of how life comes and goes, the determination to continue is a hard kernel around which to wrap the discoveries that occur along the way.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit’s cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their “task” and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

Ah, my friends, I don’t know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude — even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the “tasks” of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. — Hermann Hesse

John Vallee, 54, lives near the trestle that spans the Crane Creek and was watching TV when he heard a loud screech. He went outside and first thought he saw a blanket tangled under a rail car. Then he realized it was a person.

“It’s going to be hard for me to get to sleep,” Mr. Vallee told Florida Today. “I can’t get it out of my mind.” — AP

The energized impression and apprehension of be-ing leaves us with resonant formations in embodied memory. And it is resonance that best circumscribes (models) the phenomena of the propagation of empathy from the Other to the Self. Although there is no hard evidence in humans, the concept of mirror neurons would seem to support the idea of resonance. Caught a lecture at UM with Deb on “Empathy in Normal Adult Development and Neurological Disease” with Bob Levenson from UCB which got me thinking of the actual mechanism that allows for the transmission of the energies of expression across Cartesian space from the Self to the Other. The obvious model would be the transmission of band-limited radiative (visual, auditory, touch, etc) energy which then is apprehended by the neural system, a system which is sensitive to ‘matched’ or similar experiences that have already impinged and impressed themselves on the body system. This impression process changes the body system from one energy configuration to another. And any life system will have fundamental resonant pathways — these would be necessary determinants of basic learned experience — whatever the particular and precise mechanism is (mirror neurons being perhaps a primary model), the idea of resonance seems to be key. Resonance would depend on some accounting of sameness and difference as per prior embodied experience and the persistence of impressions (which themselves are configurations of energized neuronal structures: memory) among other factors. There would have to be a means for rapid energy pattern-matching across a huge volume of semi-fixed memory structures in the brain — it would be impossible to check all possible prior impressions with all live incoming impressions, so there would have to be some kind of disgressionary or limiting function to the process in the form of step or directional filters…

I can’t get you out of my mind…

The vis insita, or innate force of matter, is a power of resisting by which every body, as much as in it lies, endeavors to preserve its present state, whether it be of rest or of moving uniformly forward in a straight line. — Isaac Newton, Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Momentum. It’s easier to (continue to) follow a prepared pathway, or a pathway that has allowed, formerly, the development of a certain velocity and quality of transit. Shifting pathways requires adjustments in … everything, not just velocity. And change … is … difficult. But why? Is it a force of instinct that keeps track of optimized behavior, deterring one from engaging in potentially non-optimized or energy-intensive experimentation, or is it merely the threat of social dissonance, or dis-position?

Looking for a path to follow. Which one. Well trodden, worn, abandoned, crowded, one-way, two-way, or simply not there.

Make one.

And it ought to be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, then to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well under the new. This coolness arises partly from fear of the opponents, who have the laws on their side, and partly from the incredulity of men, who do not readily believe in new things until they have had a long experience of them. Thus it happens that whenever those who are hostile have the opportunity to attack they do it like partisans, whilst the others defend lukewarmly, in such wise that the prince is endangered along with them. — Niccolò Machiavelli, “The Prince”

Make change because all is change anyway. The Prince will guarantee his incremental redundancy by not embracing all the evidences and actualities of change that he may possibly apprehend.

In the Book of Changes a distinction is made between three kinds of change: nonchange, cyclic change (recurrence), and sequent change (non-recurrence). Nonchange is the background, as it were, against which change is possible. For in regard to any change there must be some fixed point to which the change can be referred; otherwise there can be no definite order and everything is dissolved in chaotic movement. The point of reference must be established, and this always requires a choice and decision. It makes possible a system of coordinates into which everything else is fitted. Consequently at the beginning of the world, as at the beginning of thought, there is the decision, the fixing of the point of reference. … The ultimate frame of reference for all that changes is the unchanging.

The question of change is an incremental valuation. All cannot change all the time. Where change can occur and where it may occur and how change will occur is constantly in flux. Social systems seek to attenuate flows of change which are too powerful, and to amplify those which are insufficient, as judged by the momentary contingencies and needs of the system. It is the task of judging the temporal scaling of response to the evolving conditions which will provide auspicious outcomes.

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…

2. Maintaining identity of product

a. Each field must be identified with a number or other designation on the field application form and other pertinent documents.
b. Maps showing field identities and locations must be maintained and furnished to crop inspectors.
c. Field inspected product must be positively identified at all times.
d. A bin or lot number must identify all bins.
e. If product is bagged, bags must be identified with a stenciled lot number or a tag securely fastened to the bag.

3. Record requirements

The following records must be maintained:

a. Field number
b. Amount of product harvested
c. Assigned bin number
d. Record of any product transfers
e. Assigned lot numbers
f. Copies of all completed agency documents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(this was the final posting to the travelog on the hybrid php/html platform p-machine pro before the tech-no-mad blog was initiated)

apologies for the lack. you have no-doubt noticed the dearth of entries here. no travel, no entries, no kangaroos. all energy goes into the tech-no-mad blog at this point in support of the doctoral research. you may tune in there for tidbits and fragments sampled from the wide range of inputs sliced through. here will remain dormant for a time, methinks. besides that, reflecting back on prior situations also dominated by remoteness. how there is no solution in distance. face-to-face has to ensue. sooner than later. (b)logging miles to return home where ever that place (of heart) might be. or not. e.e.cummings comes to mind, or so, while the Western Slope recedes from same. but without stretching abilities, formative pathways, expressive outputs, little will come. the ecology of words is not sustainable. whilst closing in on 2 million hits to this project (since 2004), gawd knows the total since inception in 1994!

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

and

Gazing out the window, not driving, watching the world pass, attenuated, virtual, transitory, and it’s gone.

How to transcend the rigidity of extant and defined protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is emetic (of protocol); or poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol. Or simply turning away to create a new protocol. This is a critical issue as protocol underlies all techno-social deployments. All. And the affect of protocol, its genesis, its makers, its purview, all contribute to the formation of a (dominant) worldview that it imposes a(n arbitrary) frame of reference upon the participant in the particular techno-social system. On the other hand, life without protocols: an impossible situation for social animals (or any animal, for that matter — a protocol may be thought of as a way of going, whether self-directed or directed by innate sense and following the line of maximized entropy production).

This conundrum applies to all (socially) evolved protocols, no matter the genesis. It means that this pervades and saturates, all experiences of being (except perhaps for the pre-human, or over-human). On The Poetics of Protocol, a working title moving towards a core thematic. Using the metaphor of a sliding scale, at one end, chaotic ways of going, at the other, completely prescribed ways of going, life falls somewhere in between.

Having to jump between several points-of-view — the tremendous volume of applicable writing on the range of subjects; a strong, principled, and unifying overview tied to idiosyncratic personal experiences; and, finally, the mental focus required to tie all this jetsam together — the jump has to be transformed into a creatively complied micro-narrative. But looking around at the plethora of source materials is always discouraging — in form and content. The inability to structure my own content into a form consistent with the material that I consume is disturbing, though idiosyncratic expression is one of the goals for DCA research. (Inconsistency has potential to uncover innovative spaces and may be used as a strategic tool or approach.) So this can be viewed as a strategic advantage in the creative interpretation and packaging of the material. Content-wise, I am confident of the presence of something to say, as well as a subsequent pathway-of-action reflecting what is said. Daunting task none-the-less, from any vantage.

Seeing from more than one point-of-view requires motion or at least movement between points of stasis. Does the establishment of a point-of-view require a cessation of movement? (motion of course is completely relative regarding point-of-view: life is never static so point-of-view never absolutely static)

As long as man’s wants and his desires for military conquest were confined to petty hostilities between individuals or tribes, the necessity for roads other than mere pathways or trails was not felt. With the beginnings of land commerce and the spirit of conquest between nations, there arose the necessity of ways better adapted to the changed needs and conditions, and with the growth of trade and military operations successive improvements in the character of the ways and the means of transportation were made only to give way to others with new conditions made a change imperative. — Charles Whittle in “Ancient and Modern Highways”

We were not a wealthy Nation when we began improving our highways… but the roads themselves helped us create a new wealth, in business and industry and land values… So it was not our wealth that made our highways possible. Rather, it was our highways that made our wealth possible. — Thomas H. MacDonald, Chief, U.S. Bureau of Public Roads

the creation of pathways onto which energy flow is restrictively directed/sanctioned is primarily for the benefit of those who occupy the nexus of power within any particular system. all roads lead to Rome.

The need for criticism to include the framework for a new, alternate pathway to travel upon shows up when I find myself focusing too much on circumscribing the problems. This is the same as opposition politics that gets too mired in opposition (doh!) and forgetting that an alternative vision is necessary as well. How to find autonomous spaces when on the road, moving along the lines of power drawn by the dominant social system? How to find or facilitate interstitial spaces that are not under the control of that system. Do these spaces have a set of characteristics that makes them immediately identifiable? Or are they only identified by the precise instances of (uncontrolled) energy flow that occur within them? (chicken-and-egg situation!) For every unit of human-controlled flow of energy, there are countless flows of energy of many orders greater magnitude that are not controlled. Humans are capable of controlling a certain, very limited range of flows. This range has increased in time from those expressions of embodied reach to those far beyond the direct impact of that body. By collecting the energy of many bodies, humans are able to express and project the reach of their control over vast regions. Ultimately, this reach is limited by the number of bodies at the disposal of the regime and the efficiency with which that granular energy is harnessed (through those controlled pathways).

Ran across a couple (excerpted) essays by Ivan Illich, a radical critic of techno-social consumerist systems.

The machine-like behavior of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed. — Ivan Illich, Silence is a Commons

The demands made by tools on people become increasingly costly. This rising cost of fitting man to the service of his tools is reflected in the ongoing shift from goods to services in over-all production. Increasing manipulation of man becomes necessary to overcome the resistance of his vital equilibrium to the dynamic of growing industries; it takes the form of educational, medical, and administrative therapies. Education turns out competitive consumers; medicine keeps them alive in the engineered environment they have come to require; bureaucracy reflects the necessity of exercising social control over people to do meaningless work. The parallel increase in the cost of the defense of new levels of privilege through military, police, and insurance measures reflects the fact that in a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy. — Ivan illich, Tools for Conviviality

In the contemporary framework of human encounter — dominated by instances of hyper-commerce and of tele-mediated presence — life changes to fit the mediation (it does not evolve in the same sense that Darwin’s idea of the process; instead it simply fits the technology), and the character of encounter with(in) life alters for each shift in the techno-social milieu that collectively generates the allowed pathways of exchange. Freedom is not a question in this situation. Nor is autonomy. Those are absolutes of the abstract: virginal conceptions not directly related to the contingencies of be-ing in and of the world. Absolutes and abstractions do not prepare the Self for the shifting potentialities of collective human encounter which proceed by degree and layered complexity. And indeed, when abstractions govern encounter, the full field of possibility of human encounter is quickly limited to a much-less-than-finite set of conditions, processes, and outcomes. There arises the alienation of emotive loss in this limitation, but that is another issue to raise elsewhere. Or perhaps this alienation is the reciprocal experience of the (unfulfilled) possibilities of creative encounter.

Or is all this just about losing or gaining procreative (evolutionary) advantage for the species (via technological augmentation), and nothing more?

The fact that the strongest, most beautiful, most intelligent are, overall, given social reward when compared to the least. (Recognizing this, the revolutionary community organizer, Jesus, said (as interpolated by Mathew) “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” to invert the perception of this evolutionary order, and the alternative fact that following his lead will actually alter the order. Was this a miraculous strike at limited potentialities? Or mere agitprop for political expediency?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Morning, mourning notes on encounter, in no particular order.

It is on a pathway, the pathway, in the mode of movement, in the shifting of unknown situations, where encounter occurs. These encounters are traced with the full presence of the body and all aspects where they occur.

There is the general rule on a hiking trail, uphill gets right-of-way: those struggling and straining to make it to the top of whatever heights that you’ve just been on should be given precedence. It’s always a question, though, what the precise character of the encounter will be. Whether you have seen (or heard) the approach of an Other, through dense forest, or whether you round a turn to be confronted by a gaggle of silent walkers. Encounter is a culturally specific regime overlying that of the embodied, the animal. On trails in the West the density of hikers is generally low, except in National Parks which can see crowds as dense any on Fifth Avenue in New York City at lunch-time. This is one criteria on which to judge a trail — not merely the views afforded, but the number of people encountered. Escaping from human presence is as prominent a thought as what other ‘natural’ phenomena might be encountered.

Silence, or the absence of human-created noise, relates to presence of other humans as well as other beasts. While walking in bear country complete silence is not a safe option, so encounters with other humans in bear country usually begin at a distance, either with bells or simply boisterous activity. Encounters with bears are sometimes at a distance, but sometimes not. I have found that the presence radiated by large hairy carnivores with big teeth usually precedes any sight.

Bush-whacking is a situation where encounter with an Other becomes so rare as to evoke a certain fear if only from the statistical improbability of encounter whilst specifically not on a trail. Sadly, it is a probability that rises as the global population increases. Too many folks out there! And one has to be aware of the timing of the off-trail experience: hunting season is not a good time to bush-whack!

Enroute, one suspends the closed-ness of daily routine. The sameness of daily regimen is upset and in its place is the jarring uncertainty of arrival in unknown, medial, places. In between here and there. Starting point, ending point. Suspended animation is an apt term. Animate, moving, but somehow suspended by the vagaries of being someplace in particular, some nameable place, some identifiable locus.

It is in this liminal space, on the thresh keld, thresh hold, the border between the space of known nutrition and the potentialities of the unknown, where all learning and change takes place. As a setting for the encounter with the Other, partaking food, sharing nutrition with a stranger is an exceptionally powerful meeting of ritual.

Of course, there is the argument that says movement can be only in mind, and such mental travel is as efficacious in bringing transcendence as any physical movement. But the movement I write of here is not a simple Cartesian transposition of body, of point-of-view, it is the processural space of encountering the unknown Other. This will precipitate something of a shift in point-of-view, no matter how small in that Cartesian sense — it is the principle of change that matters — and in an open encounter, change occurs. This demands embodied motion. Turning to face the Other.

Over the years, I observe that I take very few photographs in the place where I live. With a few exceptions of concentrated exercise to see the unknown within the known, it is on the road where sight opens and newness brings that rushing tension of encounter. That tension, when unchecked, concentrates in the shoulders and subsequently crawls up the gall-bladder channel to root behind the eyes, migraine. Gotta deal with that. Opening the shoulders, the channel, to allow the movement of difference, the tension of change to simply transit the body without leaving damage in its wake. This will be a theme of movement. To pass through and allow a passing through of the energies of encounter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

death strewn on the highway. roadkill. carnivore, herbivore, amphibian, insect: getting to the other side of the road is just part of the inexorable (natural) systemic flow. Roadkill represents one intersection of human-defined flows and naturally-existing flows. The result of this fundamental intersection is near-death or absolute annihilation, a rapid reduction to component complex molecules. from the thathunk of meatier species to the simple fluttering splat of the butterfly. Leathery carcasses that persist for days despite the brutal pounding of truck tires and hard-to-remove stains on the windshield that resist even the most vigorous squeegee scrubbing whilst filling-up the tank.

Insects with a low weight-to-surface-area ratio can sometimes avoid liquidation by the slipstream effect which will carry them up and over the vehicle. But trajectory is all, and the meatier bugs, the swarming locusts and grasshoppers, have too much mass in their sagging torsos to experience this sanctified reprieve and thus become one with their maker in a soul-wrenching milli-second that can be a marvel of colorful abstraction a-la Pollack.

Along one stretch of the UFO Highway in Nevada, red locusts were on the march northward along a specific pathway that they were intent on following without regard to individual survival. At 60 MPH, the dynamic was such that their flight reaction to the approaching truck got them only a couple feet off the ground, not over the height of the hood, so, the lower grill was a mass of dessicated carcasses by the time we got to the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, a hundred miles away. Many more were simply crushed by the wheels, leaving greasy red-greenish stains on the road and in the wheel-wells: their natural trajectory on the ground was clearly discernible where it intersected with roads. I noticed in the gas station parking lot in Ely there was a small flock of birds who were picking over the the resulting detritus on the ground, and when they could manage, actually hanging onto the grills and directly harvesting the carnage, ‘burp!’ What would the evolutionary outcomes be? Birds that can smell idling cars? Locusts who tunnel for 40 feet underground when they encounter traces of heavy hydrocarbons, with luck, getting to the other side.

Larger animals, the mammals are the worst, though, when encountered at any speed. Moose and elk torsos will behave something like the old paper-straw-through-the-raw-potato trick — inertial physics at its most fundamental. The front bumper of the car will take out the long spindly legs whilst the massive quarter-ton of body-meat, at just the right height to clear the hood, will simply stay where it is. But where it is relative to the speeding windshield means that it will simply obliterate anything in the front seats of the vehicle. At low speeds, this can mean a struggling, injured animal in the laps of struggling, injured humans, gah.

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

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

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

from Kevin Hamilton on the iDC list:

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

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

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

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

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

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