meander down to Roger and Neil’s place in Marrickville to observe the live Ethernet Orchestra network music collab that Roger is doing as a part of his thesis research. Neil whips up a delicious meal beforehand.

Mari invites me to join the Aether9 crew for a live improv video feed for Camp Pixelache @ Pixelache at the Kerava Art Museum in Kervo, Finland on a cold day in March 2010. I got up extra early and sent a live sunrise feed from Prescott, Arizona to the exhibition half-way ’round the world.

The following quick essay was for the last and final edition of the annual netarts awards from the Machida Museum in Tokyo:

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

### PROGRAMM (may change…) ###

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

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

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

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

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

up Coal Creek, on a trail that eventually would get to Mt. Gunnison, but that’s too far for the level of leisure sought after. so. a few miles in until it’s clear that any decent long view is really too far to go. a short performance Altering the Course of History at Ranger Creek amongst other diversions.

just away from the Björk and Sigur Rós náttúra event in Laugardalur. chilled to the bone from standing for the last five hours up stage front. damn Nikon battery went dead right upon arrival. (flickr shots) did some audio recording, but the wind was pretty blustery, so most of those samples will be useless, methinks. but maybe some short cuts or a remix piece. never met Loki and the others, he didn’t want to come over before the show started, so I left the house to catch Ghostigital with Finnbogi Pétursson doing an two hour ambient remix performance under the name that was okay. the whole event was so-so. Sigur Rós cranked through a 90-minute set with some interesting covers of previous work, and played well despite the chill, but frankly, the music seemed repetitive in a concert setting, compared to having an iTunes collection on shuffle play with a mix of experimental-slash-pop. there was a little electricity when Björk joined in one song as a drummer (a tentative one at that!). the smoke from the smoke machines just blew away. that’s what the energy felt like, it blew sideways away, towards the big LED screen where those not down front could see the artists close-up.

and the next day’s newspaper noted that the entire park where the concert was held was completely filled with trash — bottles, cans, garbage everywhere: so much for the consciousness-raising aspect of the concert. people still seem to believe in some kind of remote ‘nature’ out there somewhere. theoretical and not containing the Self as an extension. or not even an extension, but simply part of it. period. until there is a deep understanding of that, nothing will change.

the tmp-deluxe performance is over. not interesting or successful at all. off track, I should not have wasted my energy of pre-tension on it.

Auto-Destructive Art Machine Art Auto Creative Art

Each visible fact absolutely expresses its reality.

Certain machine produced forms are the most perfect forms of our period.

In the evenings some of the finest works of art produced now are dumped on the streets of Soho.

Auto creative art is art of change, growth movement.

Auto-destructive art and auto creative art aim at the integration of art with the advances of science and technology. The immediate objective is the creation, with the aid of computers, of works of art whose movements are programmed and include “self-regulation”. The spectator, by means of electronic devices can have a direct bearing on the action of these works.

Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation. — Gustave Metzger, 1961

Rinus makes some nice notes on the Amurikan evening at das kleine field recording festival last week in Kreuzberg.
(more …)

a performance evening at tmp.lab that Marie-Hélène and Jim set up. I do some ambient sound work, but otherwise focus on the remote situation, monitoring the stream and partners in Chile and Canada. the functionality of the ustream.tv platform (Flash- and browser-based) is quite good with controls on stream quality, multi-point collaboration, a built-in chat channel, archiving, and so on. it would have been a dream for past projects! (all this with the caveat that the stream image has the branded logo of ustream.tv on it, and the company is clearly an eventually-for-profit enterprise. that and while the archival and sharing possibilities are very well-developed, so far I have not determined if it is possible to download stand-alone flash media files from the archive. to play, one needs access to the database — all data including the chat texts reside in their server.

Derek comes by. hinting that the Regime text scared off one of the panel for the Sonic Architectures conference in July, so, I won’t be involved in that event. (thanks for trying, Derek!) and on a reciprocal note, Rasa definitely wants to include it in Spectropia. albeit with references (huh? it’s a speculative essay, but they are seeking peer-review status) and at approximately half the finished length (oh, this is really an impossible challenge to cope with). so, not sure if I want to go through the work on major revisions instead of continuing on with the other chapters. it’s a book chapter, I don’t want to re-write it. but having it published in Spectropia would be nice. they always do really beautiful and innovative design work. so…

migrating realities, day two. people going WAY over time, people reading papers. understandable a bit when they are second language speakers, but I thought at one point, why not have a native speaker reading it for them? (it would be more understandable and wouldn’t require their presence). my hand goes up, I’ll do it! annoying aspect of, again, the meta-structures of the encounter. as do dominate all social encounters. but tend to restrict and form the formal.

situation in Lithuania. empty spots, people leaving. an empty landscape (compared to Central Europe), poor standard of living, life expectancy, wages, employment. not good. but the emptiness is a nice thing. the politics of emigration.

Johannes Deutsch: WDR cultural spectacle, Mahler’s Second Symphony, gala concert … (Ars Electronica, Linz, big-ass spectacle). with live manipulation.

(and with that, I quit taking notes) <>

the last evening was nice. the conference panel in Savannah, which I managed to do from Hubertus’ flat, across the street from GdK, was not so good. my intervention was in poor comparison with the power-point presentations some of the other’s did. but I just couldn’t bring myself to engage with that hyper-limited platform. it is so ubiquitous in the pathway it prescribes on a presentation. clearly, though, Adobe Connect, the collaborative platform, is also so limited and restricted to particular forms of hyper-socialized human encounter. although limits can stimulate creativity if there is a resonance between the two people who are connecting via that pathway. it doesn’t resonate with my be-ing. I don’t use it again. f-2-f resonates. minimizing encounters mediated by cultural spectacle. focus as close to f-2-f as possible.

the performance, as with most performances is fringe, a good concentrated group, but small, the young folks wander off when the Vilnius student crew leaves. some people had come after reading on the site of my connection to Stan Brakhage. interesting conversations afterward. and a nice denouement, wandering back down to Potsdamerplatz and so on home. running on adrenaline.

today ends with a longish wander from Gdk to Pariser Platz in the reception center for the Akademie der Künste, thanks to Hubertus. wow!

Miga asked if I would participate in these two projects, in the first as redactor, in the second as a presenter and as a performance artist. should be interesting. especially as it is occurring at the same time as the conference in Savannah. of necessity, I will appear in Savannah virtually, and in person here in Berlin. that’s the easiest option!

we meet down at the Galerie der Künste to scope out the situation.

Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

The “Migrating Reality Project” organized between 04-05 April 2008 at the Galerie der Künste in Berlin is a live platform to discuss the mixing and remixing of art forms and digital data flows within the context of the current worldwide reality of migration.

From 01 March in cooperation with the online ‘zine balsas.cc for media and technology we are initiating a focused look at the migration between reality, media, technologies, art, spaces, disciplines, politics, and networks. Migration interests us in cultural and technological aspects as well as in aspects of the movement of different objects and subjects. Balsas.cc has been publishing online in Lithuanian and English from Vilnius, Lithuania since 2005. Every fourth month it announces a new topic and as of now “Migrating Reality” is open for your interpretation.

We invite the submission of texts, sounds, and visuals (photo, video, etc) which will help us to delve deeper into the subject during the Berlin project. Balsas.cc is stimulating interest in the generation and publishing of ideas online — the most important of which will be published in the printed catalog at the end of 2008. We are looking for not only pure texts but also in migrating formats, interdisciplinary discussions, interviews, and the meetings of artists and theoreticians. Please submit texts in English, German, and Lithuanian to balsas@vilma.cc. The rolling submission and publication period is from 01 March to 01 June.

Editorial Board: Vytautas Michelkevicius, Mindaugas Gapsevicius, Zilvinas Lilas and John Hopkins

Migrating Reality

The conference and exhibition Migrating Reality is organised by >top – Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V. in Berlin and KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien in Köln. It is also generously supported by the Embassy of Lithuania in Germany within the framework of the German-Baltic Year 2008.

The event focuses on the Baltic nation of Lithuania. In the last fifteen years, more than ten percent of Lithuania’s population has emigrated, among them numerous individuals engaged in the cultural sector. Others, while still living in Lithuania, are deeply engaged with the subject of migration. Selected individuals from both these groups will present their work at the conference and exhibition.

Migrating Reality deals specifically with the realities of migration and migrating realities that are independent of global structural changes and economic or cultural processes and are opening unique opportunities for creative exchange.

Electronic and digital cultures generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms to hybrid digital forms. Analogue products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are re-mixed and fused into new data sets.

The emergent processes of migration generate temporary autonomous zones where socio-political actions occur without the interference of formal control mechanisms. These zones and enclaves appear in physical space as well as in virtual space. By integrating these into available structures and temporarily interconnecting them, new trajectories and ideas are created.

Migration is reality and reality is migrating. This dialectic, appearing as a banal topic in everyday politico-economic debate, includes inarticulate issues which, by their fragmented nature have to be dealt with through creative multidisciplinary means. Only occasionally do components of the migrating global situation surface in the mass media, within individual mediums of expression, or in exhibitions as documentation and artwork. This is likely because dealing with the realities of migration in an explicitly European context means accepting the potential for conflict.

This trans-cultural German-Lithuanian event will take on the risk in highlighting certain fragments of the discourse. Participants will be invited to piece together aspects of this inexorable global mobility on the one hand and of retrograde power relations on the other.

so, art’s birthday is over and done with. for another year. number 1,000,045. broadcast from the basement, not really sure I had any audience anyway, another one of those events. I was using the waag.nl QuickTime server in Amsterdam, and for some reason it kept kicking me out every 9:59, so I have 6 chunks of the stream. can’t decide whether just to glue them together into one sixty minute file or keep the pieces as they are. hmmmm. will get that happening later.

I’d rather jump into the share.dj projects, though, at least there are other folks out there online to chat with. the arts birthday crowd is too dispersed and anarchic to manage a single meeting place. pity, though, it would have been nice to chat with some of them. maybe next year. (later) finally tack an edit of the fragments together — archive stream

no time to catch up with this stuff. in to the City to meet Josephine… we catch a show Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by the performance group 1927 at the PS122 theater/performance space. funky animations, gingerbread men, glittery eyes on stage, piano, singing, the Lodger, and the orange Imagine backpack with peace sign, while the show goes on …

over to Arweiler, an old town at the edges of the Eifel region west of Köln, for a visit with Volker’s old friends, Rolf Habel, Norbert Weise, and Angie. at an un-occupied modern office building with a single large empty floor, these folks have made something of a cultural scene, doing workshops with kids and having art events. so we go over and have a fun improvisational sonic performance session. I screen some videos, something I almost never do. in this case, they are 320×240 web versions which is even more exotic, but, what the hell?

not enough sleep after the dinner at Mokki with the Pixelache folks and the Prix Mobius people. finally caught up with Juhani who was on his way to Manchester today.

up early to meet Tapio at mbar for a short session about future polar/solar plans and dealing with future web-documentation and such.

then over to the gallery at noon to begin the final set-up. remote presence :: streaming life gets underway with preparations for the evening’s happening. all runs smoothly. except for the entire network going down about an hour before opening time. turns out to be one of those crazy glitches around a print job submitted to the wrong printer. it brought down everything for a tense 30 minutes before I could figure out what was happening. otherwise the transformation of the gallery space was completed some hours before the opening, and it looks very nice. did miss the final session of the conference with Lisa and Armin, as well as missing the last event of the Nordic VJ program. too busy.

many folks come to the opening — Antti, Bernice, Owen and his wife, Kaisu, Amos, and on. I was not so able to chat much, monitoring the outgoing streams, but the vibe was good. the sonic stream is an interesting mix, though the video input was sparse and not so electric. we would need another couple days to spruce up that medium & means. the ambient sound in the gallery is warm and party-like.

day two. Elénore catches her plane from Strasbourg, but gets tangled in security at Charles de Gaulle, missing her Helsinki flight and so I am left with a two-hour morning conference panel to anchor solo at the Goethe institute. presenting the context of the workshop and the paper that I contributed to the Pixelache publication. it goes well. although there are skeptics in the back row. not vocal, but disturbing the atmosphere by talking during much of the talk/discussion. they make no direct critique of the propositions nor contribute to the lively discussion. boring people who do that.

at another point, a bit later, someone who was to show up at placard in Kiasma isn’t able to come, so, with a little chunk of open time in my schedule I jump into the corner hot-seat and do a one-hour impromptu mix for a handful of headphone-donning folks. the sun streaming in the window, I have a good view of the Parliament building as a source of rock-solid and cubic inspiration.

Erik (aka Mr. Placard) runs the multichannel headphone mixers, the stream, and keeps an eye on the irc channel.

then, there’s Manu & Mukul along with Indigo, their young boy. hanging around waiting for the screening of their film Faceless in the Kiasma Theater.

Gary and I head out towards Balboa Park, but don’t actually make it. I wanted to get online for a couple hours of work, so he takes me to a cybercafe in North Park where the PowerBook exhibits it’s intransigent side — something that comes up about 2% of the time when connecting to a wifi node — it can see the node, says it’s connected, but refuses to actually establish a viable connection. grrrrr. the usual spate of re-starts, config changes, etc, to no avail. Gary puts up with my whining, then calls an acquaintance nearby, Christian Michaels, a professional photographer who happened to have a wifi network at his studio. we head south on Ray Street, a funky neighborhood to the beautiful studio built in a former sign-manufacturers space. he’s got a huge video projector with a 25×25-foot projection area at one end of the main studio. as we chat, turns out that he is hosting a share event in the evening! we have a good laugh that I am the share-nomad node. synchronicity! have lunch at a taqueria around the corner, and head back to spend the afternoon with Andrea and Ryan. then Gary comes by to fetch me for the evening happening. end up meeting Morgan Sully of share-San Diego and others. there is a screening of Metropolis, and I do a short VDMX improv. nice!

our arts birthday stream goes down smoothly, though I never did succeed in tapping into the actual European Broadcasting System satellite output feed of the event. August recorded the stream file on his Linux box.

Wes invites me to jump into what turned out to be an excellent evening — cycled down to fishbon (see their blog) — a weekly salon for an eclectic group of cultural activists in Santa Barbara. the evening starts with a demo of the Wii by a local teen, then a Kung Fu demo advertising the establishment of some special courses starting in the fishbon space. Wes and a friend do a MAX/jitter visual/sonic performance, and after that I do a very short 15-minute improv with VDMX.

and shortly, my talk in the IHC:

tech-no-madic pathways: networks and sonic energy

This talk, framed in observations from 20 years in the Cultural-Industry Sector of Europe and North America, will look at the energetic intersection of body and sound in the midst of chaotic social systems and restless movement. It will doubtfully answer the following questions among a thousand others: What does it mean to be a sound artist? What is a sustainable creative practice? What are we doing here? How did it end up this way? Afterward, let’s talk!

mes amis laboiteblanche and Carl.Y at (no)music are running their 10th 24-hour collaborative online sonic streaming project. I decided not to participate this time around for lack of technical infrastructure, but see there are some old faces like androvirus, Jon Eriksen, Bernhard Loibner, & Jerome Joy among 48 others — sure to be a long, interesting day! check it out!

(((NOMUSIC))) wishes to generate improbable duals and gatherings between pairs of participants during one hour at a time in a web audio performance. We make no storage because we think that Internet is a huge database which conveys already a great amount of dead information and we don?t want to pollute it further. We are thus in favor of instant access to a selective event. The mechanism of the programming is not automated; it is relayed manually for 24 hours without any interruption by laboiteblanche and Carl.Y., two real human routers who are at the service of continuous audio stream and who endure technical difficulties and give rapid formation on the technologies of streaming to all the participants.

dropping into eyebeam to meet Amanda, then back to KidsConnect, then to see Francisco Lopez, Stephan Moore, and Todd Merrell at the issue project room with Sophea.

the Month of Sundays live performance mix is done. Neil recorded it here. Kudos to he and Roger for facilitating/developing the visitorstudio performance platform.

time slips into the next several steps, with no spare to make reflexive jottings here. now in Catonsville, on a long-delayed visit with Steve, about to do a collab stream as part of his art@radio project which takes the form of a weekly streamed hour of sonic art works and a variety of other collab sonic streaming projects. it was previously airing on WMBC, the university student station, but with infrastructure improvements, Steve can now broadcast a stream from home via nicecast to a server maintained by the IRC

trondheim matchmaking cranks up on Friday morning. presentations begin a bit late. Lassi Tassijarvi talks about the demo scene, promoting his book on the history and philosophy of what is framed as a movement. gintas K. gives an overview of the Lithuanian sound art and experimental scene (as well as later doing a live sonic performance). Letizia Jaccheri talked about the trans-disciplinary IT/humanities program she is a facilitator for at NTNU. Kristin Bergaust talks about the Lofoten locative media project.

the placard session with Sophea goes okay, after a late start at Fred’s apartment with a few people in attendance. Juha put a page with some photos from the evening before, some recognized faces! nice vibe. now about to head to Shinji and Tarja’s log cabin in the green and leafy ‘burbs for a tour of the coast, a wood-fired sauna, and dinner.

anyware went down last night, but it was not a very satisfactory event despite the level of activity. I should not have joined in without a better understanding of the arrangements. the concept was not really clear, and I didn’t have access to enough of the program information until very late. and when I started delving around, I couldn’t get my questions answered in a forth-coming way. another one of those things where I will not appear in the program credits, the paper propaganda, or banner headlines. perfect deployment of tactical media in networks: avoid PR whenever possible. made it as far as to edit the wiki pages, though it ended up that my time-frame, being the most easterly of participants, except for someone in Tokyo, and having an early flight in the morning the next day, I couldn’t reasonably be online streaming when NYC prime-time hit.

was thinking this morning on the way into town on the early ferry that I function best when there is a clear understanding of the particular social framework within which a particular event will be operating. not that there is a need to actually operate inside that framework or even respect it, it just gives a more comfortable starting point. a bit like what happens when one has not been yet introduced to a stranger, and the specific opportunity for a self-made introduction passes, there are those awkward moments of disconnected collective dynamic. an unbalanced flywheel, hlaup, hlaup, hlaup. this principle inserts itself into many diverse situations. object making: knowing the film and developer (paper developer, paper, and enlarger); knowing the duration for a time-based medium; knowing the network architecture, connection speeds, firewall configurations, and available bandwidth. I tend to set those most base parameters, then leap into the project, feeling free to proceed intuitively and creatively.

these thoughts deserve more exploration, but I now have to read the article Open Content and Value Creation that was suggested in preparation for Kim’s workshop. seems like he is not ‘just a musician,’ but is into some good hard-core social criticism AND mapping out alternative ways of going.

Bjarne meets me at the hotel and we go to the new Atelier Nord offices to meet Atle. good to catch up with him. been a long time since being in Norway, and now he’s the Atelier Nord director.

evening performances at Blå alog and Next Life, around the corner from NOTAM, finally find Alexander, the festival-meister.

so, the conclusion: to Oslo for the weekend, thanks to PNEK, the organization I was set to become the director of a couple years ago, before I left Europe for the Colorado gig. and the schedule is such that I can do the streaming performance on Thursday evening with Milos in Prague and NYC — Beyond the Dream Syndicate which is part of the anyware project scenario. fly to Oslo on Friday morning and stay through until Sunday evening. excellent!

another dinner this evening, David and Maria will come out for this one, along with the local crew. it’s been slow getting the dinners thing happening, there are so many people that I would like to invite out, but the time seems to just race by. and the fact of not having a mobile phone, strange the impact of that contingency. and, the whole issue of making food. I realize now that what cooking skills I used to have since have slid by the wayside. still can whip out a brutal chili, proper Mexican when the right ingredients are available, decent spaghetti sauce, and of course the garlic pasta is a solid standby, but quite out of the loop on other improv standards, like anything Asian. still impressed with a conversation with nick many years ago where he described his quest to learn how to cook. not the surficial process of combining packages and cans of pseudo-food, but the real and necessarily deep praxis based on a dynamic understanding of the principles of combination of scratch sources along with a solid knowledge of raw materials.

logfile

after a brilliant sunny day yesterday, today is wet. (snowing!) good for washing the long winter accumulation of ground-up road and sidewalk gravel dust away. still in bed at 1000, reading, and writing. determined to flog away on thesis things, alternately, each minute, feeling empowered, and feeling lost. strange process. looking for a structural framework that makes sense, and somehow gives cues as to how to limit the scope of the discussion so it doesn’t get totally out of hand.

delve, ponder, organize, shuffle. and run across the field of Light

There is a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure Light of a representational discourse. — Michel Foucault

hmmmmm. woulda neva started this thing here, if I had read that nine years ago. or woulda tatooed meself from head to toe and enlisted in the merchant marine. wholly Madre de Dios! nada mas.

okay, ready and set up for the son(net) stream / performance. crossing fingers after setting up in my normal office space, and both ethernet jacks were dead. talk about stress, I ran to the other side of Gallery Augusta, the long low building that NIFCA uses for offices to check to see if the network connection was working in the main offices. weewsh. race back, rip everything down (two dv cams, two powerbooks with the accompanying 400 meters of cabling), drag it over to the office, set up. only 20 minutes before the sound check.

so it goes. performance over. after a testing connection earlier in the week with Josephine via irc, and then later she sends a nice video of the performance.

Manu sends an image from Tryptichon, with Amanda and I standing after the performance. a blue-Light special.

Foucault falls into my hands, though I am not particularly fond of the French School of philosophy, or, maybe to say it more concisely — I dislike the widespread invocation of his name. but, a book from the library is here, so I pick it up. immediately the term microphysics pops out from the intro. along with the observation by the editor that Foucault’s work never was successful in addressing the dynamic of social change and the autonomous nature of social action. ahah. my model does this explicitly! another spray of Lighter fluid on the fire kindling under my thesis. doubts remain, many, but as I bang words around, there seems some hope that this task gets done.

dinner last night with some of the other residents.

and then, the thesis issue keeps popping up.

Certainly, fantastic theories must not be arbitrarily invented contrary to the regularity of experience; nor must there be any departure from the harmony of Nature, since she tends to be simple and always consistent with herself. — Isaac Newton

cranking with Josephine in Amsterdam on the dress rehearsal for Son(net) Subterfuge which takes place tomorrow evening. a distributed dance/network happening, I’ll be supplying one of two incoming audio/video mixes that Jos will re-mix to be projected into the dance performance piece in Waag’s Theatrum Anatomicum. everything was stable last night. knuckles rasping to a bloody pulp on wood — to ensure the same tonight…

04 2004′, ’09 1771

pixelache finally finishes up with Tuomas’ and Mukul’s analog vs digital dual in the Kiasma Theater. enjoying a quiet morning without a particular agenda except for catching up with communications, especially answering Frieder’s pro-vocative recent email that is inspiring me to think and write toward my doctoral studies. heavy work, but ultimately feeling quite good to commit to paper (well, hard-drive) a concise framework for the explorations that may ultimately become the thesis. even if not, the exercise is extremely valuable.

ambienttv also performed their work TRiPTyCHoN, a complicated work-in-progress that is rooted in mapping human experience across a physical space. in this case, messages sent in from participants who were invited to make a walk between the Parliament steps and the steps of the cathedral, about a kilometer. along the walk, using a gps unit connected to a gprs-enabled palm with a custom interface, they were to write text messages. these messages were then sent to a server which recorded the location and the text into a database. I did a walk on Friday afternoon, slowly making my way, avoiding satellite shadows, and drifting through a space of emotional history. spontaneity was somewhat inhibited by the Lightweight but cumbersome physical interface. cold fingers. despite, I ended up drifting through parts of the history that was mapped across this very neighborhood through relationship. cafes, clubs, theaters, bars, corners, bus-stops, trams, shops all had a tangible memory overlay. poignant, as memory can often be about what has been lost. direct, as the triggers of place are very much real. silent, internal. Mukul called me after I had returned the device to Antony in the Kiasma Cafe, saying that it was a nice performance, the best one they got. He and David were on the island, actually neighbors in one of the nifca residency flats, they were monitoring reception of the ‘wander’ in real-time.

interesting experience. it was a measure of my ability to push through a technological interface, enabling some kind of flow-through. drawing focus, projecting energy, emotive force.

leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.

Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:

Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!”

It’s a bit strange, sitting on an office chair rescued from the dumpster parked on horrible-cheap 1980′s shag carpeting, pumping out an acoustic signal to a situated live urban-drinking audience halfway around the world. How to get the groove on? The inspiration of the moment has to be local and global at the same time. The senses of the body have to pick up every shred of remote input to judge the reaction, and with only those minuscule bits of evidence plow ahead with faith in connection. “I’m thinking about you!” Concentration, attention, focus are all keywords in the process of throwing embodied energies from here to there, across a network that is defined by thin wires snaking across thousands of kilometers. Connection is where the Self and the Other actually make energized contact, whether it is bridging 2 meters or 20,000 kilometers. neoscenes gets up early (GMT-7), studies the possibilities, brews some tea, maps out a course of action, and dives into the work-play.

First, gather stores of internal energy, then facilitate a material infrastructure, and then, with care-full intensity, send that energy out into the network.

The gathering process is critical. It starts with listening and looking while moving through life, an awareness of the surrounding fields of flow. Keeping the “be here now” above the need to re-produce history. Over time and space neoscenes accumulates a deep archive from this lived process of looking and listening, be-ing. These fragments are a very real energy bank of electromagnetic impulses waiting for the proper moment to be re-configured and revealed. It is from this archive that the remix arises. Serendipitous elements are facilitated in every performance — unstable real-time inputs that reflect the energy of the moment. With the proper concentration, these are combined with a flow from the archive, and whatever remote vibe is coming from the receivers at the other end. It is impossible to guess the result. Except in the deep space of psycho-spiritual anticipation.

Configuring the technological infrastructure is a time-intensive and energy consumptive process — and it’s important not to run out of energy doing that, else the actual performance suffers. Fighting the technology is an old story, not a very nice one, but it comes with this kind of work, it comes with any work involving technology (which raises the question, what exactly IS technology? Well, maybe it’s whatever means any human uses to reconfigure their internal energy in order to pass that energy along to an Other.) A balance between twiddling with tools and the ensuing energy loss must be precisely found. Simple = saving energy for the communicative act itself, not worshipping the binary coders. Creativity happens in unstable autonomous zones.

Finally, the performance. The flow, transmission. Point-to-point. Real time. Is the receiver open to the right frequency? Is the transmission to narrow? Where is the groove, especially when the sonic space is outside rhythm and rhyme. When it is full of Ghosts of the past. Speaking tongues gone by. From ether to ether to ether. And while passing through bodies again and again.

You had to be there. Revolution is a live praxis. But you can still be here now, in which case, you can pick up the vibe still ringing from radiostadt 1, through the trans-temporal ether.

a long day and the end of a long electric week that ends up behind the Bahnhof, downtown, underground, a throbbing d’n'b scene. with the informatik posse re:sorb doing the vj-ing. I’m the guest. groove. so many grooves grooved upon, grooved through, in the last decades. but it’s the same, different, each time, the focus, the concentration, the groove. it makes something happen. here and there. in a groove. to be taken very seriously. loud pictures and all.

and windows open on future praxis. embodied mind praxis the most important route.

the workshop is incredibly successful, thanks to the dedication and open-ness of the crew. again, a series of in-spiring tableau. free-wheeling conversations, the efficacy of the dialogue assignments are clearly demonstrated. optimal situation. Frieder’s facilitates a true trans-disciplinary program — experimental even though it’s at one of Germany’s most liberal universities — drawing an eclectic group of students who are able to care for themselves in a way that those embedded in the US system may no longer.

Akeno leads the last day of her Butoh lessons in Mika’s class. and serves home-made sushi and green tea. and then does a ten-minute performance. about the lotus and a small Buddha-child statue. about what is happening in the energized soul of the statue as the elemental powers of presence flow through it. the dreams of the world. amazing. I take a stone that Loki and I found in Colorado, one with a textured color that reminded me of anagama-fired ceramics. I give it to her after her performance. there was the stone that I gave to Simon Stockhausen that he made a composition from, and all the other stones that have found me for a time, and then found an Other to join for a time. and all those stones will be around long after we are all dead. this is an undocumented part of the sacrifice project

1.5 km swim. suddenly time compresses, and it is time to leave this place for a whole series of other places in the next four weeks. the swimming allows me to concentrate some energy for the movement. and at least it is a, oh hell, here this is, again, simply drowning in meaning and not allowing the words to say what is meant. the day barely ends, but is merely projected to the next, taxi to bus to train, the night train, ensemble. funny that I cannot bring myself to full-exposure in these pages, like I have to cover my words, my actions, my being. like the interstices become anti-regulatory and I merely forget what I have done. As moving into the way of the other. hanging log files in space with Carmin. preparing for the performance-event in Linz. trepidation and half-being.

early this morning Adrianne ran the Sayonara Diorama performance in New York; with a few students here, I connect up via CUSeeMe and we participate for the duration, maintaining a conversation with Tapio, Steve, Susanna, Ariel, and others connecting up from other locations around Europe and the US. until 0530 here when the performance finishes in NYC in the early evening there.

Waiting for my performance this evening. I have flashes of memory, and begin to see the monstrous gaps that now exist in the structure. Names gone, places forgotten, transits wiped from the table of chronology that is the super-structure of memory, the armature begins to deconstruct. Time folds into itself, events melt into meta-memory. And the gaps are themselves telling of another story. Studying the written history of the moment, one can recall more details, but the sensibility is limited… The performance is a collapsed fiasco. The worst I have made. It falters on ego and confusion and lack of clarity. How is it that I can make myself clear? Transparent being? I suppose this series is at an end. That over the past year of this cycle, all has became frozen and static. Rigid again. As a result of what? Unknown. But I have the suspicion that I do know some of the source.

logfile

The intro IRC test session was interesting. Willa showed up on her lunch break, Robbin, one of the PORT curators dropped in, and Terhi, from Helsinki appeared. There were some minor technical hiccups, but generally thing worked out. Josephine had some trouble, but it ended up that she was on the wrong network, and so couldn’t find us. I stay indoors all day. Why is it that I don’t want to go out. I should. But IceLand has made completely abhor being cold. Now, if it was 75F or hotter, I would be out. Shirt off, hat on. Sun screen on my poor over-exposed nose. But it is chilly out, and I can’t make myself go out. Whatever. I had dreams again last night, but they are lost in the brilliance of the sun rising up over Mingus Mountain across the valley. It is especially bright because of all the snow. Flagstaff, to the north got up to 40 inches of snow and is still held in that slow embrace. Now I watch the Simpsons. What am I doing this for? My back is trashed sitting in the lab, I don’t have a good chair in there, and I think that is the main problem with my back. And so it goes. Fragments from public television:

His body is strong, and he loves it
The man looks across the gray floor and sees the end of his life
He calls her and says Mom I love you very much
He thinks about the moment he stops breathing
I feel so Light I feel so fortunate
Introducing the survivors I see all these things
My work is that Dialogue
I have I don’t think I want to leave, I’m only 42-years-old
Where will I lay down? Who cares?
Thank you for saying that to me I’ll remember that when I am wracked with pain An interesting, vital dance that will say everything I have learned from the survivors
Diagnosis does that
Fear is the place that I can stand where I can say I am here I love the blues, I love to dance I fear pain I want to cross over I want to cross over But I’m too small — Bill T. Jones

Adrianne posts me this excerpt of a review she has written about Blast for January’s Intelligent Agent — it includes:

_John Hopkins_, photographer and writer, proves an active theorist/theory activist as an artist. By arranging one-to-one conversations between himself and others, he performs “talking” events all over the world. John sees one-to-one conversation as the only form of revolution left in the world. John provided a series of dinners; one with each blast5drama Editor. No agenda or conversational menu was presented – creating an empty space between one participant and the other which, in turn promotes a certain discomfort, accompanied by a strong urge to flail about demanding criteria. But one realizes in time that the experience exists in a state of being without identification tagging, allowing something both natural and definitive to happen between people via talking. Because he can bear the consequences of not imposing any structure or rationale on an event, John’s work, in a way, evokes the genre of outsider art.

I am grateful that she takes the time and energy to not only support my work, but to actively frame it in within the context of her prodigious and ongoing experience in the arts.

The final blast5drama convocation with Heather at Veselka for breakfast. She was recovered from whatever it was she had … Later hung out with Kevin for the afternoon, met with Lawren, a friend of hers, and Stefan for a bit then took my stuff to Stefan and Ellen’s place and packed everything in preparation for the flight to Phoenix tomorrow. Their next-door neighbors came over for dinner. Raining very hard all

day. But much warmer than in the past few days. Kevin comes down for a few hours in the evening. and the four of us sit and talk.

Dinner with Sean Bronzell. Indian food. Then went back to Kevin’s and he had just gotten back from Thanksgiving up in Westchester with friends. We called Stefan who was with Ellen, Lisa, and Jane at a nearby bar, so we met them for a few hours.

Dinner with Rick Dominguez. I meet him up at the headquarters of The Thing up on 26th Street on the far west side and then we walked back to Chelsea for dinner of noodle soup.

Dinner with Heather Wagner. She woke up this morning sick. We’ll have breakfast Sunday morning instead.

All that goes before forget. Too much time at a time is too much. That gives the pen time to note. I don’t see it but I hear it there behind me. Such is the silence. When the pen stops I go on. Sometimes it refuses. When it refuses I go on. Or it’s my voice too weak at times. The one that comes out of me. So much for the art and craft. — Samuel Beckett

I go over to Alec and Dana’s place in Brooklyn in the morning to work some. It is bitter cold today, and down there on the waterfront under the Manhattan Bridge it’s really frigid. I come back to Kevin’s and just write. On these pages and others … I am hoping that I will get some server space from Remo to use, as my site on iex.net is full, and I can’t afford to get any other space… Thanksgiving Day. (Give thanks and praises, so high, give thanks and praises…)

Dinner with Adrianne Wortzel. Long day today. I stopped by early to pick up the Noun portfolio that I have kept at Stefan and Ellen’s and delivered it to Kathy for her to have on hand at this new photography space. It does seem that the long doldrums in art photography sales is lifting. I am hoping to take advantage of that development. In two months the print sales business has eclipsed sales in her custom black&white photographic printing business! I then went right over to artnetweb to meet with Remo who is encouraging me to turn in a proposal for the internet exhibition called port: navigating digital culture coming up in February at the List Gallery (and online) at MIT that he is curating. The main premise of the exhibition is art-as-communication utilizing the possibilities of the net. Following that meeting, I went over to Alec’s place in Brooklyn. I first met Alec a few years back — we had a mutual friend that I had gone to grad school with, Chuck, who Alec had met when both of them were living in Denmark. Once, when Alec was passing through Iceland, he stayed at our place.

Dinner with Antoinette LaFarge. Little Poland, bean soup and bread. I picked up my ticket for Arizona and with that, spend my last money. Right after, I head up to Chelsea to see my old boss, Kathy Kennedy at PhotoWorks — the printer that I worked for in the mid-eighties. She is one of the two top custom black&white printers in the City. She has remodeled half of the lab space into a nice exhibition hall and is showing a number of photographers’ work including her own, although the space isn’t technically a gallery and she sees people interested in buying only by appointment.

Jordan Crandall had to cancel dinner with the message: I’m sorry to say that I can’t have dinner Monday–I have some urgent business I have to attend to then. so it goes.

Dinner with Marlena Corcoran. Pizza somewhere on Bleecker Street.

I sit and read a special Forbes supplement on the impact of technology on business and society. Most of the essays graze the mark, but none really dig into the root causes of the vague-and-growing discomfort that most people are feeling about the encroachment of technology into all aspects of contemporary being. Technology is merely another predestined manifestation of material life, or is it? There’s no proof of the pre-destination, the inevitability of development, nor the neutrality of it. The logical product of the development and ascension of the human intellect, ha. I talk to Adrianne today, and begin to make final arrangements about the Dinner series which begins on Sunday evening in and out of the Sandra Gering Gallery in Soho. I am relying on wit and presence to carry me through this series of performances … And trust that simply by doing this action will add a bit to the definition of what performance is (or, perhaps subtract from that same definition…). I rather dislike the word performance anyway. It seems to be more about theater than about real life, and I would seek to wrest those collective and hierarchical actions from the sphere of the spectacle and posit them back in the personal space.

Staying at Scott’s place for the last days here at Florida State University. He’s doing tech management for the Art Department, having just finished his MFA up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yesterday was heavily involved in discussions with students and faculty about my performance last Thursday. Passionate discussions to be sure. Because of a small glitch in communication between Paul and I, (and, the onerous ideological relationships that accompanied the performance space itself — the Art History lecture room) the dialogue which is the third component of the performance stopped after about ten minutes. The intensive hours of discussion that ensued in the days following amply illustrated to me a number of factors influencing the dialogue. The first was the power of the ideological structure enclosing the audience and space. (This would include the unfulfilled expectations, based in preconceptions and comfortable same-ness)… Anyway, the continuing discussion has been very stimulating and has opened up new areas of consideration for me. I have very mixed feelings about the performance, but the flux of energy that has enveloped it in the four times it has happened — once in Köln, once in Helsinki, once in Tampere, and now, in Tallahassee — has carried my thinking on a productive tour of my own pathway as well as providing deep insights into others’ attitudes, dreams, and beliefs.