last day spent at ISNM yesterday, apparently for ever. the school is in its final stage of collapse. although I wasn’t deeply involved in the establishment process, I did have some input when Hubertus, the founder, was framing the concept and curriculum back in, what, 1999, when he was in Kiel. or so. it’s clear why it’s collapsing in that the local politic is too conservative, the original vision of the school was not enough to counteract this. the few remaining students are frustrated and angry at the situation, as they probably should be. interesting group of students for my seminar. oral exams which were largely counter-productive to the learning process.

that’ll be Brandon.

Loreto Jaque, Mari-Klara Oja, Varvara Guljajeva, Steve Stein, Georges Belinga, Xiaojing Fan

conversations with Volker and others range across vast spaces of cultural, spiritual, personal, and social thought and practice. as per usual. great!

I’ve been checking brainstorms more than usual lately, jumping into discussions with Howard, Bryan, Andee and many others on the topic of academia, education, learning, teaching, students, and what a struggle it is to be involved with this sector of the techno-social system.

meet Wolfgang at the Pergamon and on to an exhibition at the Mitte Museum am Festungensgraben that some of his students participated on. Sensing the streets.

Farben, Töne, Gerüche – viele Sinneseindrücke, Stimmungen und Empfindungen werden beim Gang durch eine Strasse ausgelöst. Um diese sinnliche Wahrnehmung städtischer Räume geht es in der Ausstellung “Sensing the Street. Eine Strasse in Berlin”. Sie ist Ergebnis eines gemeinsamen Forschungs- und Ausstellungsprojekts des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin sowie dem UNI.K –UdK. Studio für Klangkunst und Klangforschung und dem Institut für Kunst im Kontext an der Universität der Künste Berlin. Am Beispiel von drei repräsentativ ausgewählten Strassen – Acker-, Adalbert- und Karl-Marx-Strasse – wird der Strassenraum multisensorisch, d.h. visuell, auditiv, olfaktorisch und taktil erfahrbar gemacht.

I meet and talk to Friederike, one of the students involved at some length, mainly encouraging her with the project — they have, indeed, made a very nice manifestation of research. and this is only the first of three absolutely different exhibitions in different venues entirely in the next two weeks. I would wish to be around for the other two. it was an opening, so that it was crowded and hot, but we got there earlier than the crowds and got to check out the especially provocative audio and video works.

Art is the image of a human being, This means that when a person is confronted with art, then they are in fact confronted with their own self, and so open their own eyes. And so it is the creative person who is addressed, their creativity, their freedom, their autonomy. And this is only possible using the concept of art, however, this concept must be made more comprehensive. You cannot and should not deal with this concept traditionally and say: that is what artists do, and that is what engineers do?. but you can get beyond the concept. And the only escape route is a more comprehensive concept of art that is anthropological and that is taken seriously: that everyone is an artists, and that every person has a creative core. — Joseph Beuys

Wolfgang and I continue our conversation a bit later at a cafe (after I meet Barbara, an old friend of Volker’s!), then I race back over to the Pergamon for a longer walk-through, then it’s back home to get some packing done. Roman is there and asks for some help editing a copy of the manifesto that he and Alexei are working on for Transmediale. then I crash for the early wake-up.

yet another partido de aniversário — Angelita, a friend of Fernanda’s, turns three-oh — a Latina evening. and drinking Fonte Imperial Cachaça that Fernanda imports, whuff! meeting some other ISNM students who are moving on to other things — get some other perspectives on the school and (perhaps) why it dies now. good conversation, and a pleasant wander home at a reasonable hour (for Berlin).

Of all these examples, the simplest but the most profound is the fact that it takes at least two somethings to create a difference. — Gregory Bateson

former student Sarah lets me reprint this article she wrote recently about her creative practice:

Sarah H. Chung :: http://www.myspace.com/sarahhdot

I am an experimental multimedia artist, a student, and a teacher based in Denver, Colorado, USA. My latest artistic pursuits are a combination of various mediums including still image, video, sound, sculpture, light, and performance. Most recently I have been collaborating with another female artist, Heidi Higginbottom, to choreograph audio/visual performances using found objects, homemade instruments, contact microphones, and film loops. We make homemade contact microphones out of easily attainable and affordable materials and use them to amplify the sound of the movement of objects. We have used objects ranging from dishware, tile, typewriters, music boxes, sewing machines, thumb pianos, toys, water, or any curious object we can get our hands on. Our intentions are not to make melodic pieces of “music,” but to isolate and arrange pure commonplace sounds that would normally be easily lost in the proceedings of everyday life. While these objects may be ordinary, they refer to a vast web of associations and marked memories. By arranging them, we create a new resonance in the relationships the objects and symbols have with one another. These relationships are meant to be memory cues that can be triggered by sensory experience. We are in the process of experimenting with different technologies and digital software to incorporating projections, audio delay, editing and looping.

As a studio art major I was largely focused on traditional forms of art such as painting, drawing, and photography. It was about six years ago that I began to pay more attention to the intricate and beguiling aspects of the digital art culture. I was introduced to it from digital art courses being taught by visiting professor, John Hopkins, who is a working artist and has taught and traveled internationally. Projects included collecting and arranging self-generated media and media filtered from outside sources. These included field recordings, videos, still images, and lines of text. I had not dealt with this kind of medium prior to this, so I approached it the same as I would painting and 35mm photography. While the navigation of new software in a limited time span was challenging, the results of the projects left me very intrigued and curious about digital culture. I believe that the success of these projects were due to the non-linear process of collecting media without a finished product as motivation. Filtering media (books, internet, video, music, sound clips, etc.) provides an intuitive process for choosing content. It becomes a dialogue that interacts with an individuals sensibilities and social views. Whether I am drawn to content or pure aesthetic, some aspect of the media strikes me, and I collect it.

With human interaction, technology can be used as a tool to express emotion and the individualized perspectives of human experience. Technology brings with it an efficiency that adds new time-lines within our culture. Ubiquitous media screens flash loaded images and sounds that are intended to influence feelings and opinions about products, services, and perspectives in government. These messages compete with each other and have conditioned us to receive information at an exponentially increasing rate. In a society saturated with advertising, I feel a responsibility to express and tap into more emotive, internalized feelings and memories, and to offer a situation for slowing down. This desire is what caused me to seek out the tools and skills that could connect me with the vast and accessible network I was experiencing.

I believe it is of utmost importance for individuals to be informed about technologies so that they may exercise basic democratic principles. I had been intimidated by technology before, but I felt that placing myself outside of the existence of it is like surrendering my own rights. Technology is propelled by human curiosity, but is often used as a system of control. History is constantly redefined based on documentation. Dominant historical theories are based on those with the power to document and expose others to their material. It is crucial to actively participate in the documentation process of our own history in process.

Links: (check them out!!)
http://www.neoscenes.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html
http://www.pierrebastien.com/
http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/
http://www.mutek.org/
http://www.haamu.com/launau
http://www.colleenplays.org/
http://www.skoltzkolgen.com/

uff, just when displacement seemed banished from thinking and imagination, here in Kiel to help strip all things from one apartment and install them in a house down the street. all in about 24 hours. not counting the packing up process which I missed while in Bremen. the actual move from the fourth-floor walk-up to the 1920′s mansion down the street in the affluent Düsternbrook neighborhood takes four hours. a crew of seven or eight college students and their boss, Leander (a multi-talented guy!), making the transition relatively painless.

for Steffi & Zorak, maybe a different story. beautiful new house, but much finishing work to be done, a flat on the second floor to be vacated in mid-November, a kitchen to be installed at the beginning of the next month, a cellar undergoing major repairs. and boxes. and boxes. and boxes. not to mention a sumptuous garden-intensive yard, garden house, garage, and all the accoutrements that a house brings. Fritz is the first to settle in. when all the world is new at one-year-old, a new house is merely another new-ness in days full of impressive living at the fore-front of be-ing.

lunch of goulash at Thomas’ place across the street. the street lined with early 20th century mansions. it has the vibe of the Glen Ridge neighborhood where Stefan and Ellen live. strange to get this similarity across this wide geo-social distance. although the BauMarkt and the Home Depot are also identical. the latter the same-ness of globalization. the former, the same-ness of local community.

Jumana Al Isawi, David Black, Martin Coors, Okwor Franklin, Martha Friederich, Johannes Huber, Gerrit Kaiser, Thanasis Kanakis, Katharina Kessler, Efi Kontogeorgou, Katja Langeland, Selin Özçelik, Jan Rosenbrock, Janos Schwellach, Arthur Sonsalla, Matthias Staniszewski, Philipp Steiner, Özlem Sulak, Paul Wichern, Kjen Wilkens, Alexander Kitov, Ivo Schüssler

finally and finally leaving this place with some finality. except to retrieve a few boxes of things sometime later in life. or so, depending on how life goes. or does not. Europe looming yet again. how many times have I made this leap across the big pond? 15, 20, 40, or so? Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Oslo, Copenhagen, Rome, Luxembourg, Stockholm. and on. airports. this time KLM to Schipol and on to Hamburg, taxi to DüppelStr in Kiel. and friends. that’s the best part. but it doesn’t solve the over-arching issue that hides in movement. that is, what to make of life, as it surely enters the latter half if not later.

no images, no text.

prescribed burns. burning forests with control. choking the air.

waiting for the whole wheat pasta to cook. while the daily feelings-of-displeasure arise. versus the feelings-of-pleasure. which arise under other circumstances than those which stimulate the feelings-of-displeasure. that this is the dialectic of being.

I first met my future ex-wife at a party in the German city of Cologne, or Köln as the locals spell it. it was in one of those neighborhoods in Köln that had a name, like Deutz or Uni-Zentrum, but I don’t remember the name. I was wearing a dark-maroon and black smoking jacket. In Germany a tuxedo is called a “smoking.” I wasn’t wearing a smoking, but people at the party were smoking. mostly cigarettes, because at that time, all university students in Germany were required to smoke cigarettes, it was part of the social contract. because so many were smoking cigarettes, you couldn’t say that lots of people were smoking hash as well. although they could have been, as hash was often mixed with tobacco in hand-rolled cigarettes that looked exactly like the regular hand-rolled cigarettes. nobody called them joints. I don’t remember much of the party. people were speaking mostly German, and I didn’t understand much if any German at that time. sometimes somebody would speak English, but mostly not. and as people got more and more altered, marginal English happened less and less. sometime that week, or that night, or on that trip to Europe, I lost that smoking. I was not happy about that. now I don’t ever buy such clothes, instead stay sheathed in the banal products of the banal culture of consumption. on sale.

Kly Yee, the guy in the COFA tuck shop — does wonders with cream on the top of the coffees that he serves. tried to Bluetooth some snaps he had made on his phone of different designs he had made, but wasn’t successful, my SIM was full. will try again later.

what about impressions of urban Sydney? lots of small shops — clothing, jewelry, food, cafes, small restaurants, and on every corner, upstairs the Hotel, downstairs the bar, pub, snookers hall, whatever, mostly quite upscale. clean, none of the sawdust-and-vomit-on-the-floor scene of ages past. though the design with tiling three-quarters up the walls for convenient hosing down remains. then there are the backpacker hotels, clubs, and adult entertainment joints. the occasional acupuncture and massage salons open to the sidewalk, feet protruding from behind curtained stalls and sweating Chinese hosts doing their thing. globalization is expressed in Kinkos, 7-11′s, MacDonalds, Western Union, and such, though these are a definite minority, with (apparently) non-franchise places dominant. there could very well be some mafia-type of franchising going on, but not to the casual observer. cosmopolitan. even critical locals said the Olympics were a good thing. blah blah blah…

with a climate similar to areas of Southern California, comparisons would be obvious, but in terms of general quality-of-life, Sydney would out-rank SoCal easily — especially as the population seems to enjoy the relaxed and low-key street-level cafe-scene, rather than the more obnoxious automobile-driven and anti-social SoCal mentality.

but, enough of banal and surficial observations. it does appear that there are significant levels of stress in the educational system. doing a brief presentation at a doctoral seminar yesterday initiated a number of conversations with some of the attendees. each detailed the particular struggle to get a quality education while dealing with personal economic issues. many students work, some full-time. the government has several funding schemes, but not all people can take advantage of then, given their individual situations. funding is time-limited, as has become the norm in Europe, and similarly, tuitions are rising.

but there seems to be a robust demographic pursuing doctoral degrees either part-time or full-time. good for them!

get one of these fantastic super-nice mikroPaliskunta reindeer t-shirts from the collaborative cultural project that Mari is working on. for women in sizes S – L and for men in sizes M – XXL. Colours: black-on-orange, orange-on-black, and orange-on-lime. raakaa ajoa means, liberally translated, raw driving … price only for you 10 euros (non-profit) plus postage. you can reach her at mkk ||at|| katastro ||dot|| fi.

Riikkaliina Turkki, Andrew Paterson, Gun Holmström, Sirpa Jokinen, Petri Kaverma, Sabrina Harri, Tomi Humalisto, Alex Berry, Christiaan Cruz, Mats Eriksson, Michael Glen, Eija Makivuoti, Mari Keski-Korsu

a long day yesterday riding the rails from Kiel to Aachen, back into familiar spaces again there. a really nice but far too short visit with Günter, Christina, and Manon — who is now as tall as her mother! last time I saw her she was just a little child, maybe eight years ago?! lovely child. so, hanging out talking about books, art, life, music, so nice to re-connect after all this time.

re-creating the passage of time. young children grow up.

a leisurely breakfast with Christina, and she then drove me to the Hauptbahnhof for my train through Liege and on to Brussels Midi, a short walk to the hotel, where Dirk has faxed a three-day plan of meetings with a variety of artists, artist’s collectives, and educators working in that fuzzy space of new media. my room is not ready, so I stash my bag and start wandering towards the first agenda item: a round-table (albeit around a rectangular table) with two of the principles of LA[bau] — a laboratory for architecture and urbanism — Manuel Abendroth and Els Vermang.

a nice lunch (those dang baguette-sandwiches are always so crunchy that they cut the skin in my mouth at first, I forget to remember this and take care, flipping the sandwich over so that the smoother side of the baguette is up). but mmmm. on the way to lunch, however, a strange event. walking towards a building under reconstruction, a scaffolding is being set up, maybe four stories high at the moment. I catch the eye of a guy who is stacking parts to be hauled up on a cable winch, nothing unusual there. I am looking at the structure which looks somehow unstable. I decide to walk off the sidewalk instead of under the structure. I am looking up at the structure, calculating it’s condition. a pass it by, return to the sidewalk and hear a clang, then a meter in front of me a wrench, a heavy one, smashes to the ground. there is a group of 4 guys walking towards me about the same distance from the landing point as I am. faugh! how weird is that. I had the prior intuition something was wrong with the situation, and I can’t really say that the slight detour I made brought me closer or further away from my head intersecting with this tool which must have fallen from around 15 meters up. far enough up that is could easily have killed me or those other people.

so the rest of the day, I am watching things more carefully, but what difference does it make? if you look one way, you miss what is coming the other.

at any rate, they outlined their program and a couple of the main projects they have undertaking recently. tough to cross over my lack of background in architecture — it has always been a distant field of interest, but seldom the opportunity to crack the conceptual world that it is embedded in. the one time jumping in on a final critique with some of EJ’s students at Boulder was interesting — along with a surficial awareness of functionality in housing design — but does not provide any preparation for the contemporary conceptual spaces of inquiry. it does seem that innovative, and especially decorative design elements in architecture are about something. but the connection between the about-ness and what I would understand as the reason for the existence of architecture is not clear to me. but this is perhaps my own weakness combined with a deep frustration at the frequent appearance of non-functional design in built structures and in objects, for that matter.

at any rate, their work shows the presence of superior economic capital, and the consequent high production values which is nice. professional. sleek, designer, urban.

been in the desert too long, or, not long enough.

Crabbit
(cra-bit) dialect, chiefly Scot. – adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning]. (often used in ‘ken this, yer a crabbit get, so ye are’). n. by their nature or temperament conveys an aura of irritability. — drink coaster at Christina & Günter’s place

crossing another path with sharedj people — Martin and Jürgen of the Bremen crew. turns out Jürgen participated in difusion 2002 using iVisit — he was doing some crazy things with the video image he was sending, and I remember that the students were really intrigued with his mysterious presence…

but the first time in a smoky German bar is too much for me. horrible environment. the Germans are on the verge of passing a law to cut off smoking in public places as have other European states have already passed — Norway, Ireland, Italy, France. it’s about time. head back to Frieder & Susi’s place.

wow, and I made all of $0.69 on Amazon referrals last month from my reading list of books and other media that has crossed my radar lately. I can retire now.

earlier, breakfast at Kuku, and a stop by the Kunsthalle, Frieder gets me in free (as Icelandic/Finnish artist union member) to look at the work of Annamaria and Marzio Sala. interesting, but not compelling. one video installation is absolutely juvenile and would not stand in a bachelors-level class. strange. hanging out in the permanent John Cage sonic installation work Essay.

Ethan sends this nice piece he worked on with Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche up in Halifax. nice meditation.

long day! Adriene and I finally f2f before her morning class which I jumped into. traffic made our anticipated leisurely breakfast turn into a quick stop at the local Whole Foods for a turkey wrap and on direct to class. interesting group of students. I do not make a roll listing as per usual, twice now, I’ve missed that opportunity. one of the students, Tara, graciously takes me on a walking tour of campus, and a long lunch conversation.

and finally Gary and I rendezvous after 11 years passed. last time was in Baltimore WAY back or so. this time in front of the UCSD Geisel Library, hanging.

dinner with Adriene at the house of Michael Krichner and Carmen Cucina — a reception for a candidate for curator of the UCSD Art Gallery. finally met Jordan along with the curator from the SDSU Art Gallery who invited me to an artist’s talk tomorrow for the exhibition John Q. Public & Citizen Jane: Private Americans in the Political Domain.

Art, at its social core, is the trace of an engaged pathway. A pathway that conducts the circulation and exchange of creative human energies as they are attenuated by a vast range of mediative (materialized) carriers. The artist is that person who opens and offers the Self in a directed seeking: to engage in a dialogue of human energies with an Other. Finding a proper pathway for those energies: transmitting: simultaneously receiving the expressions of the Other, this is the moving act of creativity. Creativity is the charged flow of energies between and through the Self and the Other over relative spaces and times.

These two proto-definitions are the basis of my art and teaching praxis.

reading Stephen Brookfield’s two recent books on teaching — The Skillful Teacher, On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom and The Power of Critical Theory, Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching along with Parker Palmer’s essays on education as a spiritual journey, To Know As We Are Known. might as well be girding for the rest of a career in education while job hunting. weak areas include the feedback process, especially the short-term-feedback processes to gauge how students are coping with the course at different levels. this doesn’t apply to the 2-week intensive workshops which have a constant level of dynamic feedback running the entire time. but the idea of having two online forum log-in ID’s for each student — one an assigned user ID (or self-selected user name) and the second being anonymously assigned (pull the user/password slip out of a hat at the beginning of the course) and used for posting reactions to the class situation. this can include both posed questions from myself as well as ad hoc discussions on subject material, procedures, processes, expectations, and outcomes.

part of me likes this idea, while part of me sees it as just another way of artificially coping with the chasm that has evolved over the years where the teacher and student start off their relationship not from a position of mutual trust, but of adversarial suspicion and imbalance. this largely because of the (de)formative pressures of the social system that sees education as a key element in the hegemonic production of consumables. nothing more. many now see ‘higher’ education as a mechanistic successor of primary education — where primary education was the social mechanism needed to produce people literate enough to perform as a worker in the industrial ‘revolution;’ higher education merely fills the role of producing ‘line’ workers for the information ‘revolution.’ uff!

Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness. — bell hooks

former student of mine, Eija Mäkivuoti, announces an exhibition of her photographic work titled As Everyone Else at Gallery K in Helsinki. the work is about the everyday life of disabled children at the Tornionseutu school. it also includes Polaroid photographs by the children themselves. there is a selection of these images and other photographic work by Eija at her web space.

so on. scanning all sorts of crap into the archive so I can continue to liquidate hard-copy. thinking about shopping. thinking about film-based photography, thinking about digital photography, thinking about video, thinking about cars, thinking about moving. thinking about stopping, thinking about flying, thinking about sitting. thoughts over done on being stationary. thoughts about work. what is possible, what is not. maybe all is still possible. doesn’t look like that, except when one runs into one of those supremely un-qualified jerks making money for nothing (and the chicks fer free). so, everything is still possible.

Sarah decides to apply to KHIB, hope that goes well. I send out information to the network to aid in the process. networking.

former student, Michael Phipps keeps up on his painting and techno-topian musings at the with-style network and blog. this is an image of a recent piece — Butterfly Cybernetic.

body morphology. body symmetry. of course, beauty is (scientifically) proven to be related to facial and body symmetry among other parameters of length, size, girth, curves, color, and other transitory features that lay upon us in the quick passing ether to being to ether. and there is dysmorphophobia, the fear of body shape being somehow wrong. imperfect. hmm.

spend the evening trashing a 3-inch high pile of class evaluations from my CU teaching days. noting both positive and negative comments in all the dross and three-decimal-place statistical analysis of the results. but feeling quite good about the quite good ratings overall. scanning selected records. uff! why carry it around: why not conflagurate? makes a nice fire to heat the house at least. along with those evaluations, papers a bit more problematic to dispose of — the daily role sheets — aka, Question of the Day (as a .pdf page). a literal project in network facilitation. a form where one student is chosen at random every day to pose the question of the day at the top of the page, and the rest of the class has to write in their name, and along with that, in a box, an answer to the question of the day. these played a very interesting role in the class — they would generally circulate during the entire 3-hour studio class period, between filling out the questions, and subsequent interest in the answers. sometimes they got quite elaborate (What was your most recent and vivid dream?), sometimes basic (what’s your favorite breakfast food?). they were always filled out religiously with an attention to detail and careful thought on everyone’s part — interesting fallout from such a basic exercise. and they served that boring function to keep attendance records. ugh. I often thought that I should somehow make this an interactive web project — for someone to transcribe the answers into a large grid that would be a record of the grouping of the class, but there never seemed to be the time to do it. so, a transitory, functional communications tool which broke down the barriers between peers. and a snapshot of the attentions of young college students in Amurika at the dawn of the millennium. so I heat the room for a couple hours.

to the IDC list

so, from here on forward (and backward), recognizing that there is plenty of material to be culled from the email archive and the daily outgoing rush of words to generate relevant content here. as I run into the issue of editing — why not put material here that is more immediate, more intense, more reflexive of the trajectory of life in this incarnation? one old memory popped up — that of a small scandal that I precipitated when I was in my last year of teaching at the Icelandic Academy in 1995. with a group of students, I was running a collaborative email- and fax-based project with a couple other schools and as I had also built the first, very primitive, web site for the school, I decided to put some form of documentation of the collaboration up as well. I stupidly put transcripts of emails that I and the students exchanged with the other schools. at the time there was a part-time video teacher at the academy who was using the computer lab repeatedly without asking me, for his own projects. I objected that unless he clear things with me, I would rather that he not use the machines during the day for his own things. somewhere in an email I mentioned this to one of the other schools, complaining about this guy. and somehow he ended up reading it (doh, I did put it on the nascent web) and complaining to the Rector. I was leaving the school anyway, but it upset some of the other teachers who were already ticked about the amount of money that I lobbied for — to build up the photo/video/computer lab. anyway, sotto voce will become entries culled from email. they will only be scandalous for me.

sotto voce: I’m pretty slow on the reply — just now coming out from under what seemed to be a large rock. I can walk (slowly), sit, drive now without the brace I wore until last week. it feels weird to be without it — like a shell-less turtle. & still months before I hope to get back to full strength. it’s been strange though. everything from the hi–tech repair job, the interruption to ‘real life,’ and dealing with a very material body…

the [microsound] list is discussing what some judge to be a severe lack of quality among those who write reviews of electronic art endeavors (in this case, sonic/music things), following are some comments:

sotto voce: I think there are several ways to go with the concept of reviewing (speaking as someone who once had a music column AGES ago in my university paper — mostly to get back-stage concert passes with the local promoter in Denver)… :-\\

– reviewing is a process of reducing the energy of a performance into a linguistic re-presentation for others to read and presumably ‘get something’ of the original performance.

– the principle behind this is to take evolutionary advantage of the experience of an Other in order to optimize Self-survival. relying on Other’s eyes and ears so as not to become hopelessly obsolete or even lunch meat. to remain viable in a social system one is forced more-or-less to heed this second-hand info as a part of socialization.

– the best review is “you had to be there”!

– a better review is made by someone who has the linguistic skill to take in the energy of the performance and translate the energy into a piece of text — maybe or maybe not directly relating to the performance itself.

– the worst review lists the equipment (or otherwise frets about the materialist situation) or lists the song titles and how much applause there was or how the performer was dressed, or makes up possible ‘meaning’ of the performance, etc, ad infinitum, ad nauseum…

– personally, I have come to ‘judge’ (and sometimes reduce to text) my own enjoyment of a performance simply by noting (by keeping a few objective neurons available), noting where my mind drifts to as the performance proceeds. a lousy performance is when I am thinking of money troubles or how much my back aches because of the crappy seating. inspiration is the act of energy entering the body — energizing it for whatever activity follows.

– I know I can spin a decent text ‘about’ a performance of any kind or nature if it inspired me. to be inspired, I have to remain open to the widest possible set of expressions.

– some people who review things on a regular basis often attain a “following” of people who like the same things the reviewer likes. this is a process of mass socialization which can be detrimental to diversity of tastes (especially when it is on the scale of the NYTimes, etc etc…) in direct opposition to this, I believe it is more important to nurture idiosyncrasy — I suggest to my students, when I am playing some ‘difficult’ selections (Andrew MacKenzie’s / Hafler Trio work comes immediately to mind), I ask them to make their own judgment about whether they are inspired by a work. self-confident judgment combined with open-ness is a good starting combination to approach art expressions that seem at first difficult and hard to absorb.

– of course, inspiration can be a tough thing to pinpoint in the moment, and might well only come later in time from ‘difficult’ performances. other people simply close off the possibility of liking something based on preconceived stereotyping, never allowing the possibility that a strange form of expression might be a possible source of inspiration — “I don’t like _________” (fill in the blank with any genre or stereotype).

– a personal motto is “I’ll do (listen to, watch, try, etc!) anything twice, three times if I like it” — just to make sure I don’t miss something inspiring.

– reflecting on trusting someone else’s judgment, I have experienced several moments when attending an event with someone who is experienced in a particular genre or form of creation, I have, through trusting that individual, come to enjoy and understand the work, when as an individual I might not take the time and focused intensity to break through an initial dislike. (doesn’t dislike of a material typology of expression arise simply from fear of the unknown?)

(happened to watch Scorcese’s Bob Dylan film last night — it was interesting to see documented the absolute revulsion and contempt that the folk circle — both musicians, critics, and audiences globally — had for Dylan when he started his “sell-out” collaborations with The Band. talk about close minded public! goes the same for the actor Don Adams who died this week — he was lamenting that the strength of his character in Get Smart (i.e., how set people became on him in that character) was such that it precluded ANY gainful acting after that sitcom went off the air after 4 seasons. it was such that the social system did reward him with substantial royalties from reruns, but he basically never had other acting jobs again…)

so, much of the time, critics ‘play’ to an audience that they have to keep — imagine a critic in the LA Times who was constantly giving impassioned reviews of things that were publicly reviled. it would be a contradiction of terms. one could conclude that a critic is a necessary (though evil;-) function that glues a large social system together by ensuring at least some unified (or shared) values.

deciding last night not to tell the students when to arrive for morning start-up for the workshop, so they are up until 0300 or so, keeping me in uneasy slumber, Marcus as well, who ended up staying over in the dorms too. so they are nowhere in sight in the morning. after a hearty oatmeal breakfast which Marcus says is the highLight of his impromptu visit to Beroun so far, we wander out into the landscape to shoot some. ending up on a intrusive gabbro sill, standing high above the railroad station. later, all but two of the students leave for Prague, and later in the afternoon, Milos comes back from Prague, mostly for a meeting with students of the Technical University who are working on some media projects. it is disappointing that this workshop imploded. but I think it is due to the extreme fragmentation and lack of focused attention in the first two days.

later in the afternoon Dr. Cílek, the Director of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology pays us a visit and delivers a fascinating talk that wove the human historical, mystical, and mythological elements of the Bohemian Karst region around Beroun with the underlying geology and speleology. we were supposed to go on a day-trip with him tomorrow, but Milos had to cancel it because of a lack of interest of the students. a real shame. it was a stretching excitement to meet someone from a geological pursuit who also shared a profound interest in phenomenal life and be-ing with a clear trans-disciplinary role to re-form traditional thinking models. I would hope for another opportunity to make a tour with him. googling Silurian Devonian Beroun karst trilobite tells much about the potentials! especially the French-Czech paleontologist Joachim Barrande who generated a yet-unparalleled series of comparative studies under the title “The Silurian System of the Center of Bohemia.”

All told, the complete “Systême silurien du centre de la Bohême,” published between the years 1852-1911, consists of eight volumes in 29 tomes in quarto, 8224 pages of text and 1606 lithographic plates. It contains descriptions and figures of 4565 species, with a few exceptions all coming from the Lower Paleozoic marine beds of Bohemia.

dinner later with Milos, Boyana, and Victor at the pizzeria, after visiting a photo exhibition installed in the Lower (Prague) Gate tower of the Beroun city fortifications. a view over what once was a drawbridge. it is too damn cold for walking around.

second day of the workshop. hard to read the situation. everyone is in an unfamiliar environment. the ambiance in the place is calm. but hard to decode. we are strangers. landing from one planet to another. it is unusual for me to be sharing the direction of the workshop, or at least trying to. there is an internal process of deference, but that clearly is not collaboration, I need to retune myself. it is hard for me to find a balance because of this. on my part. waiting for the students to make the 0900 morning start request to appear after losing most of the first day to stragglers who arrived late into the evening. there is a lack of awareness of the meta-structural social dynamics that would facilitate a greater intensity. but this is the normal condition. intuitive actualization is possible, but going through the gymnastics of cognitive understanding first seems the only way to bring back the operational authenticity of that intuition. either that or just get drunk with them all night, see who is the last standing.

I think what we need is critical consciousness. Critical consciousness towards the entire construct of technology. Technology is not neutral, it’s not God-given, it doesn’t come from the burning bush, it doesn’t emerge from the world of antimatter. It’s something that human society makes. So all of human society is inscribed in the machine in this sense – and then the machine becomes a force to reinscribe something on society. And you can have the negative aspect of this, and you can be truly creative – why not. I’m absolutely not denying anyone’s creativity. All I’m asking for, for myself, is critical consciousness about technology. — Hakim Bey

no record… :-(

Milos and I , along with all of two students, a Czech and a German, catch the 1000 train to Beroun, up the Berounka River about 50 minutes. already this slacking show of the other 9 confirmed participants bodes ill. in the presentation yesterday, there are some glimmers of interest, but also, afterward, a student in the typical Goth black leather trench coat walks up, gets in my face, and aggressively demands what I will provide for him (later determined to be an Estonian), I turn him away when I try to briefly review the nature of an evolving distributed system, that it works only when everybody puts their attention in. he snorts and stalks off. thank god for that.

a few of the rest trickle in over the next 8 hours, but I do not want to start until I have the undivided attention of a more-or-less stable constellation of people. nothing more disturbing for concentrated focus than having to repeat the same thing over and over.

workshop ends with the thunderous rabbling-rumble of loud knuckles on desktops. Frieder later remarks on the enthusiasm judged from the volume that reached his office. I tell the participants that I have to record this phenomena sometime as it is … different … a definite culture-specific way of applause-feedback-energy! starting with a mid-morning breakfast, I was surprised that the discussion continues un-abated right up to 1600 on the last day. last year there was an exhausted fizzle after the Thursday happening, so that Friday was a few closing comments and some de-briefing, a collective lunch at one long table in the Mensa, and then departures. matter of fact, I think I took an evening train to Kiel to C & S’s place to catch a plane to Helsinki a day or so later. cycles. orbits, gravity. this year, an equivalent level of energy, different forms. students here desirous of ideas and relevant pathways.

Björn Stolper, Daniel Möhlmann, Julia Heinbockel, Katrin Warda, Joost van Eupen, Silke Gennies, Zlatena Koceva, Nicole Herzlieb, Susan Traeber, Nicolas Pauluhn, Christopher Schultz, Götz Kessemeier, Astrid Mochtarram, Frank Jesgarz, Christian Schrumpf, Ramona Simon, Hashim Chunpir, Oliver Graf, Marcos Martinez, Atike Pekel, Stefan Krämer

the box proceeds as though it has found a unique energy source in the configuration of the students and the situation. although our stream is lamed by a lack of time for preparing content, the local energy is considerable.

advice from Frieder:

Students often ask:
What should I consider when doing research?

Here are four important advices.

Give a very precise formulation of the problem. Improve it over and over again.
Know how others have treated the same problem.
When you encounter difficulties, find out where they come from.
Make explicit what your contribution to science progress will be.
– Frieder Nake

just as I had observed and inferred from bits of data that I have seen over the past few years. that the US is in serious crisis regarding the precipitous drop in the numbers of creative talent entering the country. graduate students are not turning up in droves as they used to, populating all the hard-core science, business, and technology programs at the best US universities. they are staying home or going to European, Asian, and other societies which are not so repressive and paranoid as the neoconservative fascists in power now in the US. so, reading the article “America’s Looming Creativity Crisis,” in the Harvard Business Review that enumerates the extremity of the situation only confirms my observations. empire continues its decline with the deluded self-knowledge of ascending to the millennial realms of power and righteous glory. ideological and religious dogmas constricting scientific research along with repressive and exclusionary visa and immigration practices lead the way to a rapid decline in creative capital that was once a primary mechanism in US global hegemony. in the metric introduced in the article, the Global Creative Class Index, the US already ranks behind 11 other countries, including Iceland — a statistic that somehow hasn’t reached Icelandic eyes yet, for it is sure to make front-page headlines “Icelanders More Creative Than Americans” when it does.

workshop starts. dinner with Trine. apparently the student situation at KiT is the same as before. students too ‘busy’ to attend a workshop. given that this is the only place where this has happened — twice in 4 years — I just don’t understand it. two students showed up for the first day. one of them a Spanish exchange student. and two other people from the ‘outside.’ thank goodness. else the trip ends up not really being worth it. though it’s been great meeting some new and old acquaintances in the meantime. while hardly earning my keep. such an extreme difference in the students between here and Bremen, for example, the ones here simply absent. don’t get why they are in school except for the social infrastructural value purely. which has nothing to do with art, only commerce. if they only knew. of course, there could be over-arching infrastructural issues affecting their presence. the effect that the faculty has on the long-term base emotional confidence of the students can be immense, though very hard to quantify. but absent teachers make absent students. Trondheim suffers from the drain that all the Nordic countries experience — that of having a single dominant city that is the seat of fiscal, political, and cultural power. all other cities are second-rate. so, the milieu outside urban Oslo (Stockholm, Helsinki, and Reykjavík, Copenhagen, among other small countries) is always stretched and even under threat of not remaining viable in extreme instances.

fall sweeps across the land, from the north. thought it would take a couple weeks, but all the trees are changing, the poplars (Populus alba) as pungent as ever when the air is still, yellowing from the inner leaves, outward to branch ends. the rowans (reynivithur, Sorbus aucuparia) berries hanging in heavy clusters, walking under them, invisible birds (wrens or músarrindil in Icelandic, Troglodytes troglodytes and redwings or skógarthröstur, Turdus iliacus) chatter incessantly somewhere above. only in the rowans. but it doesn’t seem that they are celebrating the berries, more, some nervous discussion about the approaching winter. nah, just noise of be-ing and living in the moment. the higher mountains far to the north, the ones that gate the fjord into the Arctic have now a heavy cap of snow. they do have more-or-less limited permanent snowfields, but the new snow completely covers the tops. in mid-winter, everything is covered from top to sea level. the sides of the fjord, which in the clear air seem much more vertical than they really are, broad and stepped, tinged with alizarin, rust, vermilion, and gold where the miniature Arctic willow and other small bushes are spectrum-shifting. musing on the dip of the Tertiary flood basalts that make up the entirety of this area to a depth of 3000 meters. as a mass, they dip slightly, perhaps 5 degrees towards the center of the island, rising layer on layer towards the sea on the flanks of the fjord. from adiabatic depression of the center of the island persisting from more extensive Ice Age glaciation perhaps? or something else? this feature complicated by the fact that the island underlain by abnormally buoyant magmatic activity, conjectured to be a mantle plume, though this particular concept is presently under contentious revision. the whole island, approximately the size of the US state of Georgia (100,000 km2), is an igneous petrologists and vulcanologists wet-dream (albeit a cold one!) — they focus on vesicles, picrites, and intrusives. of course, foreign glaciologists and their graduate students are always boondoggling here in the summers with expensive field work as well.

the national teacher’s union has gone on strike, closing all elementary and middle schools in the entire country. clearly recall, in the months preceding my ‘official’ departure from this country in 1995, there was a 6-week long strike of all teachers across the country including we who were working at what is now the National Academy. the only thing that the Prime Minister had to say was that he was happy that the government was saving so much money in with-held pay for the teachers. millions a day. yippee! in some quarters he’s called “little Hitler” for his stature and his contemptuous and power-mongering behavior. I’m not really following the politic so much while I am here, too many other things to deal with. but it seems this is a another surfacing of what I considered a very backward attitude about education in Iceland generally. already the system is weighed down by the Scandic/Lutheran socialist mentality that everyone should be the same, so that students with a special talents, skills, and interests are in no way encouraged to develop those areas, rather they are discouraged into conforming with the average. successful and talented people more often than not leave the country — this in contrast to the general US situation of regimented hyper-competition which is equally warping.

still pondering the text about Robert Irwin, whose guest-lecture I missed, out of busy-ness, when I was teaching at CU in 2003. had I been more familiar with his work I would have definitely been there. happened on a copy of Lawrence Weschler’s book on Irwin, “Seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees” sitting on a shelf at the residency flat.

equinox, but no balance here.

Alvydas is first up, off to the sea to swim. after another late night. other teachers arrive to join the group, now around eight of them, with as many students. school doesn’t start for another four weeks at the beginning of September, so folks are intent on enjoying some holiday time though this is technically an official workshop for the students who need the credit. very relaxed.

head to Vilnius on the only daily direct bus this afternoon. can’t wait until Friday as I would arrive too late to prepare for the stream to Steve for kunstradio. have to arrange to meet the keeper of the Academy flat where I will stay until I leave on Sunday. good deal, saving money seems to always be a victory against the inevitable drain on resources that this year has been, though it’s been in the black so far despite only six weeks of teaching with another two yet ahead in Norway.

just two weeks since leaving the US, so much activity. constant. looking forward to some quiet time in Akureyri swimming everyday again.

bus ride from Nida to Kleipeda and on to Vilnius where I have to orient and walk to the center of the old town, and then call Konstis, the host of the guest teachers flat at the Academy. no hitches, at short notice he’s able to get bed linen and keys. so, thanks to Alvydas, I have a nice place to stay in the arty side of the old town. always a relief to have a roof, a locked door and a warm bed. back in Vilnius for another 56 hours, nursing an aching back which flared up the moment I sat in the bus seat for some reason. very intense sciatica that I hope will go away by morning. I’ll stretch then. long day tomorrow, until at least 0030 on Saturday morning with the art@radio / kunstradio stream. here we go Steve!

sonorous night of outside vodka partyers and raucous snoring. sharing simple spaces with others. back in a situation where 99 words in 100 are incomprehensible. so, the exhausting state of contextualizing everything, with little-to-no results. recalls first visits in Iceland and Finland. where now are comfortable hearing meanings in those places, here is that discomfort. especially in unstable living and logistic situations.

a hike to the highest dune where there is a huge sundial covered in runes, installed in 1991. the top granite pedestal, the solar pointer, is broken off and lies smashed across the circle of granite blocks that forms the face of the dial on the ground — from a storm in 1996. there are pathways everywhere, some adding to the sense of un-natural erosion and human presence. no trees are left to lie in the woods if they fall by storm or disease, so the natural infrastructure, for example, soil development, is a bit hampered, though the whole of the island is technically a National Park. I park myself on a variety of locations to soak up the ambiance, one place, sitting half-way out on a breakwater pier (to record the odd sound of waves skimming the side of the concrete). an elderly gentleman wanders up, looking as much like the images of an old Karl Marx as is possible, with a bit of white-haired Fidel Castro mixed in. he is with his daughter, who stays behind at the shore. they are there for memory, that is clear. bodies mapping old pathways and places from youth. there they were, a younger man with his daughter, a child, playing on this same beach, the trees different, the world hosting a different set of human empires, principalities, and powers. he comes to me, and asks something in Russian to which I reply in English that I don’t speak Russian, he then asks in German if I speak German, so I reply in German him that I am an American artist, he reacts with interested surprise, but speaks no English, so, smiling, walks to the far end of the breakwater to stand for a bit. his daughter finally joins him and together they chat with the lone fisherman who seems to be without much luck. the couple, young and old, walk slowly back to the beach, I tip my hat to him as he approaches, he salutes me, and pats my shoulder as he shuffles past. human connection.

mushrooms are the focus of much of the day. Alvydas has gathered several bags full, so we spend a couple hours cleaning them — peeling the top skin off and making sure there are no decaying parts.

I make a presentation for the students late in the evening that is followed by some difficult questioning provoked by my fragmentary and discontinuous comments about energy and art, and the live remix that I effect as an opening sample of my work on the projector.

this is followed by platefuls of the mushrooms with potatoes that have been carefully boiled and spiced. mmmMMMMmmmmm.

the day in the forest starts with some confusion around the timing of the bus, but half of the RAM6 group head out, arriving at a small summer cabin, a restored farmhouse where friends of Gediminas and Nomeda had prepared a nice lunch for everybody. a short walk ended at the specially selected location for the streaming party — at the same time as a heavy downpour starts. the streaming set-up is in a small clearing dominated by five massive oak trees. the rain stops after a bit and some of us head out to discover the location of a legendary spring where people still come to draw water from. no luck, but it is a nice walk anyway. I begin the evening’s stream with a short talk, and then some students from the workshop engage in one of the acting exercises. many things are going on. a hundred meters away there is a flat open space on the river where a campfire is built. there is much animated conversation happening there. after dark darkness falls, Kim and I decide to head back to the cabin for some late dinner and to the bus where the less party-inclined are gathering to head back to Vilnius.

08 2004′, ’28 1956

Nerijus Narmontas, Evelyn Müürsepp, Wojtek Mejor, Jurij Dobriakov, Julijus Balcikonis, Zivile Kucharskiene, Kiril Panteleev, Juha Hytonen, Dorinel Marc, Victoria Brannstrom, Mirjam Wirz, Juha Franssila, Renata Sukaityte, Maria Bustnes, Milda Auginaityte

the regional Geheime Staatspolitzei Headquarters is just down the street. it is now a local police station. we stop to look at a sculpture commemorating the local Gestapo victims out front. it’s done by one of the Muthesius art students. the stamp has the Gestapo text, while the platten beneath has a list of victims. there was a regional concentration camp where around 600 people were liquidated. then grocery shopping, errands. I was able to find a new clip for the waist strap on my daypack which I broke by slamming it in the door of Sanna’s car. critical item, it allows me to shift the weight of the pack off my shoulders and onto my hips. when doing the air travel, I have to carefully carry all fragile/valuable items in that pack, making it a load for the aging back.

dinner with Rieka, Anselm, Theresa, Jakob, Malou, Sophia, Barbara, Kersten, Sabena, Alf, and Chris.

Maris Korrol, Rait Siska, Külli Mariste, Piibe Piirma, Krista Thomson, Lilian Sokolova, Marko Uibo, Andrea Girich, Maiu Kurvits, Janar Puuram