For revolutionary educators, knowledge exceeds its semiotic end products; it travels intertextually within demarcated systems of intelligibility. Critical knowledge is understood as persistently open, disclosive, incomplete, and open-ended. In this way it remains cautious in the presence of reified social relations and epistemological distortions that occlude the social ontology of knowledge and its processual journey from fact to value. In other words, critical epistemological practice examines not only the content of knowledge, but also its method of production. It seeks to understand how ideological constructions are encoded and administered, how metonymic and synecdochical gestures are performed so as to obscure relations of domination and oppression, how the interpretive and interpellative frameworks by which we organize our sentiments construct ruling stereotypes, and how the governing categories of our everyday discourse render invisible and obscure real social relations of exploitation. — (McLaren, P., 2001. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies.)

Aside from the monumental use of academic blah-blah-blah here, the idea behind the obscurity is valid. That is, a radical approach to the facilitation of transformative learning requires a deep awareness of more than just a subject. It demands an awareness of how an embodied knowledge of that subject is founded or generated or discovered. This “how” is in many cases far more important than the “what” of knowledge. I describe this “how” as the meta-structures under which the learning is undertaken. It can be a material issue — bricks-and-mortar, the architectural setting — but also, consequent to an energy-based worldview, it is also a critical question of the entire set of flows within which the encounter is taking place. This is far, far more than opening a classroom window for fresh air, or sitting under a tree with a group of students, although the change in the energy ‘content’ of the situation can be quite profoundly altered by small actions on or reactions to the locale. An energy perception drives much deeper into the meta-structures than that, although any awareness is a good starting point. Because the energy content of the situation is most profoundly affected by the presence of the Self and the Others, the entire energy dynamic among participants must also receive this attention and care. This dynamic is more fundamental than ‘merely’ the social — it is expressed in my concept of continuum-of-relation, defined as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. A holistic awareness of this continuum is necessary to optimize the facilitation.

No revolution is possible among people using language as per McLaren!

point == be where you are, look deep into the world from your point of view, and into the self, and out to the Other. share what you experience

point == find a flow that you can tap into, do so, pay attention to it, and see where it takes you

point == learn how to focus your energies on something; do that, at least for a time, and see what reflects and refracts from that focus

point == action makes anything possible — there is no such thing as failure, there is only change

point == be open to all possible flows — incoming and outgoing — this will show up as (r)evolution in your life as well as a lived practice (praxis)

point == movement along with an intuitive flow will reveal truth in its variable forms — seek it out

point == creativity and rationality are two words which partially describe human behaviors — no words can describe the full reality of behavior. creativity is the movement of energies, rationality is the play of social abstractions — deal with both, you will have to anyway

point == seriously enjoy what you do, — if you don’t, then try changing what you do until the enjoyment returns — smile, it’s Lighter than you think

point == keep your own rules and points in mind while understanding that rules are only socially applied pathways that determine possible ways of human collaboration. collaborate often: define new pathways!

hints:

breathe, listen to your breath, listen to the breath of other things

understand what energy is and where your energy comes from

be a receiver and transmitter of energy.

absorb many forms of energy.

drink plenty of water

be someplace, not just anyplace, and not everywhere.

participate.

watch the sky often.

internalize or embody memory

Acquire new knowledge whilst thinking over the old, and you may become a teacher of others. — Confucius

David invites me to take over for him while he is away to Europe for a media festival in Kracow. He’s teaching a course in the Atlas / TAM (Technology, Art, and Media) program called “Meaning of Information Technology.”

The Meaning of Information Technology (MIT) is the introductory course for the Technology, Arts and Media (TAM) program at the ATLAS Institute. MIT provides an introduction to a range of topics in information technology, new media, and digital culture. The goal of this course is to enable you to think critically about the impact of technology on society, industry, and government. This course considers what it means to be active citizens in a networked digital age. It will consider historical case studies in past IT adoption, unintended consequences and futuristic predictions. It will examine the search for authentic information, whether in digital imagery, search engines, viral video, or sound formats and IT’s modification of our social behavior, and of our means of gathering, interacting with, displaying and using information. We will consider who we are and who we become in social networks, online games and in virtual worlds. Most fundamentally, the class explore the question of what it means to be human in a rapidly-changing world. This question will lead us to examining the writings of theorists, the observations of those on the “bleeding edge,” and view-points ranging from neo-Luddite to Utopian enthusiast. We will draw our own educated and thoughtful conclusions, based on a wide range of evidence, and each of you will emerge from the class with an understanding of and agency in your relationship with Information Technologies. By the end of the course, you will have acquired an awareness of the rapid expansion of new technology, and you will have begun to think critically about the implications and impacts of new technologies.

Short seminar sessions, large classes make it tough to stimulate discussion, but I think they did fine in rising to the occasion. I did put out a tremendous range of concepts in that brief time, but… Not knowing names or not knowing individuals feels like a handicap, but the ending vibe is good.

I started the second session with a single projector showing a blank BBEdit file and at the beginning of class I started typing in the file with my back to the class. I slowly generated the following text:

Silence gradually increased while I slowly composed each sentence, correcting spelling errors and such. When I was done, I turned around to kick-start what turned out to be a good discussion (although I talked far too much for my liking — as I tend to do in a time-limited situation). Last week, I had David ask them to pose five questions about the assigned text (which was the clunky Regime of Amplification text as the primary input for the week. Unfortunately the class wiki (deployed on the goingon.com platform) is not public, as I fielded and answered most of the proposed questions. They ran a stimulating and largely thoughtful gamut and did reveal some weaknesses in the text (the overall one being the density!).

if creativity cannot be taught, cannot be ‘made’ to happen, how best to approach the assumption that it can be fostered or stimulated within situations?

one answer to this is a consideration of the meta-structure of flows that characterize a particular situation. I have talked about meta-structures elsewhere. to begin with, each instance itself is only ‘separated’ from everything else through a process of abstracted defining. separation is an abstraction, a reduction of the actuality of holistic, immersed, and connected being and presence. so, best not to consider separation, distinction, and particularities. rather, retain a sensibility to all possible flows, or flow in general. easy to say, despite the (English) language being wholly insufficient to deal with such concepts. (Csikszentmihalyi is pretty good at making a natural language argument for flow, though he comes from a completely different direction than me, the conclusions are similar, will explore that when I shuffle through some of the references…)

so, back to the meta-structures. okay, suspending my suggestion of a holistic approach, a specific example of a meta-structural condition is Lighting. the Light which suffuses a situation presents a crucial ground on which the situation unfolds. deep into a dialogue on education, I recall Wolfgang mentioning to me that he had a class (possibly more) meet in a space that could be completely blacked-out. brilliant! later, during an advanced digital media class that I taught at Boulder, I had the students curate one day of class a week, so we would meet in different places. once we met at a horse stable and had class on horseback. another time, it was in a fully blacked-out room in the belly of the CU library complex. it altered the nature of the ‘classroom’ encounter. how did it alter it? I don’t recall the de-briefing that we followed it up with, but it was clear that, obviously, the qualitative aspects of encounter were shifted. one of the reasons I did this kind of shifting of venue was to instill a sensibility of how encounter is shifted when immersed in different regimes of flow. it provides a starting point to any discussion about, for example, online presence (versus presence in a dark room, or presence on a horse, or presence in a living room, etc) it seems obvious to state that varying the Lighting in a typical sterile classroom can go a long way to repairing the alienating damage inflicted by an architecture of oppression which typifies many place of learning. of course, Light is a much more profound force that can cause all sorts of nuanced environmental effects. Light is the essence of flow (as one ‘form’ of flow which is distinguishable to our evolutionarily-determined embodiment). it is essentially infinite in its range of affects.

if creativity is a condition of (open) flow, then a consideration of (all!) the conditions of flow impinging on a situation is imperative. intuition itself is a good indicator of this. most people will immediately acknowledge that a typical classroom situation is not conducive to learning. they may not be able to nail down a reason, but they instinctively know that there is something wrong with the flows or something antithetical to true learning that are present in those kinds of spaces. I have used the example, when teaching at Uni Bremen, where we have a room with a particular vibe to it. it faces a busy autobahn not far away, but at the same time is very ‘stuffy.’ windows open for ‘fresh air’ (what’s that exactly?); windows closed for the noise from the autobahn (what’s that exactly?)

the open window presents us with a chaotic flow of energy. (it’s cold! (it threatens organismic viability)) (it’s noisy (it threatens social cohesion and social/academic viability)) the closed window is safe, flows are restricted, controlled by buffers, circumscribed by protocols (ANSI rating of windows, sound-proofing in ceiling/walls) — no more threat, no more noise; but wait, we can’t breath! (organismic viability threatened again!). there was a rough consensus that the room had a negative vibe ‘because’ of these issues and more, so, we took over other spaces, and sought out other situations where we could encounter each other in the course of the workshops — in restaurants, in cafes, by a lake, in the woods, in a beer garden, in museums — and this clearly gave a solid grounding on a range of qualitative potentialities of affect. when flow existed, everyone forgot about where they were, they were immersed as though in air. we are not consciously (much) aware of the particularities when flow occurs, but rather when flows are constricted. which makes sense in that viability depends on discovering novel sources of energy and extant known sources.

this kind of intuitive, overt, covert struggle goes on constantly as we try to balance the imposed social protocols along which flow has been directed versus the desire to optimize our own (idiosyncratic) viability by seeking out a combination of known/unknown and controlled/chaotic flows for ourselves to immerse within…

in another instance, where I was to do an evening seminar at the University of Art and Design in Zurich which is housed in a magnificent example of Bauhaus architecture. I was brought to the space where I was to meet with the students. the room was horrible — bad acoustics, bad ventilation, bad furniture — so, before the talk started, I had about 30 minutes to hang out, so I took all the furniture and made chaotic piles of it around the space. a bit in protest, but also just to see what would happen. the immediate thing that I observed when people started to arrive was that, after a fraction of a second trying to apprehend what was going on, people zoomed in to seats as though they were being guided by wire. it was a good example of how intuitively people will operate to idiosyncratically hone in on the situation that appears to most augment their viability as they understand it… some people added to this a sensibility that they would decrease the overall level of disorder by re-placing the tables and chairs in some kind of order for others. I recall that the discussion after the seminar that evening was very intense and power-full. I suspect that any learning situation that combines a strong intellectual component with some kind of physical, embodied element will have a far more powerful affect than either of those in isolation.

and so on. enough for today.

Chris Allen, one of my favorite students from way back in Master Black and White Printing at CU Boulder in the late 1980′s, passed today. Chris was a gentle, gracious, and humble soul, at the same time as being a fearless seer. His work at the time he was in my class was sourced in his tightly-knit family situation. He visually mapped the dynamic of his crew of young daughters and wife with an intensity and intimacy that I have not seen rivaled with such personal work. He was hard-working, focused, and completely un-self-conscious about his photography. We had many wonderful conversations about life and photography during that time. His wife, Sandy, was due with their fourth child, and they invited me to attend and photograph the birth which I did do. I remember saying yes to Chris, and then getting the phone call early one morning, “It’s time, come on over.” Uff! What have I done! I was terribly nervous about such an event, having never witnessed a birth before. But the vibe at the house, with the midwives and the kids, was incredibly calm and loving. I was blessed by their trust. (more …)

a long conversation with Anthony this evening. always stimulating coverage of the non-typical meta-structures of social and individual existence.

the thought comes up, in teaching — most recently the “Multi-platform Story-telling” course that I was involved with this past semester at La Trobe — how seldom the holistic social meta-structure of the grouping of students (and teachers!) is considered in the facilitation of a learning trajectory. this includes the cumulative totality of all relations (power and otherwise!) that occur within the grouping. I call this space the continuum-of-relation and define it as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. Based on the assumption that we are in a holistic and continuous universe, it is possible to extend the definition to include the set of energy relations that humans have with the detailed and greater cosmos around them, and indeed, this is an important aspect to consider, but it is easier to limit the scope to a specific subset comprising relations between all humans. There are infinite sub-sets of relation that may be delineated, one set being those which arise in the process of learning facilitation. much attention is paid to syllabi, curricula, classroom technologies, and wide-scaled social ‘relevance’ of education systems while very little is paid to the immediate and long-term embodied needs for a recognition of presence of all the humans involved in the actual learning process. and especially the needs for deep human encounter and connection. is it such that this university, as with most others, is merely reflecting a wider scale of civil social decay when those crucial relations and their attendant qualities are simply ignored in the stead of assessment protocols, schedules, cash-for-services, and the general corporatization of education. (more …)

Responding to Felipe’s thread on the bricolabs list:

Obviously, I’m not asking how serious lixoeletronico.org people are, because I’m one of them :P I meant the companies who say they are not using gold, coltan, tungsten etc any more.

jump into the Multi-Platform Story-Telling course to join Jan in the first day of audio work. the students seem quite activated as they continue on the projects that they started in video, moving to four-minute audio pieces, then on to some photographic work, and finally I’m supposed to tie it all together on the ABC Pool site. the intent of the course is to aim at social networking concepts, although I find that the Pool site is a rather generic top-down implementation of contemporary social media. it doesn’t look sustainable except by a back-end maintenance infrastructure (funding infusion), and activities imposed by related institutions (universities) (attention infusion). if there’s time, I’ll make some inquiries on stats, although I doubt that those will be publicly available. most organizations don’t understand that substituting grass-roots impulses with centrally planned deployments simply doesn’t work. we’ll see. I feel like the course is 15 years too late.

by happenstance, walking back from lunch with Jan, note that the Islamic prayer space (split into two sides, one for men and one for women), is open for visitors. the LTU Islamic Students group is holding an Islamic Awareness Week: Islam: The Solution. we go in, and I end up staying for a couple hours, first listening to the general discussion, then jumping in to talk with some of the students. hard to gauge the affect of being an Amurikan in such a situation. there is one other Anglo fellow there, and the rest are from all parts of the Islamic world. interesting field of dialogue follows.

Bonnie Ashley, Kaitlyn Bennett, Hieu Chau, Bridie Clarke, Jessica Dey, Lacey Ewin, Susana Murciano, Kane Grose, Sarah Hanan, Katherine Kiley, Natalie Kornicks, Julia Monaco, Betony Pitcher, Leigh Salmon, Kjersti Aasheim, Christine Knight, Emma McLuckie, Brittany Paterno

pushing back the deep im-pressions of attention-diverting noise is the primary task I undertake in a learning situation: to the degree that the actual subject of inquiry is secondary. it is more the practice of facing the unknown which is the core of learning. attentively facing the unknown. mediating technologies tend to wrap us in a cocoon of dis-awareness of our own senses and from the flows that we are immersed within, making it impossible to focus attentions on the flows to begin with… ach! it’s such a pervasive problem. It becomes a powerful motivation to engage (young) people and to push back these im-pressing forces and watch them begin to breath freely again and then, to watch them begin to wonder what it is that they would like to learn about, then participate with them as they approach the unknown and engage it…

Workshop day begins: first the waka time on the river. Morning cycle down the river to the Putiki boat ramp, get there a little early, and feel the nerves as to what is possible with the workshop. There have been numerous anticipatory conversations in the last days about what I will be doing. I take a small paper with thought-notes and put it in my life-jacket pocket.

I am fighting with the impression that there is a superfluity of input for the participants — some have not been on a river or so. My dilemma becomes a question of when to jump in and alter the flow of events and protocols which accompany the waka and the enveloping and powerful Maori cultural scenario. It makes no sense to do anything other than participate. Where full participation is a position, an approach to an eventuality of contingent life-flow. I am observing the processes and vibes that are coalescing, seeing if there is a auspicious moment to intervene, but I see none. Back to participating. Enjoying it all. The newness, but also the familiarity and comfort which the Maori protocol applies to that (community-facing) unknown, and The River. (more …)

The official blurb for the workshop:

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

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

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

Up early again, before all the girls are off to school, the morning routines are quite entertaining to witness. Compared to similarly-aged kids in other places (the US!), all the kids I’ve met here seem quite relaxed. Is it the culture here, or? There is a laid-back quality, but I haven’t been here long enough to see how it suffuses through the society. There have to be substantial social issues, with colonialism having left such an influence on things. The stack of histories of NZ that Kerry loaned me before traveling told of savage open conflict until around the time of the US Civil War which is quite recent. Though no longer in direct living memory, it is still quite close. It’s is obvious, from the clear-cut timbering alone, seen from the air, that there is an ongoing and deep conflict over land-use, with powerful development and/or exploitation forces. On the other hand, there are definitely strong voices for nurturing the environment (and human lives on the island) back to something more sustainable.

We take a visit to the waka (canoe) boathouse to check on things — there is a crew of young gals who are practicing waka racing for the national championship. A group of absolutely charming young women.

Mike, our main Maori host comes by, what a expansive and powerful spirit he has! Julian has really cultivated some amazing connections with people here. Everyone met so far has been friendly, open, welcoming, relaxed, ready with a smile, along with some challenging/enLightening conversations.

Hardly time to make any entries now that the road has come up to meet my feet, so to say. Prepping mentally for the symposium coming up in a few days. But there is still so much indeterminacy that I will really have to improvise, and simply go with the available and auspicious energies of the moment. Many stories are already told about energy and informatics.

Towards sunset, an impromptu picnic on river turns out to be a neighborhood gathering, yet another example of a relaxed bunch of folks. Such a (WELCOME!) contrast to Sydney!

Julian, Gregers , Heidi, and I do the drive up to New Plymouth to check out the Puke Ariki exhibition/library and museum complex in New Plymouth, on the north west coast. There is a street festival and some electronic media installations as well.

We meet Ian Clothier eventually for a beer and a tour of the data-installation connected to one of the Museum installations in Pukekura Park. He’s teaching at the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki

On the way back, Mount Taranaki is wreathed in a morphing cloud hat. We take a bit of time to drive to the Egmont National Park visitor’s center halfway up the east flank, and take a short walk into the forest. Marvelous vibe under the trees. The exotic feel comes from the strange vegetation.

The drive crosses mostly land that was originally forested, but is now stripped dairy farm land, the product of which is shipped to China and elsewhere. There are milk-trains crossing the land every few minutes. The Fonterra dairy factory is reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world.

I’ll be back to Taranaki, someday.

Today is completely packed and busy: cleaning, organizing, and installing the show at the Greenbench for the gallery opening this evening. The title of the show is BURN and the show is obliquely or directly about hydrocarbons — plastics, production, consumption, distribution. Julian had tracked down a collection of oil samples from an early and now spent New Zealand (oil) field nearby (name?). I am surprised, oil — with the tectonic regime here, the foreshore of a plate boundary subduction zone. Ah, maybe the heat flow is actually lower when considering that because the immediate crust is double thickness with the subducting plate, so there is a lower heat gradient from the mantle. Shallow oil, guess I’d never thought of the genesis of such plays.

I use embodied energy to organize and clean the gallery kitchen for the opening, along with having numerous conversations with folks introduced from Julian’s extensive local network. He asks me if I will talk at the opening sharing some anecdotes about working in the oil business. Completely impromptu, though I had a minute to sit with a piece of paper before and write a five- or six-point list of things to remember to talk about. I am not the best story-teller, especially in such a situation, but folks politely listen to a few minutes of my rambling.

Later in the evening, raucous preparations over wine precede delicious dinner back at the house. Definitely some good cooks around!

The question for me becomes — how to keep track of the dialogues, and the warm humans encountered? Julian mentions there is an artist-residency possibility in town. It would be great to hang here for a time. Somehow, it reminds me distantly of Tornio, in Lapland, half-way ’round the world, literally, in the sense of it being a littoral backwater along a river in a small country, but the community here seems quite activated, and the differences between Finns/Lapps and Kiwis/Maori are complex and significant. Similarities do exist — it would be good to have the time to explore. It looks like there will not be any spare time in these 11 days for much autonomous explorations, although this is okay, as the people immediately surrounding Julian and Sophie’s lives provide a rich environment for encounter. And a site for the exchange of inspiration.

Abstract

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

Introduction

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

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

Got that one hurdle out of the way, though there is still the matter of the accompanying paper. I saw very clearly the interface between the institution and the wider world, where the protocol of the (semi-)ordered system imposes its particular form on the flow.

But, in the end, I may not be able to over-come the imposition of a protocol so polariz(ing)(able). The one person who coordinates the checking of unsatisfactory/satisfactory at this juncture did not seem to engage with my presentation at all. Except to point out that I satisfied precisely none of the assessment criteria. Were it a response that was nuanced, I could understand missing the mark, but with a complete rejection of the presentation, I find it a little over the top, and, well, disingenuous if the term intellectual engagement is being bandied about at the same time. If I didn’t have 20+ years of teaching with fifteen of it moving through this exact space of inquiry across tens of universities with hundreds of graduate students, I might be open to the idea that what I am articulating is not graspable or open to engagement, but in this case, I suspect some other mechanism was operating, what else can I do?

Pick up the kids over at the Alexander Dawson School, meeting Craig Angus, their teacher for a wood-working course. Craig is a former student from my first years of teaching Master Black and White Printing at CU waaay back in the 1980s. He’s now the teacher with the most seniority at Dawson!

The kids made some pretty fine bedside table/cabinets that were still wet with polyurethane. Fortunately I had room in the truck to stash them safely for the ride home to Boulder.

Starting with the immediate body as a field-of-action to release control (versus the control-at-a-distance regime we are immersed within now):

Bushwhacking is a method to relinquish control of the trajectory of the body. By exposing the body to the unknown, one has to respond in real time, in the present. This present invites the presence of be-here-now and within that state of be-ing, the embodied self yields to the edge that divides the controlled from un-controlled. Precisely at that edge is the locus of active transformation and change. Making the next step into the unknown is, literally, an act of trust in the body, in a belief that entering the unknown will present possibility. Whether or not this possibility is merely the chance of the continuance of the species (in a biological framework), the projection of life into the not-now, the future, or whether it is an operative pre-condition for a transcendent state I cannot at this moment comment on. Somehow, this is a question that each individuated being self-wise has to make in each of those moments.

Human-controlled flows — those apparently known, defined, located, standardized, measured flows — are merely thin veneers on an un-controlled cosmos which dwarfs all. Or does it? Are we not energized elements, expressions of that cosmos, as much as any else? Does the scalar really matter when space and time are suspended (along with the artifice of Cartesian models and all other abstracted human frameworks)?

Go to your edge. This phrase comes up in yogic teachings in the West. It suggests a shaky physical state where muscles struggle to maintain some configuration that they are barely fit to do. Of course, that meaning may deepen as a practice becomes more holistic and not limited to the mere physical (think pilates). Moving further into the image — what would it mean to an animal to go to its edge? The edge would be the dividing line between living and losing control over all body systems (organismic death). A tad over that edge precipitates a very different outcome than a tad under. Can it be that non-human systems exist at that edge at all times and at all scales — that this is the condition of non-equilibrium states? Or can this be the condition of the cosmos at all scales all the time? But it would seem that human systems exist at this edge as well, except that the human species has abstracted/constructed numerous illusions suggesting that it is not subject to the same razor-edge condition. (The illusion of control of future trajectories.)

And it occurs to me later that our retreat from that edge is in our deep desire for physical body to be maintained, for risk to be lowered, for future to be statistically more attainable. This state-of-being perhaps arose through our stepping away from simple (animal) living, and into the future-tension of linguistically-mediated half-lives.

How to translate this image into a practice? Go to your edge.

Non-doing defines doing. Sitting in stillness invites people to move. Getting out of the way allows people to fill space with their passion. Letting go of expectations leaves room for responsibility to come forth. All of this is integrity. Every piece of doing requires the strong presence of non-doing to anchor it.

Stifling every impulse to intervene, to give directions and orders leaves space for others to design their lives. You can create a container and then stand by and watch it fill and teem with life. You don’t resist the natural movements of groups of people co-creating their futures. Instead you work on your own inability to be still, to want to own the outcomes, to want to invest your ego.

This is not your show. You are holding space, embodying space and being empty and full at the same time. If they thank you in the closing circle, you have not done enough. — The Tao of Holding Space, Chris Corrigan

and a side note on one of the seven marvelous students in the Ways of Listening course I taught this term at UTS. Ash undertook a fine project Antinode, you can check out the process-documentation blog that she set up. nothing like be-ing in the analog world! her experiences definitely fed back into the overall success of the class. auspicious start to teaching in Oz!

If I could have written this DCA thing before, I would have. It is a question of style and form only. As I have already written reams (megabits) of pure (well, relatively pure) text already, megabits, not in Word, but in BBEdit, close to code, pure code; not to mention the reams of paper writing that preceded that. On an old portable manual typewriter. From picnic tables in the Great Sand Dunes on crisp winter mornings, to attic havens in the dark Icelandic winter. Drilling words out out out to the many Others. Printed direct onto papers from flat or slightly curvilinear screens to nine-pin printers. Usually, on the obverse, each sheet of that paper was already a xerographic work in itself, thanks to sometimes free access to photocopy machines in various places. Photocopy art. Nobody knows what that’s about anymore. And the postcards. The thousands of them, all silver-prints. Tight hand-written like the 4000+ pages of journal, with double-ought Rapidograph pen and permanent India inks. Sometimes exploding with the pressure shifts of flying too much. Is a remix in order, of all this life-energized output, a tracing of threads? Correlated with all the memorable human encounters — teaching, exhibitions, studios, happenstance, friends, friends-of-friends, shared meals, and strangers — what can be made from it? And how to proceed.

Big question. The difference between that lived praxis and the reflection on praxis. Or is there a difference, is a difference necessary? Or is the difference a construct itself, an artificial category, a social imprint? A remnant of Whorf’s linguistic framing which, simply stated, says that a language alters the way one thinks. Or, to go a bit further than Whorf, that a language is a particular set of (neural) pathways upon which energized thought follows along, passes through. The pathways form as the language portions of thinking form in ones embodied presence. This suggests that a multi-modality of expression is an attempt or penchant to explore different pathways of (neural) energy flow, each along its accustomed way. Life is multi-modal. And energy is the substrate that the modes are embossed in. Embossed patterns which fill with flow, or over-flow. When energy does not have a predetermined pattern to move within, how will it express? It will leak into other spaces, bleed over into other patterns, or simply build up in some corner of the body until it is expressed in pathology.

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The final session of the Ways of Listening course that I taught this term. Brilliant students (Karen Banks, Sally Hill, Golam Mostafa, Nishant Singh, Marko West, Ricky Pannowitz, and Oliver Pieterse), good dialogue!

The idea comes that I can place different narratives and sonifications in the aporee context, making a global mapping of ideas mixed with sounds mixed with voices. But somehow this seems flat. Not that the platform lacks some aesthetic appeal, but the tendency would be to continue the same old process of archive-building (with the same old criteria of acquisition of material). Or, I thought about making a performative series in the Speakers Corner in the Domain. Still, the best idea to this moment is the one where I would simply engage with this material with one Other, expanding on it, presenting it in a dialogic setting, and reproducing that. Or this dialogic situation as a live performative undertaking with an audience.

[and there is always the wrestling between the tendency to overly-formalize the potential outcomes rather than going with my intuition. This arises from that historic/sporadic lack of confidence in the execution of 'public' works. Although ultimately the more spontaneous the production, the less pre-tension, the better and more energizing the outcome for the audience/participants. If only creative action came as easily as teaching (which, of course, is a subset of that creative action)].

Then there is this idea that technology impresses itself on the individual (a form of techno-determinism). I can remember working on the graveyard shift at Rockville Crushed Stone, an open-pit quarry in a greenschist facies area mined for concrete aggregate. It supplied the entire Washington, D.C. area with aggregate until the year after I was working there, the whole short-fiber asbestos scandal broke — the aggregate was found to be full of it! That’s another story. At the end of a ten hour shift of mucking (shoveling), clearing random piles of spilled rock from the monstrous crushing machines and the conveyor systems between them, my hands would start to lock around the shovel handle. To this day, if I spend an afternoon with a shovel, this still happens. Embodied presence re-configured at the effect of technology. One of my offices at UTS is on the 16th floor of the building reputed to be the ugliest building in Sydney. I decided a number of years ago that if I had the possibility of skipping the elevator and taking the stairs, I would do that. Some of my colleagues think this is a amusing quirk. It is, but it is rationalized by the idea that using or relying on the elevator to get there is re-forming my body in a certain way that I’d rather it not do. Or perhaps, I’d rather challenge my legs to get some exercise else they wither away, as they sit lifelessly propped on the desk chair below my torso as body is only engaged in finger-twitch typing-at-screen in this moment.

Is there any instance that a technology does not re-form the embodied presence of the user? If one is using the field/flow model of the cosmos, the answer is definitively, NO! Even at great (Cartesian) distance: even as subsumed by tele-presence. Then affect merely becomes an issue of what, how, and how much. Hypothesis? Yeah, okay, it is a hypothesis, but there is abundant evidence to let it lie for the moment as a principle. What would be counter examples? A human-constructed technology is a temporalized shift in the ordering of ambient matter/energy in a localized/distributed region. A negentropic ordering along anisotropic fall lines (thermal, chemical, or simply difference gradients). (Just as the body is the same shift or change or difference in the order of a region — and the body is a primary technology).

[One way of looking at technology is that it is a subset of the alterations that self-organizing life systems apply to the flows that they are immersed in. Uff, mouthful, when working from zero acronyms... Well, it's not really a subset, but it would apply, as the traditional definition of technology does, to a certain limited number of tool-wielding species. What is the difference between the air being a tool that a bird utilizes, shaping it, albeit in very a limited temporal framework, to allow the (necessary) utility of flight? Technology-as-means to re-form the flow of energy in the active system. Perhaps too basic a definition. It certainly then would include all life, which then suggests that life itself has, as one characteristic function: as a system for altering the flow of energy in the system.]

Eduard Freudmann writes on the nettime list:

The Bologna process aims at an extensive convergence of European Universities with the Anglo-American education system. The aim is to enter competition in the global education market in order to strengthen university’s economic position and increase their research-dependent revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of standards are the basis and at the same time the precondition of this process: without standardization there can be no measurability, without measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition. Economization and the logic of competition are imposed at every level of knowledge production.

Michael Bauwens on the iDC list: I think the important insight that travels from free software to money is this. Power lies in the code and in the invisible structures that enable or dis-enable actions and relationships, what Alexander Galloway calls ‘protocolary power.’ The great insight of the current age is that money has a code as well. But just as we do not have the power to change the code of microsoft, we do not have (yet) the power to change to code of political money, so the alternative world-constructing route is to peer produce our own, differently coded money.

sotto voce: This brings up the thought that code and money are both likewise abstracted representations of Power that have to be actualized through two processes: 1) a participatory social grouping who choose to believe (have faith) in the power of the abstraction to cause material change in their lived existence and 2) a means for the abstracted instrument to interface with a real (material) regime of existence. Power, in the end has to be or has to have available a way to apply itself to life, to an individual life, to be delivered (as that change).

For example, code describes what a device can or should do in theory. It needs the device to make that actually happen. Code without the physical transmission of power (kilo-calories, joules, megawatts, whatever) is a complete abstraction and is of no consequence. The machine or interface that actualizes the code is embedded in a specific field of power flows — i.e., the electrical generation and delivery system, manufacturing systems that depend on transportation networks which depend on hydrocarbon fuel power, etc. This larger techno-social infrastructure that is essentially a field of directed energy flows depends on a whole host of humans believing that the code will ultimately improve their lives on earth. If there arises a doubt that the code will do this, the whole system starts to unravel. If it becomes clear that the code is failing to bring power to the user, they will stop putting their life-energy into propping up that techno-social protocol and the infrastructure it is embedded within.

The code of religious teaching, the code of social behavior, the code of the machine, and the code of economic instrument all have the characteristic that they are completely dependent on being actualized this way, else they have NO power. In the end, the code is merely a socially prescribed pathway along which real energy is forced to flow.

Faith in code(d abstraction) produces a shared or centralized capital of potential power, but there always needs to be a tangible means for translation from code to be-ing. The body is the primary means for code to become lived action or the source of applied and energetic change. That would be the minimum device necessary, all other devices are simply amplifications of the body-as-energy source.

With the demonstration of faith as an applied and directed energy flow through a code comes the often terrifying expression of directed social power. On the other hand, when the individual participant in a social system seeks and finds/makes expression not according to The Code, the dominant collective immediately loses a fraction of its ability to direct energy as it wills.

as an educator, I refuse to make the assumption that any reductive source (text or otherwise) is of greater efficacy in insuring self-preservation and enLightenment of the student than either their own (collective or accumulated) system of belief combined with their sensory (energy-receptive) system or any other particular (re)source. it is under that assumption that I proceed as a teacher — encouraging the student to trust their own judgment while approaching everything with an open and aware presence.

got to weigh in on health care. so sick(!) of the toxic blather going on within the US, although it might just be that it is a spent nation-state, in the throes of becoming less relevant in the world. clearly it is becoming less functional internally which eventually (already) will have an effect on external relations. morally it is tearing itself apart by those who, strangely call themselves Christian but who seem to have zero compassion and limitless zeal for defending against the stranger and killing preemptively when that stranger seems strange. period. I have some understanding of the fear of governmental authority. the media in the US has certainly inculcated so many other nation-states with the blight of the dictator and illustrated that to the US citizens, a situation that reinforces some traditional/historical fear of the government. fine. but why is there almost zero fear of the corporation? how can this be? (a belief that the government will effectively control the corporation?? or what?) it is irrational. but then again, fear usually is, especially the fear exuding from an under-class which is very poorly educated (a result of a very stratified anti-Federal education situation, but that’s another whole story). This under-class seems not to understand the dynamics of power as it happens to be expressed in the particular system they live under — global capitalism — despite being locked into that servile under-class by those same dynamics of power. a dynamics that is expressed in the same way as it is expressed in any other system of power — the elite rule that under-class. whether it is elite politicians-for-life (the Senate) or corporate boards or whatever arrangement of power, it’s all Machiavellian in both intention and execution. doh!

I have had wide experience in numerous socialist (gasp!) countries and with some of their medical systems. I have also had several encounters with fragments of the US system. in different situations I have been either uninsured or insured. I am alive/walking today because of the quality of the US system, a system that took care of me after an accident when I was in an uninsured gap in time. the system (which really isn’t a system, but more a hodge-podge of competing, conflicting, and discontinuous sub-systems), without any paperwork, without even a ID (I’m white), the local hospital ER took me in and diagnosed my severe injury — a shattered vertebra and sent me on for major surgery and hospitalization at a top neurological center a couple hours away in Phoenix, Arizona. a week in post-op ICU and I was sent home (to my sister’s place where she cared for me for some weeks until I could be moderately ambulatory). later, after three months of heavy physical therapy and a deep focus on my part, I am once again healthy and mobile. without that level of technology and expertise I would be either a paraplegic or simply dead.

this particular experience doesn’t preclude any of the criticisms of the overall system which is bleeding people for far more cash than is necessary even when factoring in bureaucratic inefficiencies that might be introduced by governmental oversight.

I didn’t have insurance at that time because it was prohibitively expensive for me as an individual free-lance educator to underwrite, an entrepreneur. surely many potential and practicing entrepreneurs are faced with problem, to what extent does this impede them? I took the calculated risk when visiting the US that nothing would happen to me. I was insured (by the State) when teaching in Finland and in Iceland and that insurance extended by reciprocity to any European state. I would have been covered anywhere in Europe had that same accident occurred there. The ultimate level of care may not have been the same in many less developed Euro-states, but in Scandinavia and most of the states I operated in, the intervention and care would have equaled or exceeded what I got in Arizona.

another prior encounter with the US system, because of a running injury during a period where I was first uninsured then insured saw mis-diagnosis for fractured sesamoid bones in my left foot. on five occasions over a four-year period I had x-rays and a variety of examinations in the US, none of which identified the problem correctly. after I moved to Iceland, my first encounter with that socialist (gasp!) system (never mind the stupid insurance company ploy of pre-existing conditions in the US), the (Swedish-trained) doctor did a focused exam of the foot and without even an x-ray, diagnosed the injury correctly, and scheduled a surgical intervention shortly thereafter. I had several other encounters with the system up there including the complicated birth of my son which was taken care of completely, my wife staying comfortably in the hospital for ten days (and having the option to take off either six months at full pay or one year at half pay from her job for maternity leave; I got to take off the second year at half-pay too). a number of emergency interventions were expertly taken care of as well. all for free. my cumulative tax rate as a university educator there was the same as I paid in the US when you added up all the local, state, and federal rates.

in Finland I had some minor encounters with the system which were expert and professional. and free.

now here in Australia, I paid all of USD 270 per annum for private (state regulated) insurance. I have not tested it out yet, but do plan to explore it for some minor chronic issues.

once, in a meeting with some executives from Ericsson in Stockholm some years back, the conversation turned to health care and I heard them agree that the high taxes that they paid as members of the upper-middle-class were worth it to have a stable society where all were cared for. uff, that sounds like (gasp!) socialism! curses! never mind what the Bible says about the sin of empathy.

although my eating habits are a bit skewed in the direction of consuming too many carbos and dairy than I should, I exercise at a level that most people my age think is extreme. six or seven days a week, I engage in some combination of cardio, strength, or centering exercises for a couple hours. swimming, cycling, yoga, tai chi, weight lifting, resistance exercise, and such. I walk stairs rather than take elevators or escalators. I am walking after that accident partly because I was in better-than-average condition to begin with and I don’t intend that to change radically.

with universal health care in the US I can see one argument against it — who wants to pay the bill via taxes for the HUGE number of morbidly obese over-consuming Amurikans, many who are the same thought-less, compassion-less christian folks righteously ‘defending the constitution’ and their fat slice of pie with weapons? gah.

a week into August already. more than two weeks in Oz, a number to go. haven’t made any images at all except the occasional telephone lo-rez abstraction. so that goes. this may be the way the travelog goes in the next months. as there are so many other things to get done now. teaching heavily underway, research cranking up, and networking. as well. essential life starts to make its way forward.

plenty of sound recording though. on aporee maps. and a few photos from around the house.

Karen Banks, Sally Hill, Golam Mostafa, Nishant Singh, Marko West, Ricky Pannowitz, Oliver Pieterse

University of Technology – Sydney
Ways of Listening
July – November 2009
students :: Karen Banks, Sally Hill, Golam Mostafa, Nishant Singh, Marko West, Ricky Pannowitz, Oliver Pieterse

tea and concrete in the morning and off for a full day of meetings and paperwork, prepping for teaching and research.

a visit to the library is disappointing, many books are in terrible condition, shabby, out-dated. hmmmm. what’s with that? evidence of zealous and active use? or small library budgets. in the technology section, so many were completely outdated and should have been consigned to basement stacks long ago.

profiling. black clad, stylishly-coiffed young Asian students with thick-rimmed Dior specs dominate the downtown city streets that I’ve frequented so far. haven’t gotten to the regular business district and will likely not unless there is a compelling reason.

bureaucracy. and catch-22′s loom out of the composition of days spent meeting people. technological infrastructure is problematic as well. regular network access simply does not work, and the help desk could not help. yet I can access a new WPA network constructed for iPhones and such.

go to bed reading of Qi in Ted J. Kaptchuk’s treatise on Chinese medicine and wake up early from a deep dream where I was working with a group of boisterous and engaged young people who are somehow brought together by the impulse of Barack Obama. my immediate thought upon waking is why does a political figure enter my dreams? social action is important, sure, along with an interest in community dynamics, but a politician (community organizer none-the-less)? somewhat disturbing, though that thought is outweighed by the energy of the scenario. I suppose I am missing teaching. there will be opportunities for that in Oz, although I will keep it highly restricted to workshops rather than term courses. nothing should get in the way of the appointed task.

the Qi discussion illustrates the absolute difficulty in framing a concept in the language — the specific social protocol — within which the concept did not arise. the fundamental problem of translation. and in this case, translation of a term that is so formative to any worldview built on it that if one adopts that specific term, it will map, literally, where one stands in the world. and the ensuing conclusion that the adoption of another social protocol, language, precipitates a shift in worldview. no surprise there.

one global ‘solution’ to this issue especially in regard to fundamentals like Qi or energy (noting that even here I am making no one-to-one correspondence between the two!), when ‘comparing’ fundamentals, is to consider that each human individually is observing the world, and, at the same time, the social collective that they are participating in exerts an impressive synergy on all these points-of-view, and generates a collectively determined world view. this is the dominant social protocol, their language. Both the individual and collective world view are reductive apprehensions of essentially the same phenomena — that of be-ing in the world — seen from the particular point of view of that individual or collective. Of course, there are the instances where the worldview of the collective is impressed on the individual when the individual is forced to sacrifice personal autonomy to the collective — often through violence or threat of violence. it becomes a deep issue of personal autonomy or idiosyncrasy versus the power of the collective and where to set the line.

… the unusual difficulty in making Qi intelligible in modern Western philosophy suggests that the underlying Chinese metaphysical assumption is significantly different from the Cartesian dichotomy between spirit and matter…. (Furthermore) the continuous presence in Chinese philosophy of the idea of Qi as a way of conceptualizing the base structure and function of the cosmos, despite the availability of symbolic resources to make an analytical distinction between spirit and matter, signifies a conscious refusal to abandon a mode of thought that synthesizes spirit and matter as an undifferentiated whole. The loss of analytical clarity is compensated by the reward of imaginative richness. The fruitful ambiguity of Qi allows philosophers to explore realms of being which are inconceivable to people constricted by Cartesian dichotomy …. Qi, in short, seems inadequate to provide a philosophical background for the development of empirical science as understood in a positivistic sense. What it does provide, however, is a metaphorical mode of knowing, an epistemological attempt to address the multidimensional nature of reality by comparison, allusion, and suggestion. — Tu Wei-ming in Confucian Though

furthermore, the adoption of another linguistic naming system or protocol represents the potential of seeing the world anew. at the same time as it represents a separation from the dominant or previous system. this is an essential feature of the process of immigration, this identity shift that comes through a (linguistic) re-naming the world. but it is also inherent in the process of adoption of any protocol or technology that is produced and imposed on the individual.

spend the afternoon at a meeting with a group of about 15 enthusiastic Mizzou students who are interested in fundamental issues around sustainability and social activism. the meeting (01:20 audio) was organized by the Open Sustainability Network Mid-Missouri, under the title Tools to Thrive. hosted by Richard Schulte, one of the founders of the Mid-Missouri group (which is connected to the umbrella Open Sustainability Network). OSN-MM is also the initiator of the Columbia Missouri Exchange Circle. Lonny Grafman, the featured presenter, is a lecturer at Humboldt State University and is the founder of Appropedia Foundation, the self-proclaimed sustainability wiki which provides a public platform for information on sustainable community practices along with pertinent knowledge-sets for implementation. Lonny is also the Executive Editor of International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering (IJSLE). He introduced some of his work in the form of a presentation Democracy Unlimited Humboldt County Rainwater: A Case Study in Open Source Community Action for Sustainability which explored community activism in deployment of sustainable (in this case, domestic rainwater gathering) systems. words: creation of human networks … the search for a deliverable … starts with a sonic ambient exploration a rainstorm … examples of rainwater sequestering … Bechtel in Bolivia … anthropocentric impurities … a lesson in rainwater catchments: free … local infrastructures generate independence / autonomy. Too many details at first. without the principles of appropriate technology use — public perception, policy situation, know-how, resources, initiative, currency in Humboldt … hemp paper, soy inks … Temporary Autonomous Zone break-out groups: creation and organization of more and better public art; bike-powered something; CSPAN (Columbia Sustainability Policy Action Network); local economy (in general); moving from thought to action; facilitating dialogue; sustainable creative activism; expanding the sustainability community; empathy and interconnectedness; rooftop gardens where possible on campus; community networking club celebrations, gardening; organizing / participating in one implementation workshop for a physically appropriate technology setup; less plastic use, healthy local food, teaching sustainability to children … sorry no more detailed notes, I had to leave right after the break-out sessions to meet Nick and Deb to look at houses. I cycle across downtown from campus to the Walgreens where I lock the bike and go in to buy a snack. when I come out I wander across the parking lot looking for Deb’s car. an chubby white woman gets out of a sedan and asks me if I need a ride. she says she normally doesn’t do that, but I looked like I wasn’t a killer and that she’d be happy to help me out. I say no, no thanks, I’m just waiting for friends to pick me up. mid-western courtesy? I’m wearing a black leather biker’s jacket, black jeans, black half-gloves and a baseball cap from Germany, and dark brown sunglasses. who’s she kidding? she must have been one of those mild-mannered mid-western serial killers. just then Deb pulls up. saved! Nick stayed with the kids, so we drive into the countryside to some small towns looking at houses. the area is really depressed, many empty storefronts on Main Street. and this area is relatively affluent compared to much of the rest of the state. it would be very interesting to travel through these areas and document what is happening. sustainability? indeed. things are not sustained here. help is needed.

iDC list gets annoying and rewarding at the same time. but what of life spent on the keyboard? the topic is teaching… and the transition of the teacher into the link jockey.

sotto voce: While the offerings of IP_based networks seem unlimited, and in rhetoric, the superlative of unlimited is often applied, I think it is important to keep firmly in mind that it is not a space of unlimited knowledge nor is it a space of neutral knowledge. And, also, in this time, it is not a space of embodied experience aside from eyes absorbing statically-framed EM radiation, ears hearing sounds disconnected from their source, and fingers twitching across a very limited place. Not to mention underlying ideologies which accompany each form of mediated connection (largely invisible but very much real) — among others, that of consumption (extractive resources, electricity, and thus, the globe-spanning world that we exert irresponsible dominion over). In this regard, the (limited)vastness of that knowledge-space seems a bit tainted and out-of-touch perhaps. Expensive and consumptive. Exclusive, reductive, and reified. A teacher is a catalyst, and is one who, simply by being an Other we encounter in life, presents us with the unknown. If we trust that Other, a world opens up that was previously unknown, and (if) we (trust enough to) apprehend and engage it, it changes us, we learn. This unknown world is sourced in the entire comprehensible universe, and is available through that Other. These encounters may take place anywhere, anytime, and can be had ‘for free.’ We need only ‘pay’ the Other with our attention, our life-time, and life-energy. It seems that in our formal techno-social educational systems, these potential encounters with the Other are (being) replaced by more and more socially-standardized systems-of-relation (protocols, curricula, government mandates, abstracted monetary instruments) which seem ever more intrusive to and even suppressive of potential open encounters. This limits the creative potential of the outcome. The cumulative effect of this social hyper-formalization-of-encounter — because learning occurs precisely at the edge of knowing, not within the known — is that we look elsewhere for the dynamic of coming-to-be (learning) that keeps us alive and growing. To me this is the ultimate source of the loss of vitality that affects the Education World, a vitality that ultimately does not rest on technological mediation but on human encounter. Yes, human encounter is always mediated by the vast range of social protocols and tools, and learning encounters may happen within highly mediated (‘virtual’) spaces, but when we allow those encounters to slide continuously into more and more mediated spaces, the life-time available for less mediated human encounter shrinks. I think that this represents a wide loss to learning, education, community, and creative potential as it moves to extremes and forgets what it is predicated upon — the originary encounter between the Self and the Other.

Concerning Particular Methodologies

Dialogues, Networks, and Collaboration — Much of my creative practice, research, and indeed, presence is built on the activation of robust and sustained dialogues with a wide range of Others both remote and local. These dialogues form a network. The most powerful situation I can imagine for creative research and production is an open human network. I am keen to engage on the ground with the Australian, Sydney-based, and UTS creative community. I am familiar with the milieu, having been in Sydney for six weeks in 2006 as a visiting artist at COFA, and I very much look forward to being there again. I have an extensive personal/professional network of Antipodal creatives which dates back to the early 1990s that I will be pleased to activate on a more face-to-face basis.

Distributed Performance — My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years is centered around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of amplified digital networks as the locus for creative action. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, dance, sonic, and other expressive arts occurring in or augmented by collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence — and how that human presence is directly and indirectly affected by any/all technologies that filter and attenuate that presence: how human expression across a network system is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.
(more …)

Migrating Régime begins in Berlin. (a photo from Edwina of a group interpretation of the dialogue assignment, hmmm?) I run a seminar/performance/facilitation on Monday, and will be randomly intervening during the week. not as fun as embodied presence, but hey, what can be done. so, from Boulder to Berlin. the next best thing to being there… so, about presence:

The expression of presence is an essential characteristic of the self-organized body-system. Presence is the announcement of be-ing and viability and requires first an inflow and then an outflow of energies from the body system through the conversion of energies from one form to another. This conversion process alters the entire fabric of local existence. Migration of the embodied and energized organism changes everything around it. What do you change around you? What is changed by those around you?

Shared presence is a dialogue of transformation and change. It is the crux of be-ing.

(sketch) the seminar ends in two side-steps which confirm the in-sustainability of that particular track of teaching — the holding to a(ny) model. it is an outcome in facilitating the participants to actually mutiny and go off on their own, rejecting authority and (s)lack, and with strong expressions of independence and a desire to find relevant subject areas for inquiry. when will this happen on a larger scale, across larger swaths of so-called learning spaces? there are limits to tolerance, this demonstrates, but can those limits be prescribed and stretched without pretension? or does any pre-tension doom the process from moving into at least an abandoned form of random encounter, instead into mere buffoonery.

well before the end it was already impossible to sustain a track, so that option fell by the way-side. at the same time, dialogues were undertaken with a ferocious concentration. this had the effect of gradually loosening any vestige of authority-in-relation in addition to any privileging of knowledge or know-ing. dramatic developments. and as the (post)authoritarian protocol became internally incoherent, evolving too many possible interpretations, efforts focused on relinquishing traces of control that the protocol demanded and instead the formation of a new protocol exclusive of the facilitator. did not compile the questions, such as they were. relevancy appeared to be attained, but through a desire to move back to traditional models of relation (the text). very interesting development. will have to re-think that framework. of all the thousands of possibly inspiring texts to consume, which will be the right combination? hmmm. cook book might be the best starting point.

a little awkward with the stylized ending, but as a sample in the extreme spectrum of idiosyncratic confabulation, very interesting!, or … not. ! a formative de-briefing is hoped for, but that will have to arise independently in other temporal spaces. perhaps easy to be cynical about the self and the situation, but human encounter arises in all forms, this being one of them. no qualitative judgment possible.

the cycling across town to Charlottenburg is fascinating, memorized now, the transitions, the corners, the sounds, the traffic. the tourists, the police, the Park, the City. the images and sounds are building up to something.

head to Lichtenberg for Barbara and Susanne’s birthday party, in a green garden shaded by an enormous and very healthy apple tree, late into the slightly chilly evening, a fire of large pieces of timber that clearly were formerly from houses. 25×25 cm cross-section, pieces several meters long, with nails in them. rafters from destroyed buildings. war relics. or reliquaries. incredible food. and a Russian accordionist.

I am shocked to hear via Raul that Nan Hoover just passed away. I had just talked to her on the telephone back in April she was just back in town after setting up her show in Salzburg, and we were going to get together after not crossing paths for some years. lung cancer and the ensuing chemo took her away in five weeks.

A condolences site is set up.

we first met through a very bizarre coincidence back in 1991 or so. MB and I were traveling in Germany and were up in Düsseldorf for a day, I don’t recall why. we were in the neighborhood of the Academy, so I thought it would be interesting to see this place where Nam June Paik (was teaching) and Joseph Beuys (had taught) at. the place was empty as we wandered around the halls. at some point I saw a name tag on a door that said Nan Hoover, and I recognized the name as this American video/performance artist. it was the only door with a Light shining out from under, so I knocked. Nan answered the door and I introduced myself mentioning right off that I was from Iceland and was at the Icelandic Academy teaching electronic media. she practically fell over. she and her student assistant, Paschutan Buzari had just at that moment been talking about the trip they were planning to Iceland, and that they didn’t have any direct contacts at the Academy. needless to say, a synchronous event which was a nice start to our connection. I subsequently did much of the ground logistics for the two week trip. the photo above is a group portrait of Nan (with some of her students and Icelandic friends along with MB and Loki (who was at that moment all of 5 days old!)). It was taken on the top of Perlan in Reykjavík. I hosted the student group at the Icelandic Academy where we had a nice collective happening at the end of their visit. and before that some field trips and visions of the Northern Lights among other activities. Nan and the students stayed in a couple flats that the Academy had right behind our house on Holmgardi. I arranged for her to do a screening and public talk at the Nylistasafn in Reykjavík as well. I later went to Düsseldorf a number of times to visit with her classes, as well as meeting her back in Amsterdam a few times.

re-reading the letters I was sending to Nan back then, somewhere packed away in the archive are her letters to me. her work is profoundly energized and a fundamental exploration of Light and change (the video and installation work). I would really like to get to Salzburg to see the show that she is sharing with Bill Viola. I never saw any of her live performance work. time passing. life passing.

University of Art – Berlin, DE
Sustainable Creative Presence :: Distributed Be-ing
June 2008
students :: Zara Morris, Catriona Shaw, Malve Lippmann, Guilherme Galarraga, Valentina Sartori

Zara Morris, Catriona Shaw, Malve Lippmann, Guilherme Galarraga, Valentina Sartori

starting with the UdK-Berlin block seminar tomorrow. 36 hours over two weekends. usually these are challenging and dynamic. good!

back to the brico list discussions:

can a lack of imagination be overcome through intensive observation of the world-that-is? what is imagination? the dream of what-could-be? realizing that there are parameters of be-ing which govern imagining, what can be done to optimize the process?

and, only marginally related to imagination…

unfortunately, to qualify the last sentence, they will also be easily distracted when seduced into believing something is relevant based on external pressures rather that internal impulses. c’est comme ça!

it ends up that we two are the only ones to take a sound walk. the rain started last night and continues most of the day. she takes me to her favorite church, the one without any gold, because gold doesn’t have anything to do with God. she genuflects deeply on entering, on leaving. it is pouring rain, she wants to go get some boots on at her house so that we can walk to her favorite place along the river. the cobble road is flooded and we use our umbrellas to block the splashing from cars as they noisily drive past. she walks ahead of me. the door to her flat doesn’t work properly, so she has to call her room mate to open it from the inside. it’s dark, there is a cat. it is warm, humid inside. the rain drums on the windows.

the water drains into a hole in the ground right outside a manhole cover. we go to look at the river which has risen at least half a meter since morning. then we slowly walk back to the workshop space to continue preparing for the DIY plug-in-party happening tonight.

food, equipment, installations. the students are enthusiastic and energized despite the sporadic and unfocused situation. day slides into evening, and the party begins.

the workshop begins erratically. 30 minutes late, time already runs down. the first impression is, wow, mostly young ladies attending — somehow a bit of a surprise

end up at a rather raucous student march through the city, well, not raucous, maybe noisy, around 500 students. they marched from the Parliament to the University where they went in to the administration building and barricaded the university professors in their offices. this for the fact that the professors did not oppose governmental changes to the free education system. I believe it all stems back to the Bologna Accord which seems to bring much harm to the system. although as we later talked about, the system of standardization can bring systems lower than the standard up to a standard. it’s all relative. in general it appears that the Lithuanian system is a bit at a bottleneck, with younger students expecting more than their professors can offer in terms of open-ness and progressive thinking.

will reactions to the Bologna Accord finally bring back some serious student activism in opposition to its blatantly globalist/capitalist view on education? it’s not clear, 40 years after the ’68 movement. they need more effective theoretical platform to work from in terms of the broader view of what education should be, compared to what it actually is. so it goes.

in the evening we are brought to a hot gallery opening — clearly a scene, to be seen, to see. brazen and blatant art market-ism at it’s very pretentious worst. I won’t even repeat the name of the gallery or the curator, for to name is to bring more attention to the blighters than they deserve. and clearly the local art/culture consumers are mesmerized by the imagination of London come to Vilnius. uff. this can only have a negative effect on the cultural community.

flying in: back in Lithuania. immediately the impression of the system not having changed much. not like the transformations happening in Berlin. aside from the few tourist drags, the town is like it was four years ago. and the system still resonates a deep conservative polarity with an inertia still flowing in resistance to … anything new.

lunch with Mindaugas with the first of several very mediocre meals. and meet Viktorija and Agle, the enthusiastic and hard-working student union officers who are organizing the whole workshop. I am impressed immediately with their determination to make a difference. sadly it is exactly these kinds of spirits who are the ones who leave Lithuania because a realization that things are not changing.

got to tour the Academy, with all it’s meter-thick walls and pre-Gothic arched ceilings. no wonder the wi-fi (communications) network doesn’t work so well. the place is naturally shielded from anything, it is part of some older church construction. a convent chapel or so. along with a 1970′s-era structure which is quite intense. in the center of the complex are two major churches, St. Francis’ and the Bernardine. there were the big changes from the East-West polarization collapsing, but since then there are few if any shifts in the faculty, and worse, the mentality. departments are rigidly defined by materialist agendas and territories of control. students are given only cursory freedom to innovate. huh? how do they survive. stoic, a little like Icelanders, but dreaming of more, with Europe at the doorstep. thank god for the Erasmus exchange program which allows the most adventurous to escape to better things.

Alvydas, head of the Media Department, the most open situation in the Academy, mentions again the idea of inviting me back as guest faculty, but I have reservations. on one hand any place is tolerable for a year, but it would be a serious challenge to cope with the conservative vectors in the social system.

we stay in rooms reserved at the academy hostel, in the guest’s wing, with windows opening on a small street that is so loud, it’s hard to carry on a conversation with the window even cracked open. the garbage truck rattles the windows and so does each car blasting up the street. stone walls, narrow streets, no speed limits, bad roads — equals intense noise levels.