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

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

Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

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

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

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

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

Migrating Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

this was a night of the full moon, and the eclipse which takes place here in the early morning, well before sunrise, deeply affects the character of sleep. noting the next total lunar eclipse to be seen in North America is on the winter solstice 2010. I’m there!

and, I still haven’t found a vessel to pour milk from for my tea. I bought a small tea thermos a couple weeks ago in Kreutzberg, one that holds four cups or so. I take this to the desk with a small clear glass to drink from. but as I have to have my tea with milk, I need a small vessel of milk. so far, I’ve tried every option available in the flat. everything spills or dribbles! I may have to buy some small milk decanter. maybe a special antique if it leaps across my path. this reminds me of a previous long-term search a decade or more ago for a decent letter-opener. I had a nice hand-carved wooden one from Ghana, but it split, and I was never able to find another which fit my demands — good design, sharp, safe, efficient, nice material.

I just want to drink my tea while writing in concentrated peace and not leave blobs of drying milk on the desk.

anyway, the writing process. uff. this morning I have yet another stupid realization about my own process (doh!). the writing can be a script, a prescription to action, a narrative about possible action. and my narrow thoughts around a substantive text as a necessity for personal viability in the social system is a phantasm. actions based in the ideas that are danced around in the text can generate that viability as well. actions are often promoters of ‘better’ viability. (what is viability anyway? survival, thriving, materially, spiritually?) I always imagined myself as a person of action, but there is at least some tendency to talk and to words. what is done as action is often in the passive mode (observing, recording). actions that grow from that process are of ambient character — that is, they take the form of atmospheric presences, not active stances, positions, opinions. opinion was not accepted as a child. yes, interesting. so now, the last word is important. teaching allows for last words, although I consciously ask, in a classroom, for someone else to make the last word(s).

so, one conclusion is that, yes, the creation of a performance/exhibition situation that illustrates the idea (the script) is just as good as writing a text about it. the only difference is the social scale of audience.

of course, the dialogue, the one-to-one, as I define and act upon it, is a powerful (socially?) transformative process. but the relation of that action to social viability is highly … disconnected? I mean, there is the direct connection between the vital process of creating and sustaining a human community around ones-Self, or of embedding ones-Self in an extended community and ones survival, but this definition of survival seems to be somehow oblique to that of larger scale social viability. am I missing something obvious?

not sure where the link to Michael Shanks site comes up, but the syllabus for his course Ten Things is deLightful and incisive. he’s got some really interesting thoughts on the life of objects, the presence of humans, and the history of both.

If we look at processes as well as discrete objects, we can be led into a myriad of connections and trajectories. In the heterogeneous networking that is the engineering of a thing, there is no end to ramification. An artifact disperses through its scenarios, networks and genealogies of origination, manufacture, distribution, use and discard.

Interpretation, as re-articulation, can track certain affiliations or lines of connection, as I sketched with the aryballos. There is always more that remains unsaid, unacknowledged, unseen, because interpretation may not go down a particular track. This is so evident in archaeological fieldwork, or indeed in any scientific research, where there is always a choice to be made of what matters to the research interest. What is left behind, ignored or discarded is the background noise of history and experience. This is far from inconsequential. First, because something important may have been overlooked. Science constantly takes a second look at things and finds something that was missed. Second, because things stand out as significant against this background; without it there could be no story, no message, no understanding. Third, because this is the noise of the ambient everyday work that makes society what it is; it is the noise of the life of things constantly reweaving our social fabric. — Michael Shanks

I recently tracked down Andreas Voigt, a documentary film-maker that I met back in the early 1990′s at a film festival in Reykjavík. He was present for the screening of his deeply moving black-and-white features made in and around Leipzig in the late 80′s and early 90′s during the early post-Cold Wars days (Letztes Jahr – Titanic and Leipzig im Herbst). He emails me that his most recent documentary, Mit Rentiernomaden über den Ural is on tonight. Christian and I watch while Steffi is out at choir practice. very fine work.

back in a classroom. talking about data – information – knowledge – intelligence – wisdom. signal-to-noise ratios. adaptability, chain-of-command, defined functions, trend analysis, long tail, lexis-nexus, The WELL, protocols and standards, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, social infrastructures, complexity, hierarchy, networks, order and disorder, economy of attention, business models, power, money, socially-defined exchange, globalization of culture, and so on. I am a teacher, I am only human.

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

this marks a shifting point for the travelog for the next weeks, months likely. landed in Berlin on this effort to focus in place on writing. very unsure of the outcome, but the attempt is necessary to explore whether or not text production is possible, and by social weight of text, whether social viability of the pathway is an illusion or a reality. success or failure will not particularly matter, but will determine future pathways. so, writing will be away from this forum mostly if I can maintain a disciplined way. it will also be away from email and mailing list. teaching will proceed as necessary, but with more limited virtual connection. if you are heading to Berlin, let me know, though, I won’t be a total monk. nor will I be a saint.

chilling out, some waiting, planning the spring which seems to be falling in place (nicely). a second teaching gig comes up, et al. as well, some other future teaching possibilities. falling into some order and potential, although the bigger questions remain unanswered. the discipline and focus to create in textual realms remains the greatest challenge.

landed back in Bedford with the clan after some cold pushing and shoving of one of the cars, the Prius, up the driveway from the ski house. cold. cold. cold.

A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. — Henry Adams

up at 0430, out the door at 0440, on the s-bahn by 0458, at the airport at 0550, on the plane at 0645, into Köln-Bonn at 0800, through Köln-Deutz at 0845, arrive at the Academy by 0900.

breakfast with Zil and a quick tour of the Academy — haven’t been here for years since visiting Nils Roeller back in 1997 to see what the progress was on the Flusser archive among other things.

Zil and I share ideas on teaching, art, creative active, facilitation, corporate be-ing, the desert, and so on. a very nice meeting with the unknown Other. as Miga and Hubertus are developing a collaborative project with Zil, I do hope to jump in with some seminars on collaborative creativity. we’ll see.

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.

over in Lübeck, meet miga and then head to lunch with Andreas at Nui which I remember from the teaching at ISNM before. had to get some outline of what is happening to the slowly sinking Titanic and what is required from me when I do a short course on e-culture in the spring.

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/

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

so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on…

questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:

Why are you looking for a unified theory?

What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it’s not just an accessory)?

How can the energy affect the technical model — for example, social networks in the internet?

Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?

How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously — wouldn’t there be a problem with time?

How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?

What if everyone shared John’s worldview, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?

If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?

Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?

Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger — without giving it back — in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?

Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?

Since we try to create a balance between “flow” and “block” in order to reach a good level, could we integrate “chaos” in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?

class begins. another configuration. not so comfortable in my teaching skin after all this time away. but so far, seems to be a workable group. the vocal along with the silent. the brave and the timid. the left-brain and the right. time is the chief enemy, only five days for this one.

class begins. another configuration. not so comfortable in my teaching skin after all this time away. but so far, seems to be a workable group. the vocal along with the silent. the brave and the timid. the left-brain and the right. time is the chief enemy, only five days for this one.

still reading too much of other people’s stuff. need to concentrate on producing rather than consuming.

To oppose these bad habits and the systems that embody them, as well as to suggest alternatives to them, is enough to get branded ‘anti-technology’ these days. Again and again, we are urged to celebrate the latest so-called ‘innovations’ regardless of the deranged commitments and disastrous consequences they often involve. What passes for leadership in our technoculture echoes the corruption of the Renaissance popes and foreshadows a new reformation. As Martin Luther King once observed, ‘A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.’ — Langdon Winner

searching the net, pleased to see that Langdon is still around, teaching at RPI or so.

finally solved the tech problem of the real audio/video stream files from the archive playing properly in a pop-up window. have the space on the tech-no-mad server to load up all media archives, and now it’s just a matter of organizing the html files, and making sure the audio and video windows are sized properly. it’ll be nice to get all that stuff back up and running for posterity. the stream index page is full of those ancient-looking 320×240 streams that were pumped out during the time I was at Boulder, teaching at CU, with access to phat-pipe Real Helix server. a few others go back to true pre-historic times with 160×120 files from the initial neoscenes occupation project in Tornio in 1998. the accretionary process that is the core of this web space goes onwards to an unknown end. with a minuscule audience. and no prospects.

raining on arrival, raining on departure, missed a huge downpour walking to the hotel where I caught the airport shuttle. Amurikan couple on board, from Portland, returning home after a couple months in Oz, revisiting places where they went as elementary teaching recruits in rural Australia in the early 1970′s.

in the airport. Dr. Phil playing on the plasma monitors. a cleaning lady is hypnotized, looking up into the susserating brightness. between the shopping possibilities, the food options, the sonic and atmospheric environment, and the general ambiance, this place would be as close to hell as one would want to be. the consuming heaven of the first world. active shopping mitigates the alienation. passive looking plunges even the most hardcore resister into a receiver. cracks open an interstitial space by invading the social self and occupying that self, pushing aside any non-social responses. and if that isn’t enough, the high-security regime underlines every possible line of action.

and then onto the plane. no comfort, though there is an empty seat in the row. bulkhead. exhausted. night comes unexpectedly quick. gaining a day. arriving four hours earlier than I depart. listening to Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451. in the air near the Hawaiian Islands. so it goes. I had forgotten that he used this phrase whenever he mentions an individual’s demise.

several projects/groups come up on the radar this week — Woytek sends an announcement about his locating Helsinki blog designed to host psychogeographical activities within the city of Helsinki. Annu sends a note from her residency in Japan about her personal pages which do include some of her image-based art projects. also, the discos invisibles collective in Tijuana, who were part of the remote presence event in Helsinki.

04 2007′, ’23 10927

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!

hmmm, combinations of local circumstances impede encounters. structural deficiencies route possible crossings into different spaces. turtle-like, looking out onto a complex and unknown landscape and socio-cultural milieu.

find any openings for contact, sussing-out, phishing, checking in, checking out. finding where there is a break in the construct, gaps. small TAZ’s crouched and ready. intervene, connect.

and on another note entirely. sadly, transcendentally. hearing on the underside of the planet. or the reverse top. as shadows point to Antarctica. another giant come to an end in this world. how to expect that another world is? or that there is some way of standing in both for more than a while.

So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

interview passes smoothly, no need for the pre-tension of notes. great pressure to articulate in brief the complex topics of life-practices. the results will be known in a week already. fast and efficient compared to the debacle of the other recent US university interaction. it will be a tough choice if there is an affirmative. there is a deeply-felt distance from everything I know in the world, being here. settling into yet another life here. finding a place. Sydney is urban, though with a slick easiness of calm inner relaxation. huh? words can’t circumscribe it yet. at all. haven’t made any photographs yet either. a few audio samples, but nothing definitive. walking home after sunset, the skyline of downtown is silhouetted against a singularly sharp sky.

Life is impossible at high temperatures. That’s why I have reached the conclusion that anguished people, whose inner dynamism is so intense that it reaches paroxysm, and who cannot accept normal temperatures, are doomed to fall. The destruction of those who live unusual lives is an aspect of life’s demonism, but it is also an aspect of its insufficiency, which explains why life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life’s normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life. — E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair

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

Workshop continues at a rare intensity. Only a good scene. Fine mix of intellects and spirits. Something good will come from this. While the situation in Sydney apparently continues to unfold, but with what characteristics and forms and potentials I do not know. There is a degree of stress heading to the unknown place.

Two participants, coming respectively from Melbourne and Southern California, used couch surfing sites for housing — I may need to make that scene in Oz if housing alternatives run out.

But the number of sand I know, and the measure of drops in the ocean;
The dumb man I understand, and I hear the speech of the speechless:
And there hath come to my soul the smell of a strong-shelled tortoise
Boiling in caldron of bronze, and the flesh of a lamb mingled with it;
Under it bronze is laid, it hath bronze as a clothing upon it. — Pythian
prophetess

No doubt a pithy oracle. Herodotus quotes. From the histories. Run across that after skyping with Loki around the histories of the Greco-Persian Wars — he saw the movie 300. Is there a difference between understanding history derived from Herodotus in translation and Hollywood scripting? Are the histories essentially the same in that they are subjective accounts of an individual as translated through a series of other individuals? As Herodotus is the primary source for any information regarding the wars, Hollywood has some relation to this, but what is the texture of relation? And the idea of telling the relation visually (and sonically) and in two hours. Complete. No answer. Though reviews point to the obvious glorification of the defeat of the Persian by the infidel hyper-militaristic Americo-Spartans.

whoa, way behind. but the email inbox gets more and more full, a tidal wave, or at least a tidal surge, about to cover nose with a sludge of glimmering words. back in Helsinki. having to take the extra time to type the word Helsinki slowly, otherwise it gets typed wrong.

workshop migrates into the second day. dialogues generate, pathways open up, words, energies are exchanged.

meet Tapio at mbar in the Lasipalatsi, where my old cafe9.net office was. the center of town, different now since the huge Kamppi underground bus terminal complex is finished. that complex is behind the Lasipalatsi, and looms like a mini-Tian’anmen (Gate of Accepting Heavenly Mandate), though the Finnish translation must be something like Gate of Accepting Earthly Commerce (Portille hyväksyä maallisen kaupankäyntiä)??

gallery space begins to acquire a lived-in look in the last couple days. Cady and Mari oversee the conversion from a booming white concrete cube into a rather comfortable space where conversations are actually possible. definitely not an optimal space. workshop begins this morning. slowly rising from the ground.

the view from the living room. the Waag Society has one set of offices in the building to the right, on Nieuwmarkt, it’s the oldest secular structure in Amsterdam. this complex includes the Teatrum Anatomicum the best-known space to public dissections…

over at the Pakhuis de Zwijger offices, a too-short meeting with some of the staff, to explore research methodologies that extend into art-making. one hour simply is not enough to generate dialogue — it is good only for talking about issues at people. not with people. the network develops at the speed of life. later, dialogues spring up out of the initial meeting context, with vigor — accentuating the problematic one-hour theory. dialogues which are the point and an expression of (my) methodology per se.

also met the current keyworx development crew, Lodewijk & Jokke. to see the whole new Open Source paradigm, including the web-based patcher. looking forward to alpha and beta testing!

trying to get more job applications in, but time is so packed with meetings, there is only peripheral possibility. but the UNSW/COFA one is in and good. at least the interview process will be in hand whilst in Sydney.

Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other — fatal — moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feedback loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walk man: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard

is it worth it in the end?

Call for Workshop Applicants:

Remote Presence: Streaming Life

Presented by John Hopkins as part of the pixelache 2007 Architectures of Participation Festival and in collaboration with Artists’ Association MUU

Dates: March 21-23 & 26-31, 2007
Location: MUU gallery & Media Base, L?nnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki, Finland
Hours: 1030 to 1630
Final Event 31 March, 2007

http://www.neoscenes.net/teach/pixel/index.php

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

In the ubiquity of networked media spaces where we distribute our wireless lives, what happens to our creative processes? How may we build a functioning architecture of participation for productive collaboration and interaction between the Self and Others?

This dynamic workshop will bring participants to a new state of awareness about their own creative practice. It will accomplish this through an exploration of human collaboration and connection within the space of networks. It explores conceptual and practical issues around creative engagement, finishing with the hands-on production of a live and online streaming-media network event with global participation.

The workshop is open to anyone from any discipline with an interest in collaboration and creative engagement at both a local and remote scale. There are NO technical background requirements. People with previous experience in streaming media, performance, digital audio and video, VJ work, etc, who wish to push their practice to a new collaborative level are also welcome.

On Saturday, 31 March, the final day of the workshop will be a live & online event. Workshop participants will not only develop digital content for the event, but will also help facilitate all aspects of it including the technical infrastructure, the local ambience, and the remote coordination.

For detailed information visit:

http://www.neoscenes.net/teach/pixel/index.php

A maximum of 15 participants will be chosen from local and international applicants with the idea to bring together a wide spectrum of cross-disciplinary energies.

THE WORKSHOP IS FREE OF CHARGE.

Those interested will need to send:

NAME:

LOCATION:

EMAIL:

Along with your reasons for interest in workshop and a brief background (studies, creative work, and activities) to:

neopixel@pixelache.ac

DEADLINE for Applications 5 March 2007.

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.

back up a familiar wash in the Marble Mountains, close to another Wilderness-designated area. arriving at dusk after an intermittent drive across the Sonoran desert from Prescott. conversations range over media, culture, education, social systems, software, teaching, art, and, uh, what else? weather, geology.

full-moon hiking up the wash into a zone of chaotic conglomerates, alluvium, diorites, granites, limestones.

blast not having a digital copy of this essay, but as it is one that I use in teaching on occasion, and one that brilliantly explores the spiritual dimension of the alienation of the age we are stepping through — so I type it by hand from the catalog printed by the Anthology Film Archives in New York on the occasion of a screening of Elder’s Book of All the Dead in November 1988. I was not present at that screening, but was at the prior premiere of the first 18 hours of the 40+ hour cycle which happened in the Film Studies building at CU-Boulder. there were just three of us who sat through the whole weekend event in an ancient classroom in the now-razed Film Studies Building. a handful of others made parts of the reel-after-reel intensity. it was a transformative experience — from the simple physical immersion that 18 hours of film induced, but also the visual energy from the work itself, and the intellectual rigor that was embedded into the narrative and visual contents. it has resonated for years as a source. neoscenes dreaming and the performative visual-sonic works that came around that impulse owe something deep and intangible to the Book of All the Dead. I was deLighted that Bruce assented to my hosting of the essay, adding to the small collection of ‘third-party‘ essays replicated for interest and convenience.

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

Kate Armstrong and I try out urbantells.net as their first guinea pigs. tech problems start everything off. and seem nearly as ubiquitous as the number of devices deployed at the exhibition.

the polar/solar brunch ends up with Ed, Ken, and I talking over lunch for several hours — nice, catching up — mapping the network, teaching, working, net-working. we then wander over to the CRUMB project run by Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham to have some tea and cakes and some interesting conversation on strategies for survival in the culture sphere.

yeah, isea ’06. stories begin to accumulate as to failures of the local infrastructure in support of the program of incoming artists and their projects.

later, doing the gallery crawl with Ken, run into Mathias. catch some interesting work and good food.

floating through a high country day. mountain bike ride after breakfast. up to the trail head into the West Elk Wilderness. back out, Sage keeping pace even on the downhills. pack up and make the circle around the north rim of the Black Canyon, and down through Delta. saw a gal parked having a picnic. single bike on the rear rack, like me. wondered about how one crosses paths. make a stop at the Ute Indian Museum.

it’s far from present Ute lands, and most of Colorado was once populated by one or another bands of Utes who are now reduced to three small reservations in Colorado and Utah. another dreadful history of crimes against humanity. are we really better than that now?

seek wisdom, not knowledge. knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

to go on a vision quest is to go into the presence of the Great Mystery.

the soul will have no rainbow if the eye has no tear.

another stop at the Gunnison National Forest main office to check out any information they might have, as well as inquiring about jobs. looks like everything is through the JobsUSA website. one path to travel. have to look into that again when online next. Ridgeway seems interesting again, with some commercial buildings for sale. question is, what to do in these small towns to survive? could computer consulting work? construction is no longer an option with the L5 disk acting up, could be major trouble in the near future. website construction? teaching high school? vocational tech? uff. re-forming trajectories seems at the same time daunting and full of possibility. how can it be problematic when so many others are employed? and so many have managed to gather so much capital in this country. but the path between scraping poor-ness and abundant wealth seems so … arbitrary. there is no clear specifications except for self-confidence.

end the day almost at tree line, up Bailey Creek, off Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan National Forest. the luxury of dispersed camping (finding places up 4×4 roads that are not developed, but make excellent camp sites) is appreciated. no cost, only fuel to get there, and that expense suggested that instead of an immediate return to Prescott, that I take several days and enjoy being back in Colorado and check out several new places. in Curecanti Creek, I saw only one car in two days, and up this rugged route, doubt I’ll see anyone until I head out and down and south west tomorrow. feeling a little guilty being out of phone range, but have no messages except one from Gary, so, figure all is well in the greater telecom world. make a short video of sunset on a nearby peak. and in the process of reviewing the tape after finishing it, I discover that all the footage that I shot of Kevin’s memorial in NYC in March had that effing bad audio. really disgusting — Bill, Stefan, Martha, Rosemary, and others talking about their memories of Kevin. the glitch seems due to bad mike contacts, or a dirty record head. it pops up randomly, and has affected some other critical footage previously. and the pondering on the idea of getting a 3-ccd hd prosumer cam comes back up and/or a Nikon prosumer digital still camera. what else to do with capital? shopping is a dumb way to make a cash flow (negatively). better to keep the investments growing and multiplying. and purchase only items that can definitely be positive cash generators.

whatever the end result, work is the next necessary step to confront. that and the June 18th Month of Sundays performance. finishing up with the house, packing things in a way that maintains some viability to several pathways of action. but meanwhile, watch the sky and the land.

Lillian Christine Hopkins, beloved mother, grand-mother, great-grand-mother, friend, and teacher, age 87, died peacefully in her home on Monday, April 11, 2006, following a three year battle with leukemia.

She was born December 2, 1918, in the town of Melville, Prince Edward Island, Canada, to the late John Malcolm and Lillian Kedy MacKenzie. Her early schooling was in Boston. She graduated from Gordon College, Boston, Massachusetts in 1945, and completed her master’s degree at Western Maryland University in 1971. On August 11, 1944, she was united in marriage to Cleveland Hopkins at Park Street Church in Boston, Massachusetts.
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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.

Nina sees a project through from a distant beginning to a colorful end, or at least to a plateau, a stopping-point with AuroraLive — a collaborative live/online project happening on 05 February – tomorrow! I recall back to 1998 when she and Stephen Kovats visited Tornio when I was teaching there – on their way to the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory for consultations. the aurora borealis is a scintillating visual experience. catching the eye at unexpected moments, mind cannot first untangle the electromagnetic information that the darkened sky is swirling, and neck immediately gets a crink between the cold and the angle of view. unlike the dark-sky spectacle Lyrids in temperate June or the Persieds in warm August — too damn cold to lie down and watch the aurora usually. needful of dark warmth, no Lights, back to earthen gravity floor and face to the eye-soaking mesmerizations. once I saw them in Arizona. as this is a darksky place, especially to the north, on the rim of the horizon, a glow where no far city plasma should be. I discounted the vision until confirmed later. at the latitude of Casablanca. a reminder of polar lives.

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.

here’s a side view of the titanium in my back — up to the right. the cylinder in the middle is located at the core of the L3 vertebra. and the HUGE wood screws are in the L2 and L4. sheesh.

sliding into fall. this is the first year that I have not been working, teaching somewhere in the world in the month of September since 1986. instead, nursing body to some state of health, slowly. bored with reading and other forms of mediated consumption. can’t sit long enough to really do concentrated work on new videos and such, but do want to at least get one new dvd done with the 3 or 4 new videos finished before summer started.

everything is in slow motion except for time passing rapidly. now more than two months from this cataclysmic accident. no meaning to interpret in the event and the subsequent process of recovery.

talking by phone to folks occasionally, hardly doing email, don’t understand the malaise.

A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks) [editor's note: this initial proposal never was submitted following the accident of 04 July 2005 which set life on another trajectory.]

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. (more …)