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

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

Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

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

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

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

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

Migrating Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:

The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.

wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance??? when one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. how can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? the web of dependencies is both wide and deep. can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. there is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon. that baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.

the dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. a dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. it consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.

how can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? it is a relative issue. clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to that system. it is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. from covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. it is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the Self in relation to the system.

in the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct likely created by a subset of military technologies. but trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. this is where the Self engages the Other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of what’s out there. trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other critical in the measure of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway which trust must follow to be realized. what is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous Others. what does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?

every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.

more on this in future rants…

A jaunt in chilly weather down the hill to Esslingen, a self-proclaimed Middle Ages town, turns out to be quite nice, with a bracing hike to the Dicke Turm. A third round of Elizabeth’s Thanksgiving fare is called for! Jeff drops me at the airport in the early evening for the flight back north to Hamburg.

Car-plane-bus-taxi to a very empty Düppelstraße 15. I race around the house getting ready for the de Hoeksteen broadcast which ends up going so late that I finally sign off before my interview. Maybe the year-end broadcast in December will be better anyway. The half-dead PowerBook is really causing me some stress especially in situations like this — with the backLight on the LCD broken, I can only use the machine with an external monitor hooked up to it. I begin to survey what’s available on ebay. To replace the exact machine will be at least USD 600, but I will get a later model, as the 1.25 Ghz model seems to have a collective history of glitches (bad latch, this is the second LCD for the machine, and not to forget the dastardly motherboard breakdown in 2005. Better to get a 1.67 Ghz model which will run a bit more expensive — the prices are averaging around USD 800 for those. On the selling side, to have one of these models retain such a high resale value when three or four years old shows at least the perceived quality which they have over a comparable PC model. But technological instability just dogs my steps these days. iPod toasted, laptop fried, miniDV cam trashed. A consumptive electronics low point.

Dinner at Aapka with Fernanda, Mari, Mika, and Miga. Good, cheap. Afterwards we go to to look at Miga’s car which has a dry radiator. hmmm. have to fix that!

Computer still screwed up — the back-Light on the flat-screen has a bad connection and starts to short out when I start the machine up. It is an intermittent problem and is accompanied with a nice crackling sound of a bad electrical contact. Putting off the eventuality of taking the dang thing apart to check it out. Thinking that Volker will have the right tools in Köln next week. Fortunately Miga has a spare external monitor which works as a usable substitute. Just another stress on the system. It first happened the same day of the SQL disaster. faugh!

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/

and then, first looking down, ahmmm, then looking back. Bremen finished, passing away on the train, now the work of helping Christian and Steffi with this big move. tough situation. when energy expressions rely on stability and known situations, up comes more-or-less chaos. how to optimize assistance?

on an ICE train, always a wonder how a country manages to field such functional chunks of technology. how great it would be in the US with such a system. what would it really cost? given that there was such an infrastructure at one time, that the right-of-ways are at least partially in place still. but the will of people to invest in de-privatized impulses is weak at best. not understanding that privatization brings a chaos of fragmented infrastructures which, driven by a profit/shareholder motive, rarely invest in long-term improvements (to benefit the people who they ‘serve’). so the US has an infrastructure which crumbles — especially now with the constant drain of power from this stupid war. which no-one except the psychologically unbalanced and stupid president, his feckless handlers, and his clueless followers want. the result is a morally and fiscally impoverished nation.

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.

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

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.

miss a meeting with Angela, got the wrong cafe in Hyde Park, there are two. sent a SMS, but got no response. ended up doing more audio work — of the Salvation Army Band in front of the big ANZAC Memorial. called her, but she must not have had her phone on. wandered down to Darling Harbor to sit and write about amplification, surrounded by amplified and simulated culture. hmm, the relationship between amplification and simulation could also be interesting to explore. where amplification is a (possible) subset of simulation. because the amplified signal is no longer the thing itself, but a simulation of the thing itself with a change of character, volume in the case of auditory works, intensification in the general sense — the intensification of a particular neurological input signal whatever the input is. at base, electrical — as in the stimulation of the auditory nerves. so, an intensification and sometimes narrowing of frequency (bandwidth) of the signal. simulation is also about the re-creation of an original signal — one whose characteristics are well known — a re-production of those characteristics. the better-known the parameters, the

better that the signal can be re-produced. always a reduction, always not the thing itself. always the reductive. efficient perhaps, amplifying the essential. but who determines the essential? that is embedded in the technology which is a determinate (determinating) product of the social system. therein is one source of a significant skewing factor in the presence of these amplified and simulated signals. that the characteristic of these signals are being largely determined by a dominant social system which may or may not be optimized for the individual, or for even the greater good. because the generating system for these re-productions has a long-term directional inertia coming from the technological production process — the larger the infrastructure (the more generally and specifically) complex the social production system, the greater the inertia, the greater the inertial resistance to changing conditions, the less relevant the amplified signal is to the individual or collective itself.

Superstitious or what? Dawning like other days. Up at the crack of (early to sleep after perusing some Plato (The Symposium)). Birds cranking away. No particular breeding time, apparently when it rains it means raucous amorousness. No rain, but just the arrival of daytime. Something to crow about.

Jumping around today. Met one faculty member at COFA, then on downtown to meet Ian Gwilt over at the University of Technology. Catching up and mapping out the states/conditions/problematics of university educational institutions among other issues. There’s a nice exhibition of large-scale portrait prints at the UTS:Gallery (digital prints, I wonder — very sensuous paper surfaces) from Jon Lewis of images he made in Bougainville. And later, meeting Anna, finally, to have the beginning of a more long-term conversation. There was one point that we skimmed across — the idea of setting up a consulting framework for corporate advising — because the problems in any social structure may be the same. Academic, corporate, creative, politic. And so on. Beginning to expand the scope of foot-travel, changing routes, checking things out slowly. Still have not internalized any form of orientation. The harbor lies east-west, and there are a variety of towering office and apartment blocks, and the downtown skyline. But the topography is contorted and wrinkled like the Coast Range immediately south of San Francisco proper, and so, no easy sights to maintain. With only a one-page Google printout of the immediate neighborhood, the mapping-dependent side of orienteering is limited. Get lost. That and get to the beach. Tomorrow. Bondi. Or bust.

Now and then — but this is rare — one hears such words as piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from the lips whence one would not expect such pronunciations to come. There is a superstition prevalent in Sydney that this pronunciation is an Australianism, but people who have been Home — as the native reverently and lovingly calls England — know better. It is ‘costermonger.’ All over Australasia this pronunciation is nearly as common among servants as it is in London among the uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of people. That mislaid y is rather striking when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to enable it to show up. — Mark Twain in The Birth of Sydney

rising too early again, out to Turku with a few hard-cores to tour the exhibition Digitally Yours that Andy Best had curated. not enough sleep. even our tireless Pixelache host, Juha, was unable to roll out of bed in time for the train, so it ended up there were only five of us who actually made the trip, but it was well worth it.

begin to get a migraine after seeing the show at the Ars Nova museum — most of the artists were there, so we were able to interact with them directly. I recorded several of the talks, so, hope to get that online shortly. great also to have a bit of time to spend with Mukul and Manu with their deLightful boy.

Digitally Yours examines the relationship between technology and humanity. The exhibition maps out how everyday life and art have changed over the period when digital technologies have become commonplace. The artists in the exhibition all use digital technologies but their relationship to it is critical. They consider the relationship between man and machine, the dreams and promises, the realities and threats. The works in the exhibition ponder the fundamental questions of humanity in this globalized information networked world, while building on a new type of collaboration between the artist and the viewer.

Animaatiokone Industries (FI); Laura Beloff (FI) & Erich Berger (AT); Elina Mitrunen (FI); Chris Burden (US); Anita Fontaine (AU/US); Phil Coy (UK); Ed Burton (UK) & Zachary Lieberman (US); Juha Huuskonen (FI) & Tuomo Tammenpää (FI); Manu Luksch (AT/UK) Christian Nold (UK); Stanza (UK); Soda (UK); Markus Renvall (FI); Åsa Ståhl (SE) & Kristina Lindström (SE); Pia Tikka (FI)

on the way back, I get off before Helsinki to have dinner with David and Maria at their new place in the countryside. unfortunately, my head it really done in by then, so, I’m hardly good company. David drives me to Linnunlaulu where I finish packing. the migraine dissipates somewhat and I am able to go to the closing party for an hour to say goodbye to folks. then off to crash for another even earlier rise and 26 hours of travel torture.

hanging out with the family. Dana is the initial portrait for the New Year’s project — a return to the work that I dropped in the interim between stopping with black&white 35mm film-based and getting the new Nikon D200 SLR which makes that work once again possible. in between, a hiatus of six years, while having access to a variety of digital cameras, the serious lack of one critical feature made my work impossible. that feature is the near-instantaneous synchronization of the shutter — when the shutter-release button is pressed the shutter goes without hesitation. the D200 is the first digital cam that I’ve had where there is no delay. that millisecond delay in cheaper cams makes the difference between the picture and a wasted shot. it’s all about synchronicity between my eyes, the collaborative subject, and the mediatory machine.

another Furtherfield review:

into the second decade of this travelog. following through the long and winding road of countless kilometers of body movement and mind floating above the surface, suspended in the dark matter between two infinite half-spaces. leaving reduced fragments of primary technology — words — behind, scattered in frozen wake-full-ness. no thought that it would persist so long, accretion volume and visuals and sonic samples. until it becomes a primary manifestation of present being. no more no less.

Back to the iDC list — consistently marvel how the topics on the list draw me out, especially when I am so overwhelmed with the local in-ma-face reality. The following in response to Josh Levy’s comment (which one in a series of comments under the subject — undermining open source: iTunesU):

> i think Apple has been let off the hook for a long time especially by cultural
> activists. Bill Gates and Microsoft have been an easy bugbear, but Apple are
> monopolists too and have been since they first started making an OS that works
> only with their own hardware.

Outi, a former student sends this link http://www.liveherring.org, a project she’s been working on.

and more iDC mailing list commentary

We Have Never Been Modular…

Thanks to everybody who commented on my text “Remix and Remixability” (November 16, 2005). It was provoked by reading about web 2.0 and all the excitement and hype (as always) around it, so indeed I am “following the mainstream view” in certain ways. But I would like to make it clear that ultimately we are talking about something which does not just apply to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web Services. We are talking about the logic of modularity which extends beyond the Web and digital culture…

Modularity has been the key principle of modern mass production. Mass production is possible because of the standarisation of parts and how they fit with each other – i.e. modularity. Although there are historical precedents for…

Maintaining consistency in this huge, constantly changing network is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Like algorithms, they serve to specify exactly how something will be done. Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no matter where, what, or who applies them. Consequently, some elements of standards can be embedded in machines or systems. When they work, standards lubricate the construction of technological systems and make possible widely shared knowledge. — Paul N. Edwards

Edwards, P.N., 2004. A Vast Machine: Standards as Social Technology. Science, 304(7 May 2004), pp.827-828.

Measurement is a comparison process in which the value of a quantity is expressed as the product of a value and a unit; that is, Quantity = {a numerical value} x {unit} where the unit is an agreed-upon value of a quantity of the same type. The concept of a quantity such as length is independent of the associated unit; the length is the same whether it is measured in feet or meters. A standard is a physical realization of the definition, with an agreed-upon value to be used as a reference. — Jeff Flowers

Flowers, J., 2004. The Route to Atomic and Quantum Standards. Science, 306(19 November 2004), pp.1324-1330.

taking Frieder’s thought-provoking commentary on my proposal draft and grinding through a thought process that in a infinitesimal way is becoming more precise and confident in dealing with the subject material of the thesis. this evening I synthesize the phrase continuum of relation to describe the continuous field of action and dynamic that constitutes our presence in the world. it is the continuum where technology is implemented (apparently) to increase the probability that understanding can be propagated across multiple human subjects, when, at the same time this altruistic goal is promoted, that exact technology injects uncertainty, a degree of attenuation, and a general increase in the complexity of the communicative act! uff! what to do? but I like the phrase continuum of relation — Google it, there are only 26 entries, and none of them in any way overlap in meaning at all. I find that comforting to be obscure. and, perusing the nettime archive, in a discussion with Felix and Geert, I read a 1999 Howard Rheingold article On Innovation and the Amateur Spirit where he quotes the daddy of the WWW:

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. — Tim Berners-Lee

Man’s comparative advantage in energy production has been greatly reduced in most situations — to the point where he is no longer a significant source of power in our economy. He has been supplanted also in performing many relatively simple and repetitive eye-brain-hand sequences. He has retained his greatest comparative advantage in: (1) the use of his brain as a flexible general-purpose problem-solving device, (2) the flexible use of his sensory organs and hands, and (3) the use of his legs, on rough terrain as well as smooth, to make this general-purpose sensing-thinking-manipulating system available wherever it is needed. — Herbert Simon

this is a clear statement of the resultant state of the human-technological system (though it does not consider the relationship between the repetitive motions of the machine (technology) and the social system that surrounds both the human and the machine which supplants the human). and it is precisely this relationship that generates the comparative advantage in favor of the machine. the human (to be supplanted) is a participant in the social infrastructure that generates the machine. this social infrastructure comes about as an emergent system as humans come together. any participant in the system gives their lived bio-energy into the system. the system, as an organized entity, needs this influx of energy to maintain its structure. when enough of this energy comes in, a degree of organization that can produce, for example, a moon landing, is formed. the relative state of advance in a technological product is directly related to the ability and efficiency of the social system to gather energy from its constituent individuals. each specific technology is the product of a equivalent state of social order.

Numbers (1) and (2) above are separable, but it is critical to note that the relationship of the two factors are in the material(object) versus its cognate. [cognate meaning the abstracted (linguistic) re-presentation of that object necessitated through the cognitive problem-solving process that the brain undertakes versus the very real interactions of the body with the surrounding techno-social system. it is not necessary to separate (2) and (3) in this case, as they both relate to the expenditure of applied bio-energy.]

more notes on the time:money:energy issue — a quick read-through of Adam Smith on the subject, the topic of VALUE pops out. where value is the process of tagging (or relating) the object to its cognate in the re-presentative system (this being the system of international finance — where value must be negotiated dynamically in consideration of a plethora of factors — all of which are rooted in material measure and its cognate representative in dualistic relation. (i.e., weapons & politics). this dualistic relationship is “acted out” whenever a consumer consumes — trading money (a multifold cognate for a range of objects) for material(s). however, this act is always preceded by the consumer being a producer — or, more precisely, one who gives in lived bio-energy into the social system in order that there is an organized production mechanism to create the objects to be consumed).

hunting more background on the ‘structural holes’ issue that Burt raises in relation to the geometry of links in a social network. Goyal, in laying out the question of whether or not connectivity is a sustainable strategy, formulates the ground conditions.

We develop a simple model of network formation to address this question. We consider a setting where interaction between every pair of individuals generates a surplus. If two individuals are directly linked then they split this surplus equally, while if they are indirectly connected — there are other players in the ‘path” between them — then the division of surplus depends on the competition between these intermediaries. In this setting, there are three types of incentives for individuals to form links with others. The first incentive is the desire to create surpluses: individuals would like to join the network so as to create exchange possibilities which in turn create surpluses. The second incentive is related to the rewards from intermediation: players would like to place themselves between others in order to extract rents from intermediation. The third incentive arises out of the desire to avoid sharing surpluses with intermediaries; in other words, individuals will try to circumvent intermediate players to retain more of the surplus for themselves. — Sanjeev Goyal

this allusion to a surplus in the connection between two individuals is one of the first uses found in network theory that is in the direction of my research — where a core outcome of the series of bi-directional connections that occur in an open network is a surplus of energy. back to the 1+1=3 theory. the extraction of ‘rent’ however brings up an entirely different mechanism. the mechanism is the applied attenuation of social strictures (as applied through the full range of ‘technological’ mediation) that extracts energy from the pair of engaged individuals — in this case, the third party happens to be in control of the ‘spending’ of energy from that immediate social energy bank. so, two separate and very different dynamics happening, not degrees of the same mechanism.

counterpointing Bateson’s eclectic digressions with Ronald Burt’s social systemics seems to point to a schizophrenic day of reading. Bateson clearly saw the dangers of the flows that power social systems, where Burt sees opportunity for command-and-control through semi-distributed systems. His view on ‘social capital’ is a mapping of positions for maximizing influence that this form of capital offers. Bordieu suggested the trinity of economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital, it is the latter that seemed to popularly circumscribe the most influential aspects of human relations. And as a way of mapping power, it floats to the surface of social consciousness.

The myth of power, is of course, a very powerful myth; and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it… But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to all sorts of disaster… If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also come to see the world in terms of God versus man; élite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at the world can endure…

The whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable during the Pre-Cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. — Gregory Bateson

another oracle, or madman?

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. (more …)

Maintaining consistency … is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Like algorithms, they serve to specify exactly how something will be done. Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work, no matter where, what, or who applies them. Consequently, some elements of standards can be embedded in machines and systems. When they work, standards lubricate the construction of technological systems and make possible widely shared knowledge. — Paul Edwards, from A Vast Machine: Standards as Social Technology

reflecting on parallel universes, light musings surround the controversy that today ceased rumbling around CNOOC (Chinese National Offshore Oil Company) and Unocal (Union Oil of California). back when I worked for Unocal in the early 1980′s, it is hard to imagine any other response than hearty guffaws to the suggestion that, in 20 years the US oil concern would be up for auction with Chinese buyers out-bidding Chevron. no longer in contact with any of my colleagues from those days, I would be curious to hear their situations, if, indeed, they still are employed by the firm. times change the conditions of the market. Unocal has been an acquisition target since the early 80′s when I was there — when the infamous Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens was in hot pursuit of the company, such that the board tried to sink the company into multi-billion debt to make it less attractive. it is a different time indeed when a Chinese company, 70%-owned by the Chinese government, makes an aggressive bid to acquire a legacy US corporation. and on top of that, a company dealing with THE major strategic resource of the developed world of the 21st century. no wonder Washington hawks are screaming! after watching the entire Cspan-aired Senate hearings on this precise merger, I was astonished at the lack of intelligence in the expressions of the ‘experts’ called in by the Senate. so little understanding of the movement and evolution and change of power in a dynamic world. fighting or resisting inevitable power shifts is for the naive who cling to temporal power under highly conventional paradigms. it is clear that China is rising, and the US perhaps falling — in the broad sense. the empty cup tends to fullness, the full cup tends to emptiness. rather than deal with the realities of socio-political evolution, the Washington power-brokers cling to an out-dated and very static worldview. few seems to get Sun Tzu.

but how is it, these men and women who populate a corporate landscape, how do they live? remembering back to the instance of going on a executive retreat to an exclusive resort in Ojai, north of LA, for a 4-day review of Unocal’s status in the oil business. my task was to present at an informal seminar an overview of state-of-the-art technology and applications for gravity and magnetic in petroleum exploration. golf was on the schedule for a majority of the older execs, their bonding exercise. open bar helped with that. I got the feeling that everything simply went along a certain and safe pathway to the intended goal of regular paychecks which were fed into mortgages, car payments, and very short vacation splurges (only 10 days of holiday per year for the first 5 years). like a corral to tame the wild engineering student broncos. at the end of my briefing on the Colombia Llanos project, I showed a series of slides including portraits of the local peasants, the landscape, and the on-the-ground operation. It was very quiet when I was showing images of the people.

I have always maintained that my departure from the Big Oil scene was in no way an altruistic choice. this despite an early radicalization which included studying “The Communist Manifesto” in 7th grade — a fact that classmate Russ Werner picked up. he was the funniest kid in the junior high school, and the best cartoonist as well. he left a note in my yearbook addressed to the Pinko Commie Rat. no, that predilection did not factor in, though I can point to Roger Steffens program on KCRW, where I was a volunteer-member, The Reggae Beat brought the vibes of the Rastafarian belief system into high relief with guests the likes of Bob Marley, Alton Ellis, and Peter Tosh. If music can radicalize, it did. Bob Marley speaks as powerfully as any German philosopher! Jah Rastafari Makonnen! not to mention programs like “Alma del Barrrio” on KXLU “schizo-radio on the Left.”

I also recall, when living off of Lincoln and Ocean, taking a long slow look at a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard, running around $1200 at the time, now I really wonder what would have happened if I had bought that rather than a Nakamichi tape deck, a used 6’2″ twin-fin swallowtail surfboard, and a Fiat Spyder.

no, leaping from the Big Oil gravy train was merely the next step. on the eve of departure, the actual handing in a letter of resignation to Dennis Mett, the director of International Exploration, there was the huge Mombasa project that came up. For six months after I left, I would get occasional phone calls from Bill Sax, the VP of the International Division, asking if I wanted to continue working for Unocal and go to Africa for 6 weeks to oversee a mag survey from offshore up into the Great Rift Valley. by that time I was on another trajectory completely.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa. — T. Boone Pickens