you have stumbled upon a slowly evolving mediated space which is the next online evolution of the original neoscenes archive and network presence. it has subsumed the entire neoscenes travelog which began back in 1995. it rolled over to a frames-based site in 1999, and then to a php-based site in 2004, and now onto WordPress as of 2009. later in 2011-2, it will also extend greatly that time span with images, audio, and video from the long-standing off-line neoscenes archive. what’s this 1961-1962 “50 years on” material? it is one dimension of the use of the (b)log as the accompaniment of the text of my Ph.D. thesis which touches on many of the topics surfaced here combined with my creative media practice. there is an evolving ‘about‘ page which will soon contain more background on the whole project.
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NEW FROM THE ARCHIVE
slowly starting to upload documents of performances like Open Air Radio Barcelona and DEAF03 – Interfacing / Radiotopia / Keyworx. also in the process of figuring out how to add the thousands of scanned black&white negatives that cover a period of time from 1976 through 2000 when I quit wet darkroom work. (a few (88, 89, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95) of the 4000+ portraits that will eventually migrate to these pages). and hope to include many documents like this over the next months to enrich the overall blog experience, so stay-tuned here for new announcements. of course, there are always new field recordings for the aporee maps project.

Responding to Felipe’s thread on the bricolabs list:

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

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

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

Groggy. Rolling over historical entries, slowly whittling down the 1900-plus entries from the original travelog. This is the fourth incarnation of some of the earliest posts. The original form of the travelog was single long html pages, added incrementally over time. The second form was using frames for navigation. The third form was (is) the hybrid html/php blog platform that was implemented in 2004. Now, finally (!?!) this migration to this WordPress platform. Maybe this will be the last, eh? The site here is due for a more or less continuous expansion of content, following the completion of scans of 30 years of negatives, and other archival threads of audio, video, text, and image content. How life gets tied into this process is something of a mystery. So it goes.

The ADA Symposium officially starts up, fueled by some excellent, tasty grub for breaks and for lunch. (sorry, no comprehensive notes here… no time at the time and no memory ex post facto.)

Julian and I do an impromptu dialogue on Energetics and Informatics in the stead of Graham Harwood’s keynote, as he’s quite ill right now and couldn’t Skype in. As Julian and I have been talking so much in the last week, it is a natural extension of that dialogue.

The day is full, ending with Doug Kahn’s talk, dinner, and a video screening. Packing things up and taking them back to the house, and I crash.

Can’t remember which evening Julian fell down his stairs after getting the girls to bed, dislocating his toe, and requiring Sophie to drive him to the hospital to have it reset. Ouch!

The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realize the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of tele-presence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the re-invigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favor of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits – most prominently in the intense debate on global warming – citizens and organizations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced tele-presence technologies.

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Abstract

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

Introduction

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

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

Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

Absolutely brilliant talk by Eben Moglen — Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center — at an Internet Society – New York Chapter event back in February of this year.

In these two videos he presents an image of what exactly happened in terms of the internet infrastructure, completely outside the purview of political or wide social awareness which presents extreme danger to the fundamentals of our civil society. Explicit, clear, concise insights into the situation presented by corporate ‘log aggregators’ like Google and Facebook as well as the issues underlying how they threaten YOUR freedom.

radio aporee presents flickering wastelands IV: another round of the 48-Stunden-(Berlin-)Neukölln Kunst und Kulturfestival at Udo’s place, so I prep this 30-minute video piece of flickering wastelands from the Wendover residency, et al. Ambient sounds included.

Today, upon waking, there are two buses parked to the west of the hangar, a bit later, numerous SUV’s begin to pull up along with several official SWAT command vehicles and their teams from Winnemucca, Elko, and Wendover. It’s SWAT play. How to deal with a bus-load of terrorists/hostages or so. Several squads are lectured and engage in practice drills for the morning. I had originally been told by the airport management folks that there were going to be live-fire exercises at South Base, so we were surprised when this began to unfold in the back yard.

There is the fascination of playing Army, recalled from early days in the Maryland woods beyond the pond, beyond the corn fields, into unknown territories of abandoned farmhouses and hunting camps. Learning to make the sound of a gun and of explosions. And here, older boys, men, with very fancy toys, playing for their lives and the lives of their charges. Learning to stay alive, to save life. Learning to kill, or be killed. Learning to protect the innocent and kill the profane.

Before this chunk of the later afternoon I went down to Blue Lake Wildlife Area to check out the swimming possibilities. The water is around 80F year-round and the lake itself formed through the effects of a geothermal percolation spring. It’s frequently used by open-water scuba divers for certification, and the area shows the signs of heavy human abuse (the BLM doesn’t really ‘manage’ it much).

A forced migration to the Holy City of Moroni. Tire issues — the damaged rear cycle rim from the red clay mishap in southern Utah and the front-end alignment of the truck. Locate appropriate places to effect the repairs before coming over. A monstrous wind from the south dogs the transit across the flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert on I-80 and whips up a blinding dust storm in the middle and at the eastern fringe at the Kennecott Copper mine’s massive tailings dump.

Salt Lake City is quiet, wide empty streets, pedestrians are frequently toting suitcases-on-wheels. There are bicycle lanes and mid-block pedestrian crosswalks with baskets at either terminus with fluorescent flags for folks to carry when crossing.

Retreat when the work is done and after lousy lunch Reuben at The Bakery. Retreat looks like this:

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

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

after a breakfast burrito and a couple hours going through the GHS 1976 images at Todd’s to stir our memories, I head south from Fort Lupton to Manitou Springs slowly. pick up that roll of Tri-X film at Reed — the one that sat, undeveloped, for almost a decade. the last roll of black-and-white film shot before shifting to the Sony DCR-PC100 video camera. it turns out to be a full roll of images, and thankfully without fogging despite sub-optimal storage. will scan the mystery shots when I get back to Prescott shortly. I’ve no idea what they are of.

taking in the way on the way. road trip images and sounds. these days, I usually stop for scenes that I perhaps previously would have driven by while noting in head shoulda stopped. I figure these days that I should be making images to somehow — at least conceptually — counter-balance my use of hydrocarbons. that and simply extending the practice of image-making which is so habitual now it risks becoming a stale rather than a vivifying practice. documenting the West as I see it and as I transit the spaces. the faux-windmill-water-station in Ft. Lupton, a darkly amusing iceberg-tip of impending global water issues; the green space appropriately called Greenland; the B-52 bomber at the Air Force Academy looms in the midst of a gathering storm; and sounds that augment a feel for the place.

the weather is strange.

I chill in a cafe in Manitou, catching up on work. it closes, so I head across the street to The Keg Lounge, definitely a local bar and grill (with wifi!). normally I’m not too chatty in such a place, but started to talk to the bartender, and then a young (obviously military) guy comes up ordering some beers for his friends playing pool. turns out he and the friends are deploying to Afghanistan in three days, to some obscure valley in one of the hottest Taliban-contested areas. I believe, without any empirical evidence, that only those who serve at that boots-on-the-ground level in the military have any clue what war really is like. I certainly don’t. war is a black box that I can only assume is full of terrors that only the young are able to flexibly absorb and at least partially master. I buy them a round of drinks and talk with them for awhile. one fellow, an ancient 26-years-old, is on his fifth deployment. he was scheduled to have reconstructive knee surgery in June, but the Army canceled that in order to deploy him. he figures he’ll be crippled by the time his deployment is over. they routinely carry 130-pounds of gear under extremely harsh conditions. a couple of them are first-timers. they harbor a certain bravado, innocence, and apprehension. embodied. I can’t say the encounter made my day, but it felt right in the pit of the belly and in the heart. the War(s) are so invisible to all but those directly involved — War is the legacy of illegitimacy and the fanatic regime that started them.

Greg gets back in from Boulder later so we hang out with his girlfriend, catching up on the pathways taken in the last years gone. hang out in his funky flat on the top floor of the (national historic register) Nolon House including the distinctive round tower. then they are away until tomorrow…

mikropaliskunta is back again! An expedition collects artists to explore the nationality of a tourist in Canary Islands 03-10.march.2009 The travel can be followed in real-time at renewed website http://www.mikropaliskunta.net

mikroPaliskunta is a series of interdisciplinary expeditions exploring contemporary imagined nation called Finland and its eco-social changes in a sustainable way. mikroPaliskunta has already made two expeditions: across Finland from north to south by a biodiesel car with a stuffed reindeer in 2006 and around Berlin by bicycles in Germany in 2007. This spring, the group starts a series of expeditions themed The Finnish on Holiday. The first expedition in the hell triangle of tourism is made to Canary Islands – the ever-popular holiday destination and a border shore for African refugees risking their lives to enter European Union. Following two expeditions head to entertain centers in Vantaa and Lapland in Finland The Finnish culture is moved to warm climate in Canary Islands. How does tourism intensify presented national identity in tourists themselves and in local people? Also, the affects of mass tourism from perspective of economic depression and ecological awareness is an interesting subject matter, explains media artist and member of the expedition Mari Keski-Korsu. mikroPaliskunta website is renewed for the Canary Islands expedition. As with the earlier expeditions, also this expedition can be tracked almost in real-time. The artists of the expedition work with their own individual themes producing articles, photographs, videos, maps and a series of performances about coffee drinking as a social phenomenon. All the materials about this and the past expeditions are exhibited at the website. Members of the expedition include media artists Mari Keski-Korsu and Mika Meskanen, photographer Eija Mäkivuoti, author and scriptwriter Taina West. Researcher of sustainable consumption and production Satu Lähteenoja is a special guest of the expedition. mikroPaliskunta is supported by Arts Council of Finland and Finnish Cultural Fund.

January 2-22 the NomadicMILK project by GPS artist Esther Polak travels to Nigeria. There she is using the satellite technology to track both the distribution of “Peak” brand milk from harbor city Lagos to the capital of Abuja as well as a nomadic Fulani family of cow herders in Abuja’s vicinity. By showing the people involved their own tracks and videotaping their responses to it she creates a reflection on current nomadic life.

A custom built robot accompanies her to Africa. Once fed the GPS data it draws the people’s recorded routes using sand, allowing large groups of people to gather around the image and reflect communally.

Esther Polak has been following the dairy economy for some time now. During her previous MILK project she tracked how milk from Latvian farmers ended up in Dutch cheese, earning her a Golden Nica award at the Arts Electronica festival. Milk, she says, has always been a fundamental part of our diet and as such has sculpted our lives and our landscapes.

Her activities can be followed live on the nomadicmilk blog as well as via a twitter account she updates via SMS.

a quick note on the 50th anniversary of the vote by the US Congress and signing by the then-president, Ike Eisenhower, that made Alaska, the 49th state of the current union of Amurikan states. this is some footage my father shot six weeks before I was born, 30 June 1958, and right after the territorial government passed a bill in the legislature approving the statehood process. the day before my arrival, the people of the Alaska territory confirmed their desire by referendum to become the 49th state on 26 August 1958. the US Congress subsequently passed a statehood bill on 03 January 1959.

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

http://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980′s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

http://neoscenes.net/info/cv/

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT (more …)

dredging (scanning) personal archives, negatives unseen until now — 1979, 1989, 1992, 1996, and then far back into pre-histories. an image of my mother taken by my father on their honeymoon in 1945. near Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.

it takes a day for one roll of 36 exposures, and entails multitasking that makes any coherent writing impossible. editing is possible, but not raw writing. and acquiring more digital scans seems vaguely senseless. what to do with all the ones that already are there? sounds, videos, texts, images. when life gets reduced to leaving traces, what then is life? stepping out of life to make a transitory tracing of energies, then stepping out for a longer time to take that tracing and massaging it into something coherent. (what is coherency?) much massage makes mashed potatoes out of some material. monster mash. right back to the archaic world of remix culture which is so incredibly boorish.

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Kim proposes a new microsound project, making sound tracks for the experimental films of David F. Wallace’s fictional character James O. Incadenza in the book Infinite Jest. I pick Kinds of Light as it immediately strikes and then patch together an obsessive piece in 24 hours (4,444 frame splices on a multi-track of a water performance in Pool Creek Canyon (changing the course of history)), shatter-welded with audio from video footage of standing at a confluence in the West Elk Wilderness entranced by the Pele’s hair of water coming from the sun). definite sonic hyper-retinality.

I missed Wallace during my North Amurikan vacancy of the last 20 years. surprised I hadn’t run across him randomly, though, given the households that I have ramble through on the nomadic way. George knew him and speaks highly of his character. sadly for all of us, another victim of the intensity of be-ing. I plow through Oblivion, and a couple other books that I managed to recall at the library. extremely dense. the first short story I read drove me, half-way through, into a delirious sleep from which I woke ten minutes later, not knowing where I was. jittery, caffeine-fueled, precise jewels. you see the faceting process, the cutting of the entire glittering crystal, a tedium of focus, the high-speed grind with diamond grit, a rocking, polishing movement across the charged wheel. spun tales. fiber glass. each brittle thread opening a bloodless wound which nano-gapes at the whole fuckin’ world, all at once. he would be Brakhage’s cinematographer if Brakhage was blind and able only to see the inside of his eyelids.

“Kinds Of Light” – B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. No cast; 16 mm; 3 minutes; color; silent. 4,444 individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate and rendered disorienting at normal projection speeds by the hyper-retinal speed at which they pass. CELLULOID, LIMITED METROPOLITAN BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL SPROCKET DRIVE

late Monsoon storm rolls by Granite Mountain, seen from the deck.

hmmm, Equinox spent in a mega-church, The Heights Church or a church aspiring to be one. dot.com. which suggests the necessity for threading through the complex layering of cultural, social, and political detritus. a guy walks in ahead of us with an NRA tee-shirt on and a giant insulated travel-mug of coffee in hand.

Al always sits in the front and center of the large industrial sanctuary space. one row back from the front row. his eyesight is pretty bad, macular degeneration, and likewise, his hearing is attenuated to whatever narrow frequency band that his hearing aids provide.

I have my shit-kickers on, the dressiest items available for church at this point. can’t find my Colorado School of Mines belt-buckle with the hand-tooled leather belt. the bronze buckle in the form of the school seal cast in a metallurgy class with an ancient prof, forgotten his name. proof of Western citizenship.

anyway, there on the stage — one of those portable raised prefab affairs for concerts and political spectacles — is a miked drum-set, a bass and amp, a Rhodes with vocalists mike, a set of congas (not timbales!), and a guitar on a stand. no podium, dais, but plenty of microphones. on either side, two very large video projection screens.

club scene? will there be a concert? the Rhodes is the most prominent object, at the front edge near the center of the stage. later the preacher uses it to as a place for his notes and Bible.

it’s the eight o’clock service. Al tells me that there are usually around three hundred people at this, this first of four services. the 300? we are early.

as the service starts out, it’s clear that I should have brought earplugs to attenuate the 100 db blast from the sound system.

somehow I can imagine doing a visual-sonic performance here. good sound and video system, focused audience, yeah, a good venue overall. more notes on this later.

belly full of travel fithrildi. bland poetic insights into leaving Berlin. not much to say. I’ll be back. is probably the most profound. sooner than later. but profoundly not knowing the future, what’s the point in statements like that, unless they are based on oracular hypersight. or delusion. as delusion is just as likely to fit into dream as any ten-year politburo plan.

out there, outside the door is all this noise. confusing sensory impressions. and arrival in Ice Land is strange, after a four year hiatus. I make my way to Valgerdur’s place in Sund. Loki cycles over later to drop in for a bit. my boy. it’s good to see him.

bummer, George Carlin dies a couple days ago. he made me laugh, and I am clearly not the only one that he had that effect on.

I look at it this way… For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers… so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse. — George Carlin

and godaddy.com threw me for a serious loop with an email thunking down into my inbox saying I had to remove any non-web-related files on my server within 24 hours. and yes, it does appear that the user agreement says no file storage on the hosting account, so I have to quickly create web pages that contain links to all the audio and video files on storage. pain in the arse. but I shot back saying all the content was part of my accreting web space and that 100% of the audio and image files were my own content, so they relented for 30 days at which time they will check the site again.

Solstice come and gone. joined in the aporee solstice happening down in Kreuzburg last night at 23:59, the official moment of the Solstice. is today’s darkness because of the knowing of the long slide to 21 December? or does it matter? swinging, Light to dark. the performance ritual, reflecting on last year’s foray up Pool Creek Canyon in Dinosaur on that Solstice, does not evoke the energy. and screening the old Solstice videos from Ice Land also do not provide the right resonance. what is the essence of performance. making visible the energies stored up when in stellar regions. or?

the streets are chaotic after Turkey beats Slovakia in the European Cup.

Wolfgang bestows a couple of good Solingen kitchen blades in exchange for computer consulting:

Mini-Yatagan — Windmühlen-Küchen- und Obstmesser “Mini-Yatagan”, konvexe Klinge, nicht rostfrei, aus hochwertigem Kohlenstoffstahl / Carbonstahl, blaugepließtet, Griff aus Kirschbaumholz-Schalen

Klingenlänge: 85 mm

Der Yatagan. Diese Form hat einen langen Weg hinter sich. Dem türkischen Säbel entlehnt, über Frankreich zu uns gekommen, hat dieses praktische Messer immer seinen Platz als Obst-, Gemüse- und Kräutermesser. Mit der Spitze läßt sich beispielsweise ein Apfelkerngehäuse besonders gut herausschneiden und auch die bauchige Schneide und gute Ausgewogenheit erleichtern das Zubereiten von Gemüse, Kräutern und Ähnlichem. Das Windmühlenmesser gehört zur Serie der “blaugepließteten” Messer von Schleifmeister W. Fehrekampf. Das Blaupließten ist das aufwendigste Verfahren der traditionellen Solinger Schleiftechnik.

Man erkennt eine solche Klinge an der Lichtbrechung, die sich in den feinen Schleifschrammen als bläulicher Regenbogenschimmer darstellt.

Nan’s funeral in Charlottenburg. I see a number of people that I have not seen in some time. Kathy Rae is there from Manchester, and Sandro, one of the students who came to Iceland all those years ago.

the funeral is moving, standing room only. in the room with the casket, a video tape interview with Nan running silently, along with a projection of one of her Light-water videos. flowers, candles. friends in black. stories from a few folks.

after the service, Sandro mentions that he has a photograph from the Iceland trip, which he then pulls from an envelope. I am moved when I see that it is one of my postcards that I sent him after the trip. I think I sent each of the students that I had addresses for a copy, if I remember right. I immediately notice that it is on resin-coated paper, ach, but that was a time when I could use nothing else as I had only the college lab which could hardly be called a lab even. I worked with what I had. he said he would send me a high-rez scan of it. it underlines that old idea I had to gather up all the postcards that I have ever sent and put on an exhibition. what fun that would be. especially if each of the people would attend the show.

it is very nice to let memories of Nan float up, especially her work which is essentially about Light. and her presence as a mentor, teacher, friend, her art. generosity. the community she supported.

and memories of her Armani suit and her fondness for good cognac.

Avalon from Roxy Music plays in one interlude. and I make this small tribute — blackbird sings…

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

A condolences site is set up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

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

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

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

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

Migrating Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tmp.deluxe. call for interest. huh? a large empty space inside a renovated neoclassic building with high ceilings and big windows. controlled on the U1 line by two smiling-but-thuggish youngsters merely flashing their KVB identity cards. as a performance or so. fortuitous to have the right ticket. €2.10 normal tariff. not so cheap. I’m committed to a single round-trip maximum per day. how to do this when a typical day might require getting to four destinations or so. anyway, make it to the tmp.space. they are asking for proposals. slowly the space fills. black clothes, I’m no exception other than wearing faded jeans. there are two of us sitting at a raw chip-board table. call for interest. two large stacks of bluish-white A4 paper, two glass ash trays, one with a few pens cradled in it, one empty. the ubiquitous stench of cigarettes. why is that smell the quintessence of stale? somebody changes the music — electronica for death-metal or so. conversations trip along and don’t seem to get through the aesthetic miasma that is anchored in the stacks of paper and the ashtrays. following the reasoning, following the line. and attempting to insert energy into the situation. having seen and been seen. and a child in a pink t-shirt wanders around. Papa! Papa! making space-testing sounds. to locate herself in the space. doing this, she locates all other receivers in themselves. placing them in the stiff reserve of their aesthetic opinions which they trade in measures, lubricated by wine. locative media while Rome Burns. or is this an exaggeration?

most guests are older than I. a few others are younger. one younger fellow sits at the table and opens a PowerBook and puts headphones on. with his Bionade by his side (the aesthetic anti-Coke backlash). with the stack of empty papers setting a slow gravitational pace at the center of the table. so far, I have not spoken. how long will this take? the little girl in pink finds a lime-green tennis ball that she carries around showing people from her grounded point-of-view. no one else has sat down. the pile of papers does not change. while this pen runs down. I’ll have to get another. older women come in. or are they younger? I can’t tell.

the blank papers keep the slackers away from the table. anti-gravity. good. occasionally searching for meaning or searching for the ultimately meaningful creative statement. finally one lady takes a sheet of the bluish-white bleached paper and sits down.

the little girl in pink is making the best performance: while the kultur-crowd chats loudly over beers and wine (or Bionade), she sings Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa, Papa!

some seriously hacked people. deeply en-culturated. and dressed in … black.

nobody else can cope with the stacks of paper — too white, too clean, too sterile. the electronica starts up again in the background. the little girl in pink now yowls Paaaaaaaaaaaapaaaaaaaaaaa! in response, she is perfectly in tune with the ambient zeitgeist.

Miga doesn’t show up yet. I’ll not wait too much longer as more and more people start to smoke. scheisser! I thought the new smoking law came into effect at the beginning of the year that banned smoking in places like this. it stinks.

so, eventually the artist/curator comes up and introduces himself to to me, Mathieu, originally from Marseilles, the Papa of the girl, Eloïse, in pink, and explains the situation, inviting me to make a proposal for the space. this is the kind of facilitation that I have been doing for 20 years. does it get old? possibly, when limited to socially selective instances. pure happenstance (indeterminacy) gives some impetus to try it again and again. it is a-historical. how is that? any human encounter has a potential that is defined at least partially by the moment in which it occurs. change is constant, so that two humans meeting at one moment are not the same a moment later. the potential energy of encounter is not bounded.

first night out in loud Berlin. ambient sound mix. and so it goes. (make an ambient stream from home. and go from there.) keeping to particular centers, comatose. while this feeding of thought goes on here (there, everywhere) where here this kind of creative action is valued: the artist who prescribes it gets paid at least a small amount. or makes some social currency. along much of my pathway, I practice in a void, without any cultural support. have to make the situations happen in socio-cultural situations that are aggravated by the presence of the autonomous zone. so it goes.

the day spent in busy multi-tasking. feeling how it is to make the first bowl of muesli for breakfast in this place; the first shit; after the first night of transient sleep; the first cut apple, omelet, fried garlic; teeth-brushing and shower; incense burned, video conference, ftp upload (check speed); the first walk around the block; shopping trip to the banal Kaiser grocery, the first peek of sunLight into the kitchen window.

and next, I have to make my budget to see how much I have to scrimp around. how much I can do in the social sphere. how much I need to slack at home and WRITE. well, slack is hardly the word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sarah H. Chung ::
http://www.ropeswingcities.com/hdot :: 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/

in the midst of Frieder’s piles of books and papers to-be-dealt-with (meticulously organized, to be sure), is a copy of Mark’s new book on MIT Press, meta/data. a remix auto-biography of his last 15 years or so.

comparing/contrasting to my own traces is a strange flux of feelings. where practice is sampled (how, what, and into what form) and translated (re-mediated) into another form. it is only the form of the mediation that determines the relative fed-back social efficacy of the individual (or social sustainability of the individual’s praxis). the books points to, alludes to, hints at, expands upon, posits, and invents a praxis, part of which is the reflexive re-creation of a praxis. but does it engage in an authentic praxis that is not about pragmatism and social role-playing?

it is clear that it is the choice of propagation channels that ultimately determines how the Self is or is not rewarded by the larger social system. it is also clear that these choices will also have a profound affect on the human relationships that ensue.

how to select those forms? Mark’s book and documented practice seems optimized, pragmatic, and formal (that is, formed to optimally integrate into an existing social reward system). the question of form returns again and again. along with the embedded-ness within a social system that has strictly limited pathways for reward and punishment.

I understand the principle, but choose to engage in the praxis which supersedes the documentation of the praxis. although I continue to write, make images, sound and video works, and so on — none of which garner any attention whatsoever.

the presence of the personal network of a handful of deep supporters is the only plus to the path of the praxis. otherwise, might as well be living on the streets. or simply finished off with the whole thing.

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.

Where did you study and work as you reached adulthood? What are your strongest memories of encounters with nature during that period? Were there any landscapes that you especially connected with your intellectual and creative development?

What aspects of nature are important to you now? How do you engage with it in both physical space and virtual space? Prompts for this question might include: Do you grow plants at home in a garden or indoors? Do you live or vacation in the countryside? Do you wish you did? Have you built ‘natural’ spaces in virtual places such as Second Life, MOOs, game spaces etc?

This question is about any connections you may have made between the way you experience computers and the internet and the way you experience nature. Do you find yourself noticing similarities between the two lifeworlds? Prompts for thinking about this might include the way you experience the passage of time; connection; travel and movement; spirituality; physicality; emotion; abstraction etc. I’m interested in any synergies around this area that you may have noticed in your own thinking or that of others.

This is a very loose question — feel free to skip it if it doesn’t attract you. If the internet were a landscape, what kind of landscape would it be?

Ready to vacate the camp ground: the omens and portents are not good.

Bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.

Nothing like the amplified throb of hydrocarbon explosion to go to sleep by and to wake up by. Camping in a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) OHV (Off-Highway Vehicle) area. The premise is simple, the social system has generated devices, machines, both two-wheeled and four that allow a single driver to mount somewhat like a horse, and to ride at speed on rugged and steep terrain. For entertainment. (Note: three-wheeled machines were banned from production 25 years ago because of the vast toll of injuries and deaths which ensued as a fault of the basic design). The word entertainment is key. It is absolutely true, straddling one of these machines, with hydro-carbon explosions vibrating the body, landscape rushing by a high speed. The body transforms itself into the body of a god (or goddess). (more …)

with the mass of storage space available on the godaddy account, anything’s possible. so, an upload of a work finished a couple years back — a prototype for the kind of works that I would really like to make for all the friends that have been included in the archive over the years. ideally, making individual video-based works which include the diverse re-presentations of people, encounters, and events that have transpired over the years. it’s a tremendous amount of work, and requires a dedicated working place with two or three machines crunching away on the material. along with the four or five terabytes of raw digitized material easily available. not possible at this time. will it ever be? hmmm. we’ll see.

this work starts with the visit Stefan made to Finland back in 2000. we rented a car and spent a weekend with Kaisu and Risto in Noormarkku. Kaisu took us on a tour over to the Bay of Bothnia, but the high-Light of the weekend was a private tour of Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea which Risto’s company was managing, and that was just a five-minute walk away from their apartment. amazing house that my old acquaintance Johanna still uses as a summer retreat on occasion.

the video follows us to Tallinn in Estonia, followed by a brief pizza dinner in Tribeca with a visit to the WTC, then there is a fast forward to 2004 when Loki and I visited Stefan and Ellen in their place in Glen Ridge. We all make a party & campfire visit to Bill and Andrea’s place up in Bedford.

head hanging, I have the distinct mis-pleasure of missing my godson’s Bar Mitzvah this coming weekend. hmmmm. lack of disposable income to increase carbon foot-print-stamp and head East. that’ll come shortly perhaps. but in the meanwhile, Andrea (Simon’s mum) shares her script for the evening (mind you, the photo above post-dates the beginning of this narrative a couple years — around the Buttinsky-Hoppy-Top & Armpit Dancing Era), that’s dad, Bill with big bro Zander along with Simon in his mother’s arms, lil’ sis Maxie is still in the oven):

Simon Arthur gracefully slid into the world on May 2, 1994. He had a powerful set of lungs, but he didn’t get much chance to talk those first few years. Zander was his big brother, and rarely missed an opportunity to speak on Simon’s behalf. Simon had to learn other ways to capture an audience. Silent, sly, comical ways. He innately understood the power of nudity to gain the spotlight, and used it regularly. It was the rare gathering in our house, or anyone elses house for that matter, that Simon did not make the scene if not fully undressed, then in his tiny little briefs. Whether it was his stunningly fast Ninja moves — which often had the unintended result of landing him on his own back — or his oddly endearing Armpit dance, Simon relished entertaining the crowd his way.

His casting as second brother also seemed to give him an ability to communicate empathetically with children all over the world, transcending language. Simon was a little Pied Piper. Somehow he’d end up as the leader of a small gang of kids wherever we went, who drawn by his sweet smile and antics, wanted to be near this brown-headed American boy who could climb like a billy goat (barefoot!), do cool flips and headstands off walls and in the sand, and all kinds of tricks with balls.

Simon always had an uncanny sense of physical perception. I remember a particular moment on the tree-swing out in the backyard. Simon liked me to twist the swing as tightly as I could, then let go, so he could spin at high speed. I could barely watch him without getting sick, but he made it ballet. He slowly rose, like a figure skater coming out of a sit-spin, and in the most elegant way, raised his knee and extended his leg, his head dropped back. It was the most natural artistry, and the kid was 3, maybe 4 years old.

I am stilled awed watching him play lacrosse, how he can move at such high speeds, covered with all that gear, and track that tiny ball and all the other players, moving objects that they are — and still get the ball where it should go. At soccer, even as a little kid, a ball would come sailing on high down the field. Simon would place himself precisely where he had to be to meet that ball with his forehead. I’d picture him with little birdies and stars dancing around his head and swimming before his eyes, and he’d be off for the next play.

And on a mountain. Skiing behind Simon is just pure pleasure. And pride. His speed of perception is so fast, he finds every opportunity — every bump, bank, and chunk?over which to propel himself into a jump, a spin, or a twist. In a terrain park, he takes the bigger guys by surprise, this slim little kid who not only hits the jumps, but nails things like 540s, 720s, and even, this winter, a 900. Those numbers may not mean anything to you, but to Simon they mean everything. It hasn’t hurt his math skills, by the way, to learn to count by 180s. I love to hear the comments of the behemoth teens who populate the terrain park after Simon’s hit a jump. “You see that little kid? __uckin’ 720!” That’s my boy. And, by the way, he did not learn anything like that from me.

Skills. As Napoleon Dynamite explained, you need skills. And Simon’s got them. It makes him an acceptable tag-along with his older brother’s friends, and a special guest star at his younger sister’s play dates. Simon is always welcome, because he always has a game to play.

He still entertains us, but he keeps his clothes on now. His sense of style is, shall we say, still in the early stages of development. Zander uses the word Hobo to describe Simon’s sartorial look. At the end of six weeks of camp, Simon appears tan, but when you look closely, you realize it’s just dirt. His leathery feet are ready to scale the rocky cliffs and rough beaches of Greece, always barefoot. I have never worried watching him climb a steep face in front of me, or ski off some gnarly outcropping. Never. I have total faith in his skills. He knows where his body is and what it has to do. And make it look good.

Simon always takes me by surprise. That’s what happens with the quiet ones. He is funny, though it is always an offstage humor, not to mention off color. Simon can access the exact line from a movie to apply to any situation. I remember him performing the dance finale from The Full Monty, with perfect mimicry. Wish I had gotten that on videotape. I did get this one, though: when he asked if instead of a bed, we could get him a cage, like the dogs, so we could lock him in at night, and let him out in the morning. You can’t, as they say, make this stuff up.

Throughout the whole lead up to his bar mitzvah, Simon, fortunate to be working with friends and with a rabbi he adores, willingly and good naturedly studied, almost daily. I only had to say, “Simon, how about reading your Hebrew,” and he was right at it. Or, he’d beat me to it, and was already done. He’s the same about his homework, his projects, his reading.

I am blessed to have this family, blessed with a husband who not only enriches my life, but takes active involvement in the daily doings of his children. Blessed with three children who love each other, like each other (except when they don’t), teach each other, push each other, and revel in each other’s accomplishments. Simon deserves all the attention he is getting today, and if all continues to go well, he will not have to take his clothes off and do the Armpit Dance. — Andrea Raisfeld (Simon’s mom), Bedford, New York, May 2007

Montgomery Village Junior High School, MVJHS. seventh grade. Miss Burrough’s English class. was carrying a small Sony cassette recording deck. recall recording some of the top-100 pop hits off the radio, when home sick from school one day, and I wanted to play music at school during lunch with my friends. anyway, I covertly recorded part of class, including Miss Burrough’s yelling at us — she probably had very good reason as Gary, myself, Fritz, Bruce, and few others of us were constantly cutting up in class — she found out that I had made a recording, and I ended up in the principle’s office. my first foray into ambient phonography got me into big trouble.

the latest is a simple remix of sounds from Sydney along with a video segment — the Sydney sky line — that is, the tracing of the separation of earth-bound objects and the sky. trouble, what trouble? can you pick out the numerous CCTV’s?

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.

finally getting around to a good look at Oog, a curatorial project by Dutch artist Nanette Hoogslags curates at Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily newspaper. I happened to meet her for the first time when I was in Amsterdam last March when I had dinner with she and her husband, network activist David Garcia, an acquaintance of mine. Nanette comments on the current state of the project:

Oog is a commentary and opinion platform for the online edition of De Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily national newspaper. It began in September 2004 as a platform where every week a different artist working in sound and image is asked to respond to news and current affairs. The selection of artists participating has grown into a varied group of national and international artists working with very different forms of expertise and approaches. In this way, artists are using their skills to become commentators on events in a news environment. After each week, the work is placed in the archives, making the Oog collection accessible as a whole.

The artists participating in Oog are a diverse and renowned group of applied and autonomous artists both from inside and outside The Netherlands. Oog is one of the most visited pages within the Volkskrant website with weekly visitor numbers between three- and five-thousand.

The project has been received well. People treat it exactly how it is meant — as a combination of visual comments mixed with the ‘funny pages’ in a newspaper. There is a real fan-base of regular viewers as well as incidental viewers every week. Sometimes you read it, like it, and it touches you; sometimes you disagree or it doesn’t do much for you; sometimes you have no time and you miss the edition. There is one difference though, in the online version there is always the readily available archive of all previous works. It’s important to me to showcase as many different artists as possible, even ones that have no direct relationship with the online environment. I look around for people not just from design and fine arts, but also choreographers, architects, VJs, and sound artists. Oog is set to continue for at least another year, running parallel to an version which will be presented on an urban screen in relationship to its own website. There are many aspects of Oog I would love to develop and explore, what is keeping me back is the amount of time it takes and no funding to compensate for this time. My aim is to broaden the platform over the coming year, in both the material medium and in audience.

visiting the site, well, one does have to negotiate the Dutch, which isn’t too terribly hard, though for the uninitiated it might pose some challenge. the right column is a search and navigation area for looking at the archive of past weeks work. the works are done in Flash (I believe exclusively, with the sampling that I looked at). Flash is now somewhat less popular than it used to be in the web domain, but it still remains a potent tool for more or less complex animation, sound, and video work. it is well-suited to this project, as Nanette mentions, with the work being something of a corollary of the funny pages of times past. by attaching it to a popular media site and making clear that there is a tacit intent at commentary on contemporary events — political and otherwise — the platform has a strong edge over other Flash gallery sites. I didn’t ask her how it came to be that the newspaper is hosting the project — whose motivation it was for them to host it. in Netherlands, though, cultural patrimony of one form or another is a relatively common circumstance that the private sector engages with some gusto. it is hard to imagine a large Amurikan newspaper doing the same except in a tightly controlled editorial environment.

Nanette initiated an earlier project on the same premise last year as a stand-alone event-based installation piece. with a simple interface, one can chose from a wide variety of works from ‘traditional’ political cartoons to powerful mixes of visual-sonic information — some with overt, some with covert critical messages about those who make news and those who pre-digest it for the masses. as would be expected with the divergent styles available to Flash autours, the works are all quite unique which at some level makes the experience of browsing them full of surprises. however, the technical interface requirements of the medium do not allow one to quickly pass by weaker material. if this style of material becomes more commonly used — with online media sites and blogs being the obvious venues — the syntax of the medium would probably be streamlined and lend itself to more potently condensed content. whatever the case, this is a fine project, and I highly recommend a browse.

meet Sophea, from ‘podes to antipodes. three continents in less than a year. shaming our carbon footprints and our inst- & dis-abilities.

earlier wandering around the Opera. and making a 15-minute piece skyline of Sydney along with some sonic work. that should end up being quite good — catching the ambient reflective sonic environment and the microscopic skyline with the video cam zoom on full. slowly and unstably tracing the man-made and natural intersection. earth and sky (back to the infinite half-spaces).

over to Randwick, do the coast walk to Bronte, recording some lawn bowling, eating fish&chips. once a decade enough on that score — last time was in London visiting Joanna in 1996. sitting in the park that adjoins Bronte Beach, twiLight falling, the atmosphere cool, reduced, mellow. somebody playing Bob Marley on a decent sound system, a rasta picnic at the beach. hmmm, pretty nice lifestyle.

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying — Samuel Beckett in Molloy

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

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

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

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

the accession to thought, and the impulse to create removes us from the flow of present be-ing. outside the Nieuwmarkt is noisy with tourists wandering in search of meaning, the people in the market stalls, selling, café sitters. with beer, coffee, lunch. enjoying a bit of early springtime afternoon sun. inside the tipping flat, where front wall is leaning drunkenly forward over the café tables set up on the brick sidewalk four floors below, inside, there is the atmosphere of closeted dis-knowing. but a dis-knowing in need of gradual release into a form.

no network. so discommunicator. decide to go to Montevideo to see David Garcia’s show of video works, Faith in Exposure — a project in which artists ‘talk back’ to the news media.

The exhibition addresses the central narrative of western democracy, our ‘faith in exposure,’ the unquestioning belief that the circulation of knowledge through the news media (and other means) constrains the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable to believe the central myth of the information age: that knowing the truth shall make us free.

technical difficulties with a couple works. intriguing, some arrive at the tableau of just-more-media — in the process of projection in white cubes. how to disassemble the house of the master with the tools of the master. and find truth…

finally meet Sher. network crossings. dinner (red beet pasta with smoked mozzarella, mmmm! at Mappa), then on to a dance performance by choreographer André Gringas. what to say. networks are alive because of the real energy going into them.

somehow I am surprised that she is American! all this time I was thinking that she was Dutch or something. another cultural refugee — thriving in Europe.

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

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

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

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

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