The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — as deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.

The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam.

So: two major mechanisms and the second is responsible for the construction of the first. It takes an energy (depletion) to create these barriers which subsequently carry and direct energy flows as prescribed by their particular socially-mandated configurations.

[This all goes back to the hypothesis about virtuality -- where virtuality is (merely) the presence of a situation of attenuation of 'natural' flows (and here, tool-making is a key component). The question of what is 'natural' may be approached from a couple way, but more on that elsewhere.]

And all the way, Coyote laughs.

The day spent in leisurely absorbing the energy of place. The campground is built under the only trees for miles, (eucalyptus, from Australia!) so there is raptor and other bird activity all the time. The owls at night contribute a fantastic dialogue to the silence.

A short hike west to some low hills, down a wash, ends up, with the recent extreme rains, at a cattle pond full to overflowing. As per usual, I do not do a ‘before’ image (note to self — do a before image next time!). The downstream side of the small embankment dam has been undercut to within a meter of the main body of water which is substantial. With a small stick, I scratch a small line across the top of the dam, gradually increasing its size, using the initial slight flow of water to clear the waste from the cut. After twenty minutes of play, there is a sizable gap in the dam along with a flood of water rushing through, further eroding the dam body. Monkey-wrenching? Nah, this is merely a slight acceleration of what is happening ‘naturally’ — the breaching of the dam will occur eventually unless there is maintenance energy applied into the system. It would have likely occurred with the next substantial rains.

I do take an after image, and then head back to camp circuitously. It is after I see Coyote’s paw-print in the rain-damp soil, walking on a trail, that I cross the wash on which the dam is built. I am surprised that the huge rush of water from the breach is just reaching this spot. It is first a trickle which then ramps up to a full-on rushing creek. Fascinating to see the water fill the bed of the wash, pooling in hollows, flowing over small water-falls. I see immediately this is a perfect audio situation to continue documentation of the ‘changing the course of nature’ or ‘changing the course of history’ project that I have undertaken in the last few years. I lope back to camp, grab the recorder, and race back, downstream, to the wash. The flood is proceeding slow enough that I can run further downstream several times to record the ambient audio and make some images of the process.

Then it’s back to camp for dinner.

Sky-worms bugger the clarity of the atmosphere, attenuation the flux of Light reaching the surface. Obviously this is under a major north-south air-route — the only good thing is that the planes are at 10 km altitude, so the sonic disturbance is minimal. The affect on high-altitude haze, however, is profound. Long vision (at the sky and at the landscape) refocuses eyes through these worn diffracting glass into another focal point. Eyesight goes bad with all the reading and writing. The next year will make all that has gone before (go pale in comparison, argh!) as the PhD takes shape. No life, no sight left.

I have not seen another human the entire day with the exception of a well-armed ranger cruising through the campground. A droll chap, probably 30 or so, from the East Coast, a Federal employee, dislocated.

Around sunset, a car pulls in, first they park in the next slot, but then pull out and park across the campground, 50 meters away. There is a couple, they mill around, looking like they are setting up camp, it’s cold, getting colder, sunset. I’m sleeping on the ground. They turn on a radio playing pop mariachi music. It gets louder and louder as time goes by, getting later and later. They are sitting in the front of the car probably drinking, smoking, whatever. At one point well after 2300 I yell over to TURN IT DOWN. That has no effect. I honk my horn, also to no effect. I contemplate going over, but also realize the odds are that the occupants are armed. I instead pack the car up, fuming, and drive to a side-road further south in the valley and find a spot there. Faugh, why would somebody drive all this way — it’s at least 50 miles from the nearest town — to sit in their car and play loud music? Sorry, I don’t get it. [expletives deleted!]

Later, Orion drags his belt and sword from the sludge of Light pollution that sits to the south: Los Angeles, more than 150 km away or so. To the east, light from Taft and Bakersfield. A strong wind arises late in the night, there are no trees where I have moved to. Uncomfortable night after the luxury last night.

The official blurb for the workshop:

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

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

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

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.

(more …)

It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society. — (Ellul, 1967)

What would poor Jacques think about the ubiquitous constancy of FaceBook and Google and mobile telephony and locative media and RFID chips and biometrics?

After eight weeks of intensive effort, sometimes re-writing almost from scratch a wide range of (English-second-language) articles, essays, and academic papers, the second and final book from the MigAA project is done and at the printers. Bravo to the Alfa60 designers, Joseph and Lina in Vilnius — perhaps this book will win awards like the last one did! And big kudos to El Jefe, miga, without whom, none of this would have come to pass, none of it!

This is the jacket blurb I wrote in ten minutes — the day Lina was sending the book to the printers!

We’ll be providing a pdf file of the book at some future date, after the final symposium and exhibition in Berlin (coming up this week! see info below), and when any sales of the existing print run are over and done with.

Presented by The European School of Visual Arts (EESI), the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM) and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA)

Migrating:Art:Academies:

Conference – 15-16 October 2010, 13:00 – 18:00
Exhibition opening – 14 October 2010, 19:00
Exhibition – 14-16 October 2010
Opening times – daily between 10:00 – 19:00

Collegium Hungaricum, Dorotheenstrasse 12, Berlin

The two-year project Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) comes to a close with its Laboratory V Migrating:Art:Academies:. This exhibition and conference, organized in cooperation with Collegium Hungaricum Berlin, will map the territory around an ensemble of new and innovative forms of creative practice. During MigAA students from the European School of Visual Arts (EESI, FR), the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM, DE), and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA, LT) traveled in Media RVs (recreational camping vehicles) throughout Europe, engaging the local cultural and environmental milieu, and creating art works “on the road.”

“The wealth of Migrating Art Academies was unanimously proclaimed by both the participants and by those who they encountered in the course of the project. This creative experiment was also an excellent educational laboratory and such laboratories undoubtedly play a critical role in a time of European-wide reforms in art education.” says Sabrina Grassi-Fossier, the MigAA coordinator and director of European School of Visual Arts, Angouleme/Poitiers.

The combined MigAA exhibition and conference does not claim to be a full picture but rather a presentation of life-sketches, fragmentary practices, and evolving processes. These active threads together chart a new territory for learning that turns away from most traditional academic strategies. This open event is meant to critically address this new approach and to open it up for public dialogue.

On Thursday, 14 October, Migrating:Art:Academies: will open with an exhibition of works by more than thirty students from the three European art academies at the Collegium Hungaricum Berlin. The selected projects, developed during the four consecutive MigAA laboratories in Berlin, Vilnius, Linz, and Royan, range from drawings and maps to installations and interactive works.

The laboratory will also present a 300+ page reader as a summary of the two years of distributed and mobile research. The book, divided into three essential parts – Migrating:, Art:, and Academies: – serves as a navigation supplement for the exhibition and the conference as well as the overall project.

The conference will take place on Friday and Saturday, 15 – 16 October and is divided into four panels: Migration, Education, Technology, and a final Round Table session with the participating students.

Friday, 15 October
13.00 : Migration panel
16.00 : Education panel

Saturday, 16 October
13.00 : Technology panel
16.00 : Final Round Table

About Migrating Art Academies

Migrating Art Academies is an ongoing joint educational project of three European higher education institutions: the European School of Visual Arts (EESI, FR), the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne (KHM, DE) and the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VDA, LT). Its primary purpose was to research and develop a progressive model of education that combines new and innovative forms of creative practice, collaboration, cooperation, and production. For the duration of the project, students had the possibility to work in an autonomous zone situated between virtual and real worlds, as well as between their normal home environment and new, unfamiliar places. The students investigated and engaged the local environment at the same time as developing creative projects in response to their experiences. The MigAA project is financed by the European Commission Culture Program 2007-2013. For more detailed information, please visit: http://www.migaa.eu/.

The conference language is English. Admission is free.

Migrating Art Academies team:

Mindaugas Gapsevicius (top e.V.), Sabrina Grassi-Fossier (Coordinator, EESI), Jonas Hansen (KHM), Zilvinas Lilas (KHM), Alvydas Lukys (VDA), Sylvie Marchand (EESI), Vaclovas Nevcesauskas (VDA), Martin Rumori (KHM).

ed: This short note is the epilogue for the Migrating:Art:Academies: book. Otherwise because the heavy duty editorial tasks, I didn’t have time to write something more comprehensive on the ideas surrounding movement and learning, maybe next time!

At Linda Leas cafe in Kanab, locals, non-Mormons pursue another religion, worship of java, across the street from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. After the first night out. Wishing for a 4-wheel-drive vehicle to give a greater degree of risk possible. Snow or rain threatening in forecasts, and bentonite clay roads are impassable when wet. The guy working the BLM desk, old, over-weight, tobacco stains his white mustache brown, makes the warnings. He has to talk to foreign tourists and downstreamers a lot, surely. Folks who haven’t a clue about how it works out here. The Grand Staircase – Escalante National Monument is so large, and the country so unforgiving, surely they have to scrape up the dessicated or flash-flood saturated remains of folks every year. On the other hand, this is no monkey-wrench territory anymore, it’s just a place for cheap virtual entertainment via wheeled vehicles with windows. Maybe some stars glimpsed, a whiff of juniper blossoms firing off tart pollen.

Typing like I can’t get over it. Wanting to find something to use, utilize, make happen, profit from, in this movement, this travel, across these space. Spaces that have so little to offer in transit, and less to offer when living, settled, in them. Nothing arrives. Nothing comes. Even with some caffeine enhancement via cappuccino. (Cappuccino here, wondering about the spread, propagation, of cappuccino across Amurika). In territories defined by the dominance of thin and watery drip-grind served by waitresses named Flo or Blanch, in stainless diners. Now, instead, cafes with multi-colored chalk menus on the walls, starting with espresso, then cappuccino, then lattes, and so on, with as many permutations as the local consumers demand to enhance their sensibilities. Retro interiors: Naugahyde, Formica, Vinyl, Linoleum, garage-sale vintage, cluttered.

Accident intrudes on the evening hunt for a place to camp. Again the bentonite clay plays a significant role. Up from Paragonah, into the National Forest a few miles along Red Creek Canyon, and the road starts to get wet, then snow-covered, no match for my vehicle, reach a zenith and decide to backtrack. With no turn-around except back a quarter-mile, I start backing, and a bit too fast, get caught in some old tracks in the mud and bingo! In the very muddy ditch up to the axle, with an overhanging branch almost completely ripping the bike rack off the roof. Shiite! Climb out the passenger side window, shaken, cursing, looking at the graying sky and approaching dusk, and knowing the forecast for bad weather.

Heading out on a three-month road-trip. Tailwind across the reservation at least part of the time. Embarkation for slickrock and slot canyons, salt pans, playa, and rotated fault-blocks. Heavy tailwind expected, along with winter weather for the rest of the week across the entire west. Hope to appear, unscathed, at the other end in Wendover.

The road fills the head with eye-blink disorientation. Transient fragments of thoughts thrum along in no order, no rhythm, as unconnected as any sequence of fated events: reflecting fated events in mind-eyes. Too much seen outside the window, beyond the amorphous silica barrier. And too much not apprehendable because of that attenuated presence versus the full immersion. (Virtual) movement. Looking for roadside memorials this time. Something to lock the thoughts into the reality of mortal coil. Find a few. Stopping for them is always a bit tricky, especially with a 65- or 75-mph speed limit. I drive a bit slow with this old vehicle of mine, and slower still so that once I spy a cross of some sort, I can safely stop on the shoulder. To die on the same stretch of road somehow would not be auspicious; under the wide silent sky and red cliffs, stars, with the smell of spring sage in the air. Wind passing through shredded plastic bags caught on the barbed-wire fence. A small golden bell tinkles vacantly, tied to a wreath of plastic flowers shivering in the wind.

What is the difference between that which is containable in the reduced tracing of recorded, reproduced, recreated image or sound and that which resists the reductive process with an impassive tenacity, no, a passive and eternal persistence. The difference lies in what the observer brings to the reductive process and what the hearer, viewer brings when consuming the reduced trace. It has little if anything to the originary energy of the thing, das Ding, das Ganze, itself. The emanations affect the reduction, there is a direct correlation, but in the technique, the process of reduction is deeply tied to the techno-social. No way to decouple that. (Or is there?)

All the way from telling stories to making movies to painting canvases to building houses.

What is the advantage of shunting the energy of a situation through more and more of the techno-social domain? Or does it matter at all? Compare (telling) stories in person about an experience (sono-linguistic reductions) with posting digital photographs online (visible radiation reductions). In principle a reduction is a reduction is a reduction. And when compared the the situated phenomena itself, any and all reductions are not the thing itself.

The dam at Lake Powell, as with the Hoover, a high-security zone, protected by hired guns. No bags allowed in the visitors center. Celebrations of all that the techno-social can bring to the merely social, along with a big-screen overview of the lake at 59-percent-capacity with a fat white bathtub ring contrasting the red rock cliffs. German tourists debate the advantages of the Best Western versus the Quality Inn motels.

Humans approach the ‘criticality’ of the global situation from a very species-centric view. (of course). If one looks at the flow of the continuance of life throughout its entire trajectory (back to we-know-not-where and we-know-not-when (and we-know-not-how)) — it is quickly noted that all species are transitory to one degree or another. Is there anything special about humans in this regard? So far nothing that humans have succeeded in doing has transcended the flow of life. There is the material/scalar aptitude with which we have accelerated the production of entropy within the limited planetary system. But this, in itself, is insignificant on any transcendent cosmological scale. If this is the only difference, then it might be said that we are only a more efficient life-form in that we cause this entropic acceleration. But even this aspect is relative. Each life-form will fully engage its energy sources and utilize them. To the degree there are readily available sources, life will expand its scale to take advantage of that abundance of energy, rapidly transforming it to waste. A pride of lions will not arrest its hunting of abundant prey unless satiated (and engaged in optimized procreation). Again, nothing new. It seems that the only disturbing characteristic that we sense somewhere in our perspective is the question of scale with our waste-production. Through windows of tele-media we have an (apparently) expanded perspective on the global picture. We see images of ourselves everywhere, engaged in the process of living. But this itself is suspect. A global perspective is a virtual artifice. Our awareness of our problem arises from an artifice of our own creation. What does this say about the problem? The perceived planetary scale is perhaps a distorted and very much reductive artifact embedded in our vision of life. But would the (limited) set of localized sensory perceptions lead to any different conclusions or ways-of-going?

No wonder people crave hyper-Terran (Celestial) visitation — what a perspective shift that would be. That we are not unique in a wider cosmos. That we are merely life. Only then might we be able to get on with it reasonably!

The condition of virtuality arises when humans create a situation which attenuates the flows that are impinging on their sensual and embodied presence. When technology is defined as a way to alter the paths of energy flow: virtuality is a subset condition of the altered flows such that the flows that are obviously (or not!) entering the body system are attenuated. The obvious (materialist!) subset of the widest set is that grouping which attenuates the classical sensory-input spectra. These may be ‘scientifically’ framed based on typical wave-based mechanical and electro-magnetic physics: the EM frequency band of visible Light, the pressure-induced electricity of touch, and so on. In a holistic approach to presence, the affectations of flow are continuous, complete, and substantive.

Alluding to yet a further subset is the use of glass as a specific form of energized matter which is placed between the eye and the ‘world out there.’ This is a fundamental form of virtuality, where silicon dioxide is introduced as an attenuating filter of flows between embodied presence and the cosmos. (this is a short intro to a longer text on the history of glass that’s cooking on the back burner.)

Gazing out the window, not driving, watching the world pass, attenuated, virtual, transitory, and it’s gone.

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

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

Last day of the month. Skipping this forum mostly because of the extent of other writing that is happening in the moment. Floods of text-framed energies, directed along one path or another.

Virtuality limits the potential for changing ones point of view. Watching a screen is, literally, a sustained process of maintaining a static point of view. This is in extreme juxtaposition to the process of primary observation of the world as moving through it.

Days are spent writing about amplification and other phenomena that arise from the unequal distribution of energy and matter in the cosmos.

Friday evening I participate in the Migrating Realities conference that Mindaugas has initiated. There will be many familiar faces there: nice. So, a brief presentation in addition to the regular act of active participation:

Window Weather: A Nomad’s View of Reality

The history of the human use of glass, the chemical compound silicon dioxide (SiO2), prescribes a novel point of view on the nature of virtuality, and consequently, the nature of reality. This presentation will sketch a history of that attenuation on individual realities and offer some views on the techno-social system that we are migrating through.

Later in that same evening, I have to remotely present for the conference panel in Savannah, and immediately after that, a live 30 minute visual-sonic set at the opening night of migrating realities. Going to be a stressful day, to be sure.

Frane the virtual mori gloss
And barm in glory midas tock
Notter fen inbyro pressed
When quinsly Durham bilag lock
Full ennil bhutol durm intact
And japock frocks were kileray
Best green was in a tirade sterm
And murmer played the rudge all day

Then pult oh fromot liport yearned
Was thus the burlap empty cup
Lorn in excess pressed doily mange
Whilst fedro billing looked her up
Bright jiring elements were brash
Pre Raphaelite and over brushed
Through endless graze born phananthrope
In bobbing excess weedy rushed

No more the intent grim and foil
No more bereft than pindle bake
No more the dorey gimble oil
No more the stilted ingress flake

And so to hermane fillet brought
By verbose insight truly lost
Are brackish kalick wishing wrought
For sixpence and a far thing crossed
All lava braut in basket taal
Sought diamonds in the chilling moss
But finding nothing water raal
Was frane the virtual mori gloss

– Rod Summers/VEC, Isleworth, 29 January 2008

just out of the second evening of sound constructs with Udo, Rinus, Jodi, Derek, Kim (remotely), and some other interesting folks. nice vibe.

31. The hacker class has an ambivalent relationship to education. The hacker class desires knowledge, not education. The hacker comes into being though the pure liberty of knowledge in and of itself. The hack expresses knowledge in its virtuality, by producing new abstractions that do not necessarily fit the disciplinary regime of managing and commodifying education. . Hacker knowledge implies, in its practice, a politics of free information, free learning, the gift of the result to a network of peers. Hacker knowledge also implies an ethics of knowledge subject to the claims of public interest and free from subordination to commodity production. This puts the hacker into an antagonistic relationship to the struggle of the capitalist class to make education an induction into wage slavery. — Ken Wark

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

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

Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

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

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

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

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

Migrating Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces rather than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich
http://www.feraltrade.org/

Again, a complex year for net art, looking at the divergent and still diverging fields of creative production within global networks. This year’s criteria of “Embodied Praxis” was complicated by the arrival of the much-hyped Second Life on the main-stream media stage. But material and very human networking trumped the attenuated virtuality of SL. Making a functional parody of globalized capitalism, Feral Trade seeks to stimulate a direct distribution network that follows the connections of existing social networks. It takes advantage of the un-mediated plurality of human networks and personal connections and constructs a direct affront to the anonymous standardization of global trade. It opens a small crack in the facade of globalization where autonomous collective be-ing can be activated. As a classic example of a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), I hope it takes hold to become a permanent presence that de-powers the dominant and monolithic capitalist structure. At the very least, it points out the deep lack in that structure, and this is a critical starting point for evolutionary changes in human relation.

an honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call

This project emerges out of the long-term network practice of artist Isabelle Jenniches who has in the past worked in a wide variety of creative net-based activities. The particular piece, “The Call,” is one of several process-oriented projects she has initiated that depend on the availability of generic user-controlled Internet web-cams. The works are constructed over a long period of time — time spent watching the selected scenario, remotely — life-time spent observing the world. Thousands of images are made during a methodological process of deep-looking through this mediated network eye. The extended seeing and repetitive digital stitching operations on the thousands of gathered images acts to frame a meditative daily routine. The cumulative practice approaches the classical Zen expression — “there is no web-cam, there is no PhotoShop, there is only the Void” — and it arises through the post-Cartesian possibilities of a commonly accessible network interface. Formally recalling David Hockney’s early Polaroid SX-70 time-space collage work, “The Call” is an intimate and intense personal vision of a scope rarely manifest in the click-through eye-candy world of the net.

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich
http://www.feraltrade.org/

an honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call

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

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

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 …)

another Furtherfield review:

hit the road, heading gradually south and east. through the burned hills of the coast range between Livermore and the Great Valley. avoiding the main roads when possible, but spending most of the day at speeds too high, with death only a wrist-flick away. here again in the Mojave. fullness of stars. moon will be up later. tonight on the ground. head exhausted after first the NYC trip and then the ISEA gig. haven’t processed it all. and the short time need for employment. Prescott is a lousy base anyway for that.

head exhausted with the whole last year. need to clear it out and start a new life. suggestions about going to OZ surface again, after the virtual contact and the contact with various kiwis and ‘strains in the last couple weeks. hmmm. that or Canada. okay, heading for bed. letting granite grit cradle my brain for a half-solar-cycle.

great visit with the Pulsar Road crew. left five of Kevin’s paintings on loan. took the rest with.

the day before Loki turns 14. the separation is painful, especially with no clear plan for the next months except for heading to Colorado and to Missouri. putting job applications in. following up on the UC-Davis opening, and on. spend the next week finalizing everything in storage. keeping out what’s necessary. trundling the rest off not to be seen for an indeterminate length of time.

morning spent making a photo archive of Kevin’s work that Stefan and Ellen have. adding to the archive, not really sure how many works are out there of Kevin’s — he had a lot of cultured friends, and he liked works to go to good homes, so.

an afternoon with Josephine and Dan and the KidsConnect crew. interesting to work with 7th – 10th graders from around the metro area. I jumped in with a simple facilitation of the local human network, hearing their stories. later met the Scottish couple who are acting as advisers and tutors on the Second Life platform that is the virtual platform for KidsConnect.

long-time digital artist and writer Joseph Nechvatal updates me about his exhibition Contaminations in the Beecher Center of the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. By programming randomized computer viruses which interact with the structure of a digital image, Nechvatal explores the dynamic and metaphoric interrelation between healthy host and the contaminations and mutations of viral attack. given the current excited state of global epidemic both virtual and carnal, these re-presentations exploring that intersection are especially relevant.

shoving into the month. already moving again. house emptied more-or-less. now out in the Mojave. near Kelso. on the usual overnight stop between Prescott and San Francisco — in the Granite Mountains southeast of Kelso Dunes — perfect temperature, negligible humidity. so, star gazing bare-chested. Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, Antares near the waxing moon. Jupiter ahead. took the back way to I-40 at Seligman — essentially continuing out Williamson Valley Road for 65 miles. deep through isolated ranching territory on the fringe of the Prescott National Forest and something of a soft terrain of limestone, basalt, some red-rock, and green vegetation cover from the recent two weeks of monsoon. even caught a small storm that cleaned the windshield. making virtuality more transparent.

the Mojave as it always is. despite encroaching red-yellow air at sunset from eLAy and other less tangible impacts from humans, bats are winging about, some animals and birds out there — jack rabbits, nothing else seen, but likely there — and the plants, rocks, contributing to the raw being of place. and the ever-consequent silence laying heavy behind any sound. even starting up the computer for a bit of writing is a noisy industrial incursion. and with battery running down very fast. so that words either have to form now or simply dissipate into the real ether! setting the alarm early to have a slow breakfast, tea, before the sun breaks the boulder ridge immediately to the east. want to get on the road in this black car so that at least all the hours of the heavy mid-day sun are not spent inside it. coffin.

back to look at stars as battery dies.

The local controversy around widening Williamson Valley Road continues. It is a microcosm of the more general issue of development in the southwest of the US. Arizona has one of, if not the fastest growth rate of any state and the Prescott – Prescott Valley – Chino Valley “Tri-city” area is near the fastest in the state. When the folks moved here and built their retirement home (purely my father’s impetus — the clear-sky suitability for his astronomy), theirs was the second or third home on the street, and the view — a 200-degree panorama that reached 100 miles to the San Francisco Peaks near Flagstaff — was long and relatively free of any spurious Lighting at night. Williamson Valley was still populated by several large ranch spreads, and the road was narrow and twisting as it approached Iron Springs Road and the fringe of northern Prescott proper. That was twenty years ago. The population of Prescott has increased by a factor of four, and the Tri-city area by a factor of six. Everything from Mac-mansions and gated communities to cheap tract housing and trailer courts are changing the landscape on a daily basis. Traffic increases, and now, with development along the WV corridor stretching 20 miles northwest along the fringe of the National Forest, the wealthy folks who have chosen to live that far out are upset when the traffic slows their ingress to town. The first five miles of WV road has more than 75 side roads — everything from driveways to major roads — many of them blind entrances. The second five mile stretch is more straight and has only around 50 intersections. The City of Prescott, working with Yavapai County officials decided unilaterally (well, with the heavy hand of The Developers behind them!) on a “Master Plan” to widen the road, now two lanes, to five (and sometimes 6 or 7) lanes to accommodate the increased traffic and make the road “safer.” If only! Given the drivers who are already tailgating folks going the speed limit (anywhere from 35 to 55 mph) an extra lane means there will be, in effect, an extra fast lane in either direction. That means, if any of the other local 5-lane roads are any indication (including the infamous “Blood Alley” of Rt. 89A between Prescott and Prescott Valley) impatient drivers will be hitting 65 to 80 miles-per-hour in the fast lane. Residents with entrances on the opposite side of the road along that ten mile stretch will be required to cross up to three lanes to turn into their driveways or enter the road. Try that with a blind entrance and 80 mph speeders. The body count will be significant.

It is clear that it is The Developers who will benefit the most — that class of people who carve up the ranches into salable chunks and build houses. Most frequent now are the aforementioned mentioned Mac-Mansions — monstrous homes up to 5000 ft2 (450 m2). Emblems of consumerism, with Hummers and other SUVs parked in the driveway, in front of the four-car + RV garages.

The most annoying aspects of this housing excess is the lack of design features that show any awareness for the local environment. Generally the only nod to the surrounding environment are massive windows (usually placed towards the north-west) which allow the standard spectacle of virtual-environment-as-entertainment. No need to actually go outside!

The house my parents designed and built went up during a short window of time when the state and federal government was giving tax credits for energy-efficient features. My father took full advantage of this, although the house was going to be designed for solar anyway. It has active and passive solar components along with energy efficient characteristics like 6-inch outer walls (instead of the normal 4-inch), anywhere from 3x – 5x the normal insulation factors in the foundation, exterior walls and attic, and so on. Perhaps the single dominant factor, one which affects the comfort of the house most, is the simple orientation of the foundation. There is a sun room at the south end of the house — a room that gets a full blast of Arizona sun during the winter months. The room has a concrete-slab floor which acts as a heat reservoir to store the solar influx. The room has a sloping ceiling which carries heated air up towards an intake vent which carries this pre-heated air down to be pumped out into the 4 – 6-foot high crawl-space which is under the rest of the house. The air then comes out floor vents located in each room. This simple system which needs electricity only for the circulation fan — it easily keeps the entire house at at least 68F in the winter when the sun is shining, the sun room in the 80′sF. On the rare cloudy days, the wood stove in the sun room acts as a substitute. There is a solar water heater which acts as a pre-heating element for the regular water heater or, it can supply the house with 50 gallons of 100F water by itself. Not bad.

Sure, my folks were part of that wave of retirees who came 20 years ago, just another wave coming to the warm west. It’s been going on for 150 years at least.

Presently, along the road, on the wide easements are horse, mountain-bike, and ATV trails paralleling the road. These will be wiped out, further reducing the ”usability’ of the corridor to local residents.

I dunno. Watching the developers consume the landscape of the West is pretty depressing — unfortunately, though there are alternative ways of going, they drive the process with little effective opposition. There is the web site of citizens opposing the widening at http://www.Wvroad.Com.

Starting off the month with reading more from and about David Bohm, the quantum physicist and researcher into the nature of human relation (in the form of his defined term, dialogue). He maintained a suspicion about language, that it formed a mechanism which reified that-which-was-being-talked-about as it was (being) manifest in language. The idea that thought tends to impress a static order on the world outside. (And meanwhile, accepting the premise that all reality is a dynamic procession, thought included.) However, there is an inexorable process — as thought creates knowledge from reality (experience) — that seeks to lock in a fragmentary (incomplete) view excised from reality. This is one general characteristic of linguistic representation of dynamic reality. In a similar vein, Walter Ong (2002) maintained that the transition from aural to written to printed language defined deep shifts in the relation of the Self to the Other and to reality. He compiled a set of characteristics of expressed/expressive thought (=spoken word) that supports the necessary salience of aurally transmitted information (as there were no other ways to catch / statify information in aural cultures):

expression is additive rather than subordinate;
it is aggregate rather than analytic;
it tends to be redundant or “copious;”
the process tends to be conservative;
out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close references to lived reality;
expression is agonistically toned;
it is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced;
it is homeostatic;
it is situational rather than abstract

The key to most of these characteristics is that they directly relate to embodied presence versus the absence (and abstractedness!) of a (printed) text. So that here, in this blog, there is a long sequence of absences, separations — which together accumulate as disembodied virtuality. Ong elsewhere hints about the cumulative effect of this movement from embodied connection with language to the abstractions of mediation introduced by printed texts. And on into the further mediation in telephony (all ‘tele’ or attenuated/virtual realities I would suggest). Socialization is that process of abstraction and reification of what were once active and dynamic processes happening at a granular level of human-to-human. The process moving from dialogue to incontrovertible law (protocol) is a mapping of the ‘advance’ of a social system. Yet, social order is dependent on that dynamic of that granular ground state of the system — at least if a society wishes to retain a vital edge on evolutionary survival. It is precisely this reification process that spells the doom of a social system — though often not before that system has attained a temporary advantage over other systems (by being more efficient in a materialist way), and caused great suffering and alienation.

Scrolling through the personal book collection installed in the mostly unused office that I constructed for my father years ago when the house was quite new. After reading Wolfe, it’s hard to look at a sheet of paper: virtual or crinkled. The border of autobiography and fiction is a powerful dialectic to play along. Always sure to raise hackles of feral anger in dissociation when the images are built from eyes that see essences. It is the essence that is the only thing valuable enough to comment on, eh? Appearances which point to essences are the best.

Those who are motionless on the wandering earth: the voyagers. Those who flee over the motionless earth: the stay-at-homes. But those who flee over the wandering earth, and those who are motionless on the motionless earth: what should they be called? — J. M-G. LeClezio

Back to the desert. Around 95°F from Kingman onwards past Needles, then the turn north off the Interstate into the Mojave. Things are still green. The Buckhorn Cholla (Opuntia acanthocarpa) is blooming, along with Sacred Datura (Datura meteloides) and other plants. There is already one generation of spring grass that is now bone dry and gone to seed, dead. A reason for some alarm in human quarters: fire hazard, from simply driving through the stuff with a hot exhaust pipe. Southern Arizona is already seeing higher than average burn acreage this year even though it is early in the fire season. Sliver of crescent moon, shadow bathed in blue-green earth-Light. Venus slightly below, eclipsed by granite boulders. Jupiter with an extended string of pearls high and wide. Close by to the place I camped in December on the way up here. Not as cold as then, but the temperature swing from day to night will be at least 30°F tonight. But the dry air has a ethereal soothing quality. Limited material content, terrestrial-bound equivalent of Mars. Day and night. Hot and cold. Long drive tomorrow, the rest of the way for Dana’s birthday dinner. Five hundred miles away still. Mostly interesting drive, as a virtual show of landscape variation. But tedious when there are deadlines. Would rather take several days to cross the Great Valley. So many strange scenes there.

Smithsonian magazine echoes my words again. How the visibility of the West has contracted from 145 miles to between 35 and 80 miles. More dramatic than I mention to folks, but I got my statistic some years back. It is decreasing. From the right vantage, overlooking Tejon Pass and the gap to the south of the San Bernadino Mountains, thick jets of raw burnt-red eL-Ay air burst into the desert, making a dusty haze that spreads east to Arizona and further. Ever got caught downwind of a campfire? What’s the difference to that and being downwind of 13 million Los Angelenos swarming in single-passenger SUV-droves, simultaneously towards and away from their every desire. Not much. Weepy, stinging eyes, raspy nose, and asthmatic breath.

Imagining if I came into a sizable chunk of money I would buy a 3-CCD video camera. I shoot so much nice footage in cool places that it is a bit of a waste having a crappy consumer cam. Would never settle for such lousy optical quality doing still camera or traditional film work. The cheapest one could get would be $3K, and the prospect of a used pro cam is unsettling. Hmmm.

Well, once the doctoral direction is settled (or dropped).

naming of location is an old social process. it is an association of place with event (long- or short-term). event may be natural or social. the naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. local means that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. embodied means that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global — it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people.

located story-telling

physical signage is the first step in externalizing the naming process. as social structures become more and more global (de-localized), naming structures have evolved that are more and more universal. (exactly the same process as any kind of socially-driven standardization in engineering, language, and such). GPS, as a numeric cataloging of discrete points on a socially abstracted mathematical surface is a specific form of representation. why do we struggle to associate events with those places? are we continuing the inexorable alienation process that separates us from non-standardize be-ing? is there a praxis which can bring these two systems together without the seeming inevitable separation that the deference to standardization promulgates?

when I lived in Iceland, I quickly grew frustrated with the cultural system for locating ones-self in the landscape. coming from a long experience of DMA (Defense Mapping Agency)-based mapping and location activities — Boy Scout orienteering, geological and geophysical mapping, remote sensing (low-altitude to satellite-based) — reading, comprehending, and making the leap from the ‘coordinated’ map to the territory was a learned but very comfortable process. approximating distance, direction, and azimuth vectors from paper to topography was practiced. watching the stars and sun and making accurate estimations of location and time based on those observations was also standard. Iceland presented a radically different paradigm of location.

when I would come back to town after a weekend hiking trip, the occasion might arise that I would need to describe where I had been. a typical description would be: “you know the Hellisheidi road?” “ja” “well about four kilometers past the turnoff to Thorlákshöfn we turned due north and went along a valley on the west flank of a ridge for 6 kilometers and then crossed a small river and followed it west about 1 kilometer to the top of a valley leading southeast towards Hvergerdi.” This kind description, one which would have been enough to locate one quite accurately in the landscape of the Rocky Mountains, never elicited much of a response. It was not until after some years of traveling in the remote landscapes of the country with native friends that I realized that I could simply say that I went to Grensdalur. That localized naming precisely located a particular place in what is often a disorienting fractal landscape. and indeed, the more I traveled in the country, the more I came to understand that virtually every location — creek, molehill, cinder cone, hot spring, forested area, and (ancient or present) farm had a specific name. the more local the people one traveled with, the more precise the located naming (where each name itself represented a more-or-less comprehensive story that ‘mapped’ the human occupation of that spot). the names came out of embedded human occupation of that exact place at that exact time (or over a period of time).

the key to this anecdote is that this system cannot be simulated except at a loss. the loss comes from the separation by greater degrees of mediation between the embodied experience of the place and the means of social transference of the experience that ‘names’ it. it would seem that the embodied, lived experience is the primary source of placement, but equally important is the propagation method that locks a nam(e)ing / story to the place in the collective memory.

using one system will not allow a Utopian ‘return’ to another system. they exist in parallel to some degree, but they are different paradigms and ultimately different living practices.

John Douglas and I met virtually back in 1995 or so, as a result of the PORT MIT exhibition. his creative feeds to my inbox are a hard-hitting deLight to bring solid soul back into life when psychic drift and political psyop-subduction are rife.

folks begin to migrate in their separate directions after the final main evening last night (which was interrupted by a fire alarm right when VideoHomeTraining was about to start their set at 0030. I was pretty tired by that time, because the fire alarm in the art academy building where I have a penthouse flat went off last night at 0300 with a huge clanging bell right outside my bedroom door for 20 minutes. so I missed the big finale with xploding plastik, oh well. today is spent packing, and having some final meetings for future reference.

It is less a question of the artist interpreting the world than of allowing existing or hypothetical biological processes, mathematical structures, social or collective dynamics to speak directly. In this sense art no longer involves the composition of a ‘message’ but the creation of a mechanism. A new type of artist appears, one who no longer relates the course of historical events. This new artist is an architect of the space of events, an engineer of worlds for billions of future histories, a sculptor of the virtual. — Pierre Lévy

almost a month later. in the middle of a conference. mapping transitions. academic discourse. so. stream notes. what do pictues want? god is an artist. reductions (models, models, models, built on each other, intertwined. biocybernetics. science/technology making bio-sciences possible. cloning and computers. extended sense. political economy that runs the world. world of computer station, tangled wires. cybernetics: the steersman. kybernaut. writing as control system. not law, but the actual technologic/semiotic (phonetic) tools. (code writers). conflict of visual orgy and at the time of triumph of the digital (logos). analogical arguments. (dominant). terminator of liquid metal. ultimate simulator. academicians desperately searching for a label. an interpretive system to decode what the hell is going on. building a new model with old embedded pieces which have no inherent difference in structural predicate. sa-mo, sa-mo. formative paradigms are old. 1) copy original 2) artist and work (subject:object) 3) temporality (remember Virilio, huh?) 4) time of gain. uniqueness. copy has more aura than original.

enhancements of amplification (reproduction): are they qualitative improvements? reproductive cloning — an improvement?

actual and mediated. (electronic media is given a certain status of unprecedented power.) “new media.” participates in “massaged” production. mechanistic view. the aesthetics of digital media? (what about defining what the hell “digital media” is? (instead of defining it’s “fit” into the hegemonic/dominant worldview). hybrid aesthetics? why not just toss it out…? simulation. materialistic presence. current, seeking closure in the circuit. remix, unlocking input and output authenticity. (digital images and digital culture and rituals of new media). new vs traditional: imitations. virtuality. ontological status. proper character. procedural, conceptual (don’t fit…). anti-materialist. (medium is not the point). thesis-antithesis. we’re not allowed to make progress? hierarchies of form. perfection of expression. useful ways to talk about objects. (and subject experience). taste. rational cultivation. descriptive systems assume static forms of … aesthetics of change. mechanistic production. potential literature. procedural methods. with certain sensibilities. floods of wards. static bodies in space. reading texts. monolithic and reified forms of presentation. (any tweaking of of meta shakes the whole tree, gimme a chain saw). key forms of reference — generative: Pannini, Turing, Babbage, procedural, Stockhausen, and so on. iterative. new objects. rethink premises of knowledge production. aesthetics is about awareness. (iterative), step beyond — in flux. two feet in the mechanistic…

swarming

taking quantum to its conclusion — points to a movement from product to process to practice — (Saskia Sassen — the “meaning” of the activities in the digital sphere is the total accumulation of all practices that take place in that space … MAKE THE LEAP…

anthropological centrism. mapping transitions. (remembering the new world order is a limited access, top of a hierarchical high). indigenous technology. Inuit Broadcast Corporation. media-maintenance. next5minutes comes up, tactical media. good topic.

reproduction (gathering and redistribution of original energized event creates a pseudo-powerful illusion, but this is purely illusion based on the hegemonic (and static) position of the “reproducer” within an implied “global” order … the photograph in the world order (re-radiated Light from the self.) … some forms of hypertext with image are nice, but. just ’cause it’s horizontal?

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. — Plato’s Cave

caves, CAVES, and caves. technocracy. aristocracy of technology. networks of expensive, institution-oriented situations, (isolated from the Light, Light re-amplified, reflected, refracted, energized). “gotta have content.” flippant sycophant, mouthpiece of the complex. access. high-end polarity. slick-packaged technological. famous last words. manipulation and collaborative interaction. glib passing over any moral embeddedness of the power structure. fair use. attitudes of use.

I should not be here, I should be elsewhere, by measure of PLANS. but plans shift and slide, along with the whim of the body presence. missed my flight this morning at 0700 to Prague via Helsinki and Stockholm. first time I have ever missed a flight. anywhere. cost me some bucks, and now I miss the whole cafe9.net meeting in Prague. along with a lecture at the Academy in Brno. and the ensuing reconstruction of schedules and flights makes my head ache. doing too many things, and not enough. nothing and everything. Loki is extremely happy that I am staying another week at least. but I see no solution. Iceland does not work for me. there is no way for me to live here, unless I was fluent with the language. unlike other places where there is enough room in the culture for a foreigner to exist in first language, here not. and I have too many things going on elsewhere anyway. cafe9.net. I hardly mention the internal mechanics of this project. no details, no revelations. though I have never been criticized about revealing anything in these pages, except by Sanna, but that is passé at this point. cafe9.net rumbles on. despite. but lately, since October or so, maybe even last summer, whenever the slip in communications began to happen, the dislocation of immediate being and remote presence, a gap, a slippage, opened up, a dissatisfaction has been growing with THE MEDIUM — the net, and the role, the effect it has had on my situation. in contact with so many people that I can hardly think. several days ago, before the rigidity of my lower back lead to this degraded condition, there was a subterranean urge to meditation, an urge that I did not quite fulfill. each time a discontinuity explodes on linear and insulated life, psyche measures itself against virtual standards. hints of higher being play across media-saturated energy configurations. untouchable. inaccessible. over there. other life-styles seem to creep further away. “what if?” becomes “because that’s the way it is.” damnation. peaceful damnation. mistakes. paying for past errors in judgment, SINS, whatever that means. if a sin is the transgression of the mind against the combined being of the soul and the body. the apokalyptic dream. reflects. what it is to be here and now. like speaking with a mouth full of small round pebbles, black basalt, worn smooth. easy to swallow. hard to talk. and then there is.

nine more days in the north for now. quickly the darkening comes. and days are filled with the radiation of monitors. partly Tornio becomes synonymous with staring into screens. the extreme of virtuality. when I take a slow walk to the store for food this afternoon, thoughts crowd my head: IS there a way to use media, mediation that is FOR life? IS it possible to use these things without leaving life, losing life, or missing life? what of the people in this time now who have no use for these image machines? they are tough, hard, and will have little trouble dispatching those soft ones of us who couch in front of screens. I have little use for discussions of this and that aspect and detail of the mechanics of culture. the Utopians, the distopians, the doomsayers, the academics who end up saying nothing after long-winded forays into the depths of their particular tribal language. I can hardly bring myself to participate in these exchanges unless.

Retrospecting on the disheveling week of near-constant stimulation and activity that was the Ars Electronica FLESH FACTOR event. Five hours sleep was a miracle which was as remote from reality as was the idea of downtime. A thrashing whoosh of flesh factors and virtual emulations and emanations and emissions and manifestations accompanied with the appropriate techno-beats, subtronic and subsonic throbbing, visceral vibrations and skittering cathode-ray-tube radiations. I spent a vast portion of my time within the comfortable, though frenetic, Open-X space where something of a revolution took place. A revolution of interface design between audience and artist, participant and observer, creator and consumer, networker and networker. As far as I know or can ascertain in discussion with other networking artists, Open-X is a first as far as restructuring the relationship between artist and audience — although even this pronouncement is a rather näive and surficial reduction. The space was occupied by about 50 networking-artists working on a variety of projects from finished web-projects, to live web-radio, to collaborative events (like our net.sauna), and a full-tilt live documentation of the entire festival. I should point out that this term networking-artist is something of a misnomer, or, at least, a scraping bow to the traditionally relegated identifications of this and that. Previous to this event in the heritage of conference, traditional paradigms have absolutely prevailed for electronic media festivals, exhibitions, and symposium. I came away from the festival feeling virtually invigorated and physically completely wiped-out. The 18-hour flight from Linz to Frankfurt to Washington to Denver was almost total torture for my back. I was constantly checking the count-down timer on my watch, the seconds tripping by far too slowly for me to remember anything through the constant hot-nails in the lower back. In the last hour, I got to digging my fingernails into my palms to make me forget the pain in my back.

At the home of Rikki and Sólrun and their two teenagers Rosa and Kári. I worked with Rikki at the Icelandic Academy of Art for some years, he is an Austrian native (actually from Bolzano which is now in the Italian Dolomite Alps) and is a print-maker. Sólrun teaches in the local school in this small fishing village of around 350 inhabitants. Rikki is still in Reykjavík finishing up teaching at the College. The drive today is long and cold. We finally get out the door around 1030 and head east to Myvatn where we happen to run into the President of Iceland and his wife who are touring the north this week. My back is not doing too well, so I give up driving and lie in the passenger seat for most of the day. We make stops at various places, tourist spots, and locations that I think might be interesting to film. The Hi8 video camera that I have with me is making something of a challenge. I have so long carried my Nikon with a 28mm lens and nothing else, that I am having trouble adjusting my seeing and pacing when using a time-based medium suddenly. One nagging feeling is the dilemma of what I will do with the material once I have gathered a number of hours of raw tape. I rarely have access to decent editing equipment, and even if I did, would I have the time to do the significant editing required to make something interesting out of it. The camera is on loan from my nephew, so I won’t have it on a continuous basis either, which limits the time for experimentation. Of course, I have used video extensively in the past, and audio also, but it remains a challenge to see creatively through this new mediation. I did happen onto an expression of an old idea that I worked with a decade ago in a photographic project with Bill, that of the “infinite half-space” of geophysics and math, where a theoretical space is divided into two half-spaces by an infinitely extensive plane. This is the beginning point of mathematical modeling of the earth and its surface and the various properties of and reactions to changes introduced by external sources. One half of the space is the earth, the other is the atmosphere or space above the surface. Anyway, this idea pops into my head as I am watch the incredibly varied earth-sky interface rolling virtually by outside the silicone-dioxide car window. I make a short video work (to be finished off with titling and all the formalist details in, Finland) called memory of three infinite half-spaces simply by filming with the camera rotated 90 degrees from the horizontal while moving and attempting to maintain the left half of the screen as sky and the right half as earth … a second short video comes from that single day — mama, where are you going? starring Loki with his expansive style. The landscape is bleak and snowy, and there is Light snow falling almost all the day with the exception of an hour spent in Egillstadir at the house of Steinnun where it was warm and sunny.

Juggling mental images, virtual being-ness, weather impressions, family, others, water, body, rain. I saw a coyote loping along the road this morning on the way over to Jim and Janet’s for breakfast. Angelique made biscuits and gravy. Jim was out waiting for a javelina to show up at a friends house — I guess you could call it vermit huntin’ — inside the town limits, and a big javelina it was rumored to be.

The Stupid Bowel, as I named it, was today. I was pleased that during that spectacle of spectacles, the internet was FAST! Like, Blazing! Wish it was always that way … Alexandra and I finally touched base with an IRC test this evening for something over an hour. I am having difficulty putting some kind of deconstructive take on this whole eight dialogues project. It is carrying energy, of that I am certain. The energy is real time, but the effect of the text mediation, the time lapse, the technical interface, and the perception/manifestation of physical presence. I have been having trouble typing all day, too, inverting letter order. Don’t understand that. I wouldn’t mind a better keyboard and working situation here at the house. I work standing up for my back and then my feet and legs just go crazy. I have never been so conscious of my body and its limits as I have these past weeks here in Arizona.

My back is totally trashed. A combination of hours in the car, sleeping on a couch, and sitting around waiting for Trey to arrive. I go to work today and can barely get in and out of the car. I am floating along. Most my activities are in the virtual world, related to the PORT project and things at work.

fortune cookie:

Two small jumps and sometimes better than one big leap.
Lucky Numbers 2. 10, 20, 24, 33, 44

Out on a hike with Janet and Jazzie around the Inscription Canyon area north of the house here about ten miles. A day where things look alive and still. Jazzie, the Aussie (Australian Sheepdog), is a live-wire, sharp and witty.

Making this walk reminds me of when we were kids, going up in to the cornfields behind our house with the collies, Lady Jane, and Rusty Nails and playing hide-and-seek with them in the towering stalks of silage corn. Conversation being played out on different backgrounds and at different time of life. How things change, how they remain the same. We read the writing on the rock in tones of age, time, and especially, place.

Yesterday was an exhausting day working on three people’s Macs, swimming, and then driving round trip to Phoenix to pick up Casey (my niece from California). Driving fast. Something I have noticed about the US recently, that people are really driving much faster than either the posted speed limits or what might be construed as safe. The fifty-five mile-per-hour speed limit is a thing of the past. No more savings needed. Oil seems an inexhaustible resource to Americans once again. I wonder how it will be in the future. For my child and the other children of today.

I talk to George on the phone today. I guess the last time was back in October or so, from Stefan’s place in Manhattan. The difference between our long virtual conversation and these short ‘real’ ones is immense. But of the substance of the difference I am not able to dissect. Like walking in the land today. Under Granite Mountain behind the folk’s house.

I feel almost completely cut off from the land, in a way that I have not felt before. It is truly strange. Yet familiar. As though I am drawing away from the being-ness of it all. And simultaneously drawing into complete alignment. I go to look at the stars and I realize that I am seriously slacking. have only made a couple hundred dollars in the past month. here under the winter sun. and not much future happening yet either. not hustling enough.

Well. I did make a foray into the high desert near Sycamore Canyon a couple days ago. Not far, however. Too much virtuality has left me stunned. Too much driving especially, that oh-so-virtual reality where, like with digital media, we are insulated by the silicon dioxide / amorphous silica, except of windows rather than IC chips … I figured once, some years ago, that I have spent about 500 24-hour days in a car, traveling about 50 mph, since I arrived in this in-car-nation, so to speak (ohhh, now THERE’s a pun for you…). But as it is ingrained in my existence, I must say that I do enjoy cruising across/through the western landscape in a vehicle. The unrolling vistas, the feelings of Power, the big road. … Enough of that. I stopped and walked some ways into the VR world, and coming upon a manzanita bush that had been uprooted by a heavy tractor, I cut a branch. Manzanita has always intrigued me, mystified me, to be more precise. For bark, it has only a thin silky-smooth surface of a dark reddish-brown hue. Dead parts of the bush lose their color quickly, or, well, the color becomes dead to the eye and harder to the touch. The surface invites touch. The leaves are small and roundish, silvery on the bottom. Dead branches stick out from live branches and are a gray-silver. I am back swimming, much to the deLight of my travel-battered body. Spent today stripping ten years of acrylic floor polish off my mother’s kitchen floor. Forty years of TeeVee demands that kitchen floors gleam like the nose-cone of the Enola Gay, reflecting atomic glory and modernity and TeeVee dinner trays. Working with acrylics is always the same. Dry too fast, sticky, hard to get rid of. It takes two or three applications of the stripper to remove the layers. Looks like I will be swamped with this chore tomorrow, although in the afternoon I am supposed to visit with Hope down at Computerlink to see about some web work. I’m getting a bit desperate. Supposed to be cold tonight, in the north of Arizona, -20F with wind chill. That’s cold…

My proposal to the PORT MIT project was accepted by the curators, Remo Campopiano and Robbin Murphy. Now I have to get into gear and do something about it. The project begins at the end of January and runs in to the end of March … Email overwhelms me, especially at the moment when the OTiS/SiTO listserv is going blazes with new things, and with the PORT listserv, I can’t keep up even reading the texts. But a few weeks ago, out of the blue, following a visit to my Web site, Alexandra began writing to me…

As far as writing to you goes–it seemed important to respond to your site for the reasons I mentioned in my first letter. I certainly *wasn’t* flattering you. But you had put something out towards “me,” and it moved me … And to stop just with that — your offering, my receiving of it — seemed somehow incomplete. As a writer who frequently reads in public, I’m often struck by just how abashed my audiences are, how seldom they move past their reticence into response. They seem struck dumb by the common belief that, as Audience, their only job is to receive, passively. But both for their sakes, and — quite selfishly — for mine, I want/need them to respond. Hate it? Love it? Grok with it? I want to know. Like you, I’m interested in real conversation, in an exchange of energy that transcends the patterns of ordinary communication. As Buber wrote, dialogue requires mutual attention and intention. It involves the willingness to be available to the Other; to recognize the common humanity between you. And then, dialogue is a living thing itself, isn’t it. My best friend Jane describes it as an imaginative dance, one in which the mind is free from its need to maintain persona, free of anything but the moment’s opportunity to speak, and to receive. I’m not saying that my silent audiences are locked off. Sometimes silence itself is a form of — one half of — a dialogue. I can feel the difference in a silence like that; it’s permeable, spacious; it speaks back in a language of feeling rather than words. Or, “Come, let us not be animals”… Just to finish what I’d been meaning to say about dialogue: the silence of my audiences, when it’s a dead rather than a living silence, has often made me feel weary and discouraged. Even when the silence is a living one, though, I long for just those few words that might let me know, directly, that I’ve made a moment’s difference in (any one of) their lives. Which response might lead to a little more from me. And then more again from them. Dialogue. And then it might be like that story you offered, the memory of which was touched off, it seems, by the very simple thing I did, which was to offer you thanks, and a bit of my own story. (And again, I did this because of my own experience of non-response, and because while I may, just may, pick up from an audience sitting right in front of me, this online sort of offering seems not only to allow for, but to require some actual feedback. I mean, until I wrote, you couldn’t exactly feel us as members of *your* audience out here silently communing, could you?).

Up early again. Sunshine. 0930 ferry into town, packed everything last night, so took my backpack over to the Silja terminal and left it there in a locker, then went direct over to Muu to get one more fix of fast digital life for the time being. I meet Tapio at Café Fazer, off the Esplanade. This week he is attending a conference put on by the American Studies Department of the University of Helsinki concerning a critique of media and culture. The prospectus looks, well, typically academic, and it is certain that they have good funding given the number of American … academics … giving papers. We have a long conversation about some of the issues that concern us both. At the moment the boat is slowly pirouetting away from the dock and heading past Suomenlinna to the open Baltic. This ship is more strange and less comfortable that the Silja boat I took to Turku. There is an open five story mall down the center, and aside from the sun deck on the top, there are no places to simply sit and enjoy the mode of transportation. Everything is done to distract the passengers from the idea that they are moving on the (sometimes savage) sea. There are bars, a casino, restaurants, and shops, not to mention the obnoxious Tax Free Market. (We are now passing through the narrow strait next to Suomenlinna which can’t be more than 200 meters wide — you can almost reach out and touch the battlements of the fortress — people are standing there waving. We take a sharp right-hand turn and are almost to open ocean.) Behind my head a bad American teevee program, maybe BabeWatch, blares, the speaker keeps cutting out, giving a surreal quality to the already stilted monologues. Nobody cares, they read the subtitles. The only place I could locate an electric plug to run this machine was in the casino, and already, at 6pm it is filling up with people and, consequently, smoke. Europeans are smokers. Maybe not like the Chinese, but there are plenty of them puffing away. I occasionally have to do the same — if you can’t beat them, join them — smoke just to survive the smoke. Hack hack hack. Moving on. I sadly see my last of, Finland for the next few months. Of course it is only just now getting warm again, so, aside from the weekend before last at the summer house on the west coast, it hasn’t been much of a summer yet. When I hear from email connections in warmer climes, I really have to ignore the weather data. Sweltering in NYC, hot and dry in Colorado as Nick writes:

It’s been scorchin’ here, 90+ and dry. Lilacs did bloom this year…first time ever (since we’ve been here). Not much time for landscaping/yard work. Gardening is still a plan but may need to hire roto-tilling … where are you when I need you, haaaa?

Well, I wouldn’t mind a little scorching at the moment. I still have to wear long underwear! Oh gosh. I remember visiting with Nick and Deb last summer and volunteering to clean the gutters and the roof at mid-day when it was at least 100F (what, 42C?). Most of my friends from the US really can’t understand why I actually moved to a small volcanic island in the North Atlantic, right on the Arctic Circle, when I used to say that any temperature below 70F (19C) was f**king freezing. I admit, I was thoroughly spoiled with my three year stint living in Santa Monica, six blocks from the very beaches where BabeWatch is filmed, as well as living in Colorado where statistically there are 330 days of sunshine each and every year … I guess I made the move for LOVE, at least that’s what I call it now, in retrospect, but who knows? Digressing, now there sits a crowd of Swedish kids in their early 20′s. Each talking on their mobile phones to some invisible connection, smoking and already drunk enough to be slurring their speech. Obviously the phone is the status symbol of the age. Tapio mentioned at lunch that between the two mobile communication providers in, Finland there were over a million-and-a-half accounts — in a country of five million, that is one per household! And this development is only three years old! Astonishing! I still find it rather obsequious for people to be going on and on while standing or sitting in public transportation. This odd juxtaposition of private and public. It has to mediate the content in most cases — reducing it to a certain formalized blather. And perhaps this very page here is another form of the same type of public/private inversion, of artificial presence and being. Around 2200 I unplugged and went to the upper deck to enjoy the Arctic sunset.

The slowness of the darkening is quite special. After the first eventide on the train when arriving in Turku, I find quite some difference being in the water. The darkening has a totally different character and expression. The water enters a shivering dialogue with the sky. The only darkness is held by the thin lines of land which slowly sink out of sight as we pull away from the south coast of, Finland. There is a blue-ing of everything. As though the world becomes immersed in a transparent ice of ether. As though the world here begins silently to remember its burial under the massive thousands of feet of glacier. It is a land that is still rising from that era of oppression, islands growing each year, sea shallowing. The moon is broadening its scimitar. Venus there. A thin band of cloud, like a chalk line, floats, glowing, close over the point on the horizon where the sun vanished. Surrounding our boat, scattered on this half-plane intersection of shimmering chill a few kilometers distant, are other ships. All steaming west, a flotilla, but each one knows nothing of the other except the failing truth of vision and perhaps virtual radar images. and wakes which tell something of the past and passing. I go back to the lowest deck to cabin 2006, bunk D. I had stopped there briefly when boarding the ship, meeting a Finnish man, named Juha-Pekka, maybe 30 years old. He said he was going to sleep, so I left and went to do some work. When I returned, I entered into a strange dialogue that went on for an hour. He was obviously agitated about something, and bit by bit I learn something of his story. He has left, Finland. He was forced to leave the country by relatives who wanted to put him back in an asylum. He had already spent a year in one under a regimen of various drugs to keep him ‘in control’. He is a musician who played in a number of bands, and who simply wanted to write “pure music”. He had nothing with him, save the clothes on his back and a sheaf of musical scoring notebooks, no money, no passport, no destination, no friends or family in Sweden. He was very distraught with worry. He had left his wife who he loved very much and he hope she would come live with him wherever he ended up. I encouraged him by sharing some my difficulties, and saying to him that if he needed to write pure music, then that is what he had to do, and he made the right choice to leave the threat of drugged imprisonment, and he had chosen the right things to have with him — the blank musical scores which he had gotten at the conservatory. He said he had been teaching at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. I also gave him some traveling tips — like how to wash ones socks and take a hot shower whenever possible — as one never knows when the next opportunity might be. To be sure, I was a little nervous about being in the room with him, seeing his agitation and especially upon hearing he had been committed before, but after a while I understood that while he might have been a bit unstable, he was not going to do anything crazy. He thanked me for listening and talking to him, especially as he could practice his English and learn more how to travel. I finally was able to crawl into bed and plug my ears and try sleeping. As I mentioned before there were lots of teenagers on board, seemingly without adult supervision of any kind. At one point while wandering around the ship, I come across a group of ten young teenage boys carousing with one young girl who was completely drunk and was pulling her dress up to her shoulders as she stumbled around the deck. There were cabins full of kids across the hall and a great racket spawned of drunkenness mixed with de-flowering continued until at least 0500. I didn’t sleep too well. The other cabin-mate was a Norwegian man who I didn’t really meet — he came in later and left early in the morning. I did hear him get up and yell at the kids across the hall at one point. The fourth mate, an old alcoholic Finn made it to the room once early in the evening where he left an empty bottle of vodka on his bed and then again at 0700 when he came in, turned on the Lights, and proceeded to try to have a loud conversation with Juha-Pekka who ignored him. The old man was totally drunk and stumbled out a few minutes later with me yelling at him to turn off the Lights. So it goes.

Sadly, my last day in Vienna. I do laundry, and clean the flat in the morning. And then I go out to meet Mathias at TELLER. We eventually make it the the Hochschule für angewandte Kunste where he is a lecturer (he was hired by Roy Ascott when Roy was starting up the department there back in 1991 or so). They have a great computer lab, all the way to an SGI Reality Engine (at least I think that’s what they call these huge blue boxes — rather reminiscent of the IBM mainframes that I used to work on way back in the deep past of engineering…). We were unable to get online for me to send mail, however. Long story. We met Sylvia and Jon at a secluded restaurant behind the MuseumQuartier for some traditional Viennese dinner and then took a slow walk through the First District to Schwedenplatz where Jon says is the place with the best ice cream in all Austria. The evening was warm and there were crowds out everywhere, like in the middle of summer. I never did get a chance to get to the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, so it will have to be a virtual trip, eh? Such convenience! Same with the exhibition that Mathias is working on at the Kunsthalle — about the history of the techno-wonder-machine…

For (Walter) Benjamin to quote is to name, and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to Light. He regarded truth as an exclusively acoustical phenomenon. — Hannah Arendt, in the essay about Walter Benjamin, Men in Dark Times

Here we go. And so on. In the west of London, not far from Shepherds Bush and Ravenscourt Park on the District Line Tube. Hanging out with Joanna Buick, a friend from ISEA94 days — we met at the Symposium in Helsinki. She’s presently a tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art which is part of the University College of London as well as a tutor-counselor at the Open University, the largest open learning institution in the UK. She is running a class called “Living with Technology” which encompasses an innovative scheme to familiarize students with the impact of technology on daily life. The class is run using the internet, audio and video tapes and hard copy materials, as well as occasional tutorial sessions for students who live in the area. The Open University has tens of thousands of students studying around the world. Pursuing her own work, Joanna been doing developmental work on Virtual Reality systems.

I did get by The Photographers Gallery yesterday after lunch with Katrine and Juan, but was not impressed by the work of German photographer, Michael Schmidt. Not that there was anything wrong with the work, on the contrary, I personally find it difficult to engage with dead objects and words these days. Recently I have been going through a kind of opening awareness about my own work, that this travel ritual and emphasis on the action of Dialogue is becoming core to my thinking. It has always been important — the sustaining of focused Dialogue with both new and old friends — but I never considered it either a product of working, a goal to work towards, or a means/medium of work. It just was. As I was describing to Juan and Katrine in the noisy Chinese restaurant Wong Ki just off Shaftsbury Avenue, I am realizing it IS a means and a highly effective unmediated means at that. I am rather tired of objectified mediation and thrive on the most unmediated contact with others that seems to occur while engaged in attentive and genuine Dialogue. Gallery and Museum exhibitions — while, to be sure, they do occasionally contain inspiring (inspired?) objects and such — seem to be locked in a struggle with entangled and intertwined corpses from which they are unable to escape. The public discussion here in the UK these days centers on the calamity visited upon the Beef Industry for better or for worse. Not to delve into it deeply, I would only make the observation that it seems it might be a foreshadowing of more global crises in the coming years as we approach the millennium and the further crowding of the planet. I am reminded of the British science-fiction writer John Brunner’s book “Stand of Zanzibar”, which portrays the microscopic turmoil of a world culture gone mad through the pressures of the Global Market and overcrowding.

There’s a belief still current among British school children that you could stand the entire human race on the 147-square-mile Isle of Wight, elbow to elbow and face to face.

Well, that may have been true around the time of World War I although nobody was keeping records accurate enough for us to be certain. However, right now in the 1960′s you’d have a tough job packing us on the 221-square-mile Isle of Man.

And by 2010 — the time this book takes place, you’d need an altogether larger island — something like the 640-square-mile surface of Zanzibar! — John Brunner

back to Mad Cows — it is hard not to be pessimistic when cows are being forced to become cannibal/carnivores because of the greed of humans. No wonder the disaster.