domination of landscape 16:26
The lifetime of situation
BEFORE
Thoughts unreel, leading nowhere in particular: parrots leading monkey-brain. So many sketches started—more than one hundred drafts in the ‘pending’ zone—while lacking the embodied discipline and focus to finish any. Blah, blah, blah.
My situation is moving rapidly towards a major change, assuming I can manage, and that is the main focus of a very blurry existence. Blurred by fractured attention, internal and external stressors: societal instability, monetary insecurity, psycho-spiritual transience, mortality, inexorable cosmological flow, etc.
Reflecting on the four-year tenure here in rural western Colorado, the “Western Slope” as it is called, being on the west side of the main range of the Rocky Mountains. It’s been a mixed experience. Initiated in the depths of a bad cancer prognosis, it had a harsh essence from the beginning. Three of the past four years was spent, primarily, working full-time/remote for the CGS. Two of those years were with the most miserable excuse of a boss, the former State Geologist. With new management, the final 16 months were far better, but the profusion of way too many responsibilities simply burned me out. After a disturbing interaction with one of my colleagues—one whose work was an essential support element to mine—who had confided to me that he wasn’t going to do anything at work unless forced to, I decided to pull the plug with just three weeks notice. Precipitous, yes, but somehow necessary, given how life-time was/is slipping away at a rate that continues to disturb tranquil thought every day. It was a bit surprising how easy it was to ‘retire,’ and how quickly the job vanished in the rear-view mirror. How all that time spent since 2016 evaporated almost without a trace. I did leave the highly organized legacy in the form of their information/dataspace, built with my life-energy. That along with putting in place workflows that guaranteed—to the degree possible at my level of responsibility—the highest quality of their public-facing information.
“So what?” Richard Pryor asks.
The other focus of attention was to the house and the 13.5 acre property, the land. Once I left the job, the countdown started on the retreat from this place, first back to Arizona, and thence back to Iceland/Europe. All along, since I bought the property here, I’d spend hours each week day, many more on weekends, working on clearing up something or other. Cutting and collecting dead wood, pruning trees, moving rocks, weed-whacking, clearing defunct fencing, encouraging re-wilding, selectively reinforcing aging out-buildings and root cellar, removing vast amounts of detritus from same, improving the water drainage situation, setting up a large composting system, and re-doing the house interior and exterior to some degree (roofing, kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom especially). I have made a couple thousand images from the property, but rarely explicit before-and-after images, there is some evidence of the improvements. The main goal was to stabilize the physical infrastructures and fix things that bothered me or obstructed optimal enjoyment and operation of the facilities. This became, cumulatively, the dominant creative act. In retrospect, I could have done more careful documentation and explication here on the blog, following my efforts, but there wasn’t the will. If nothing else, the move from Golden saved me from paying $50K in rent over the years. I do have a potential buyer.
I do watch the sky here. With a 360-degree panorama (the property has few trees) and a view up to a hundred miles (the San Juan Mountains to the south, the Uncompaghre Uplift to the southwest, Hells Kitchen directly west, and Grand Mesa to the north), there is always much to contemplate in the sky. And aside from a paranoid neighbor from Southern California who recently installed a ridiculously bright night light on his garage, the area is known for its dark skies. This will be the greatest adjustment, as my place in Arizona is deep in the ponderosas. I’ll have to wait for Iceland to ponder and enjoy big skies again.
The economic demands of this particular period of existence, from 2016 until now, have impacted life in ways that confirmed my long-standing perspective on the pursuit of money—as Blake expressed in Laocoön—“Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only.” Formal creative pursuits were sporadic, and amounted to little more than recording fragments of life along the way, this blog being the only public venue aside from aporee::maps and participation in a few international streaming projects.
Contemplating my next situation includes mulling the question of how the physical dislocation and change will go down. The next temporary physical landing place is known, but far away, and the inertia of being here is now exceedingly large as precipitated by time and age. That and TOO MUCH STUFF. The Archive weighs heavily on mind, and, once moving, on body. In a cosmos that is transitory at all scales, the attempt to stop entropic decay is almost completely pointless. And through aging, The Archive becomes something of a retroactive creative crutch where delving into it is a poor substitute for actively creating *now*. At the same time it presses down heavily with the message that there is enough stuff in the world: no need or reason to make more. Best to simply live and spend time with Others instead.
Stay tuned. Oh, but wait, there will be stiff competition for eyeballs here, what with the ongoing socio-political conflagration about to receive another corpulent splash of gasoline… Sigh. I’d advise dropping social media.
AFTER
flash-flooding
On the afternoon of 27 August 2024, the area including Upper Sand Canyon, a relatively small drainage in Dinosaur National Monument, experienced a major precipitation event. The fifteen mile Echo Park access road, in part, runs the full length—about three miles—down that canyon, much of it in the fluvial hazard zone. Long stretches of the road were completely washed out, and it was only the heroic efforts of the guy re-grading it that re-opened access to Echo Park some days later. I recently made it back up to Dinosaur for a short sojourn after an interminable and blurry five-year absence.
Earlier bush-walks along the dry washes in the area, the curious effects of flash-flooding as well as other, slower, changes are noted. I’ve come across dried-mud-caked trees in Upper Pool Creek Canyon more than 20 feet higher than the dry creek bed, yikes! And in some areas of Hells Canyon, boulders the size of small cars are seen piled up and ground together in violent proximity.
With the 27 August incident in mind I did a long bush-walk along the east-west axis of the Ruple Point-Red Rock Anticline that forms the Weber Sandstone hogbacks running perpendicular to Upper Sand Canyon.
and then
and then …
desperate.
where is meaning in a system so completely out of balance?
speed of adjustment too slow,
gyroscopic inertia too high,
center of gravity external,
lightening world spinning, all in a cosmos of dark energies and dark matters: occultation.
at once, briefly, looking up, with the eyes of god: plasma of blood reading plasma of star.
and then, exsanguination and final uplift into the approaching Void
hypostatic inversion, return return return
acceleration. what does this look like? bodycage pressing seat of heart, spine once shattered, now in tensile repair. static, greymetal frames cage neuronal pathways. acceleration of bodily demise is not motion, it is stasis.
it is time.
to make do. quickly. traverse no zenith. accelerate.
the volume of memory
May we speak of fullness, and of amplitude?
Or,
mere intensity and lack?
Of certainty, not. Buried, yes. Suppressed, but not invisible.
What was: now only traces, tracks of energy in liminal mind, itself the inconsequential armature of be-ing.
Released to the future, tracing a trajectory not governed by arc, origin, or knowing; the unknown entering that mind, leaving Light and uncertain matter.
You impressed on me your broken self-love and absolute certainty in every moment and I remember it all, forever.
interspecies communications
Yet another example of cooperation between kingdoms of life is found on acacia trees. These trees sometimes develop galls on their bark: woody chambers that are ideal homes for certain ants. The ants colonize the galls, and when a browsing giraffe approaches the tree to gorge on its tender leaves, the tenant invertebrates rush to the scene to defend their landlord, squirting acid at the giraffe until it is discouraged.
Interspecies communication is an integral feature of life on Earth and has been around for Billions of years. All these mutualistic symbioses have one thing in common: They are held together by signals. A growing fungus will send out special feelers called hyphae and produce mucus to sense the signaling molecules on potential algae teammates, in order to size them up with a view to making a lichen together. The honeyguide bird sings a special song to the honey badger to get its attention, then flies ahead to lead it to the beehive. A foraging shrimp will keep one of its long antennae resting on its goby pal’s tail so that if the eagle-eyed fish spots danger, it will signal to its myopic friend by waggling its tail and both will scuttle to safety. An acacia tree will release chemical signals (hormones) that alert its resident ants to a munching herbivore and tell them where to come to help. Living things survive by signaling to other life-forms, within and across the species boundaries. This includes both whales and humans.
Mustill, Tom. How to Speak Whale: A Voyage into the Future of Animal Communication. London, UK: William Collins, 2022.
Tom authored an easy read across a relevant subject: the whole effort initiated after a humpback whale breached over the sea-kayak he was whale-watching from: the energized and auspicious start of a personal search.
I kept getting the feeling that much of the theoretical and applied research—as articulated by the scientists he interviews—is (still!) mired in the most mechanistic of physical worlds, though. Oblivious of the concept that sound—in its spectral complexity—is merely one of a plenitude of energy-exchange, energy-transmission pathways. This, between and among the plenitude of species (who are themselves merely varying configurations of life-energy flow).
The flows are there, we are immersed and part of them. An individual of a species will use the embodied pathways of energy expression available to it. Transmission, signals. Others of its species have resonant energy receptors, communication; other species sometimes have overlapping receptors as well:
“Did you hear that? Ugh, the smell!”
“I did, that was Claude Shannon farting!”
Mary Bauermeister 1934 – 2023
Incommunicado, distracted this whole calendar year by exhausting j-o-b tasks, along with endless, heavy, slow physical labor on the property, I completely missed Mary‘s passing in March. Her NYT obit gives some sense of her powerful creative trajectory and persona as an artist and a convener of artists.
Volker had told me late last year she was declining from cancer and that Simon had moved into the Forsbach house to look after her. But it was too much for him, and she was subsequently moved to a care facility. I had planned to spend some time with her back in March 2020 during my Covid-aborted Germany trip, and now, she’s gone. The last time then, were the days spent in 2013 at Forsbach, the highLight being the day-long Fluxus Akademie meeting that she convened, inviting me along with a number of German academics and artists in her orbit. Her energy was astounding: just shy of 80 y.o., she raced around the house preparing for both the meeting and in the kitchen, a sumptuous luncheon. Helping her as best I could, I almost had a heart attack myself when, at one point, as she ran back and forth from the kitchen to the meeting space, she tripped and fell up the stone steps between the rooms. Showing no injury, she brushed herself off and kept going at high-bustle speed: the indomitable dynamo that she was her entire life! “I provide” as she says below.
We first met in Aachen at the Avantiere* exhibition in 1990 that HaWeBe (Hans Werner Berretz) organized at the Aula Carolina. Mary had a sculptural installation “Zeit”; my installation was “der Apkalyptische Traum” that was wrapped around the massive stone columns of the ancient hall.
I was the oldest daughter. I had an older brother whom I loved very much and four younger sisters. So I was then the provider of the family. I always had to, that is, I wanted to. I thought that was wonderful. I actually provided very early on. Later my children almost resented me for that, because my love is always in providing. I am a human being. If someone tells me you don’t love me, don’t hug me, I provide, I like to provide for people, and my kind of love has to do with providing, not necessarily with cuddling and hugging. That I had to do without that for too long in my life. In order to take that importantly now, I then also learned to put away nicely ascetically. As a child, I saw colors around every object, moving colors. One would call that today aura, above all around living things, but also around stones. Stones were not dead for me. — Mary Bauermeister
That’s also where I first connected with Simon Stockhausen, her son. He performed a long improve electronica piece—an hommage to the works in the show—as his then girlfriend, Tina, pulled his synth rig around the space. I unfortunately hadn’t any access to a decent recording device at that juncture, having hopped down to Germany from Reykjavík just a few months after moving there from the US, footloose.
Over the times we crossed paths, I never did a portrait of Mary, it seemed too trivial a gesture in the face of her powerful life-energy (there’s her hearty laughter in my ear!), instead I shot a lot of interiors at her unique house (designed by Erich Schneider-Wessling) there in Rösrath which was, essentially, a working museum. Among countless other objets d’art, stones, crystals, and musical instruments was a set of absolutely huge Tibetan singing bowls. They amplified and resonated with her fundamental life-energy. The garden was also the site of numerous permanent installations including the largest singly terminated quartz crystal I’ve ever had the opportunity to hang around.
Thank you, Mary, for so freely sharing your prodigious creative energies with so many of us, and thank you for providing.
* Hans Werner introduces Mary and the rest of us starting around 00:15:30 in the video following a long introduction by a critic whose name I can’t recall. I shot this on a borrowed VHS machine that Léo managed to snag from his office. Ancient history!
Systems thinking and the narrative of climate change (excerpt)
The problem of climate change has become a part of the current global discussion, due to the Paris Accord. Current mainstream arguments focus on three specific components of the problem: (1) the disputability of global warming, (2) the relevance of anthropogenic contribution, and (3) the extent of the dangers associated to an increase of the global temperature. Key players appear to have difficulty moving the discussion past these three components of the problem, towards potential solutions. Instead, the discussion returns again and again to describing the problem, in greater and greater detail, with arguments stalling on various small pieces of the problem. Our inability to move past the problem to solutions is based in part on how the various critics frame the discussion. Critics on both sides of the issue are subject to a framing effect, where we house the problem mentally within the boundaries of the human economy. While opponents of climate change suffer from their own framing effect, this post focuses specifically on the proponents’ framing effect. Those who advocate for policies to limit climate change make four main assumptions that impact their thinking:
- Those concerned about the climate place the environment either within the global human economy, as a subsystem, or externally, where it can be used at will, endlessly. As a corollary to this mindset, the problem of climate change is an anthropogenic problem caused by humans, with no real impact on our resource base, which is either external to the system and infinite, or internal and thus, not critical to our life support.
- Because the human economy is more important than the environment, societal economic growth is an inviolate mandate for all countries. The assumption is that we can support economic growth while solving the problem of climate change.
- Globally politicians have the will and options to create viable, effective actions that limit the temperature increase without harming economic growth.
- We can use technology to find suitable solutions that will eventually handle, if not overcome, most of the problems. Moreover, added technology does not use added energy or environmental resources.
Unfortunately, these postulates are false.
Gonella, Francesco. “Systems Thinking and the Narrative of Climate Change – A Prosperous Way Down.” Blog. A Prosperous Way Down, July 23, 2017.
from source to sink to source
Thermodynamic and electromagnetic (energy) models of reality use the terms ‘source’ and ‘sink’. Given that certain aspects of living organisms are accurately modeled by thermo, it follows, reasonably, that in a science-driven interpretation of reality, these terms may be applied to human life.
Eau de source: spring water, water that is safe to drink. Source, re-source. Life-source. Keeps life in motion and creating.
And then, sink: to submerge (in water?). Water that kills, hypothermia, a demonstration of inverse heat capacity, from source (body engine) to sink (cold water). Taking from, depth, gravitational pull of the Sun at night: into the earth. Drawing, winding down, running out.
From source to sink and vice versa. The movement of energies from energy-dense to energy-deficient regions.
Back to the anisotropic distribution of energy/matter in the cosmos. Life is predicated on this seeming imperfection. It is the ground condition of Life as a negentropic phenomena. Pure sameness was once disturbed and began to differentiate. Back to Weil’s “Two forces rule the universe: Light and Gravity.”
Mind has forgotten how to string words together. Mind knows no more names. A retreat from naming is the end’s beginning. I will stop naming what I cannot recall. Rather, turn naming into an action stripped of all symbolic content. No adjectival building of sense: mere non-sense. A good thing perhaps? Rules broken, expression by fiat, without the symbolic chatter, without symbolic precision.
An urgency to fall back into a frenzy of creative action emerges from a deep loathing of empty-headed criticism of pointless tasks that have no use in changing the social system: the dysfunctional working life. In service of the overwhelming human inertia directed into the search for (re)sources. Sources. Am I then guilty of helping sustain the unsustainable? Maybe, but worse, guilty of tolerating the intolerable idiocy of management: an energy sink.
To be a source is to allow a flux of energy to pass into and through the body with minimal disruption, minimal blockage. Channeling, not grasping, not riding the tiger, but simply be-ing the tiger, inspiration, be-ing the tiger’s roar, expiration. Nothing to do with the social, the fiscal, the political, the noumenal.
fragments
Walking. There is no trail. I follow the accumulated energies of the world, not merely my nose. There is a path that is to be taken, as sure as the gravitational fall line that carries a skier to the greatest velocity and thrill in the downhill race: there is a pathway in the bush that presents itself as the way to go. I am impelled: the bushwalker, on the asymptotic pathway among infinite permutations.
I am on a planet, I am in a country: how absurd is that. I am in a state, I am in a county: how absurd is that? I am in a national forest, I am on Forest Road number 12: how absurd is that? I am in the forest, somewhere, off the Forest Road, an un-named place, I am stepping, full of care. There is no trail. I follow not my nose, but the aura of an energized gradient, a fall line of the self, as a being. How absurd is that? I am falling along that line, down, down, down, away within the roaring beauty of presence.
Stars careen through life’s nighttime, momentary solace to the parched days of no rain. Nights of virga, souls falling, falling, falling, yet never reaching the Earth: convective transcendence instead filling Heaven with we, the fallen.
field work
notes: ‘using’ vs ‘taking-care-of’
I got onto this track while observing how others live in relation to the stuff that they ‘have’. A few additional thoughts coalesced between the annual moving of house, the monthly payments for a storage unit 800 miles away, and the effects of having too much stuff myself.
The personal nature of this dialectic rests within the character of an individual’s relation to reality, to the world, and to the perceived structural manifestations of that world. A worldview of flow acknowledges that change drives all conditions, that ‘things’ are temporary configurations of energy flow. A worldview rooted in the hard structures of materialism sees ‘things’ as mutable in their immediate usefulness, based on their potential to persist, if that characteristic is acknowledged at all. Both views stand in deep relationship as to how life is lived, moment-to-moment. Both are forced to acknowledge the transitory nature of be-ing.
Using suggests a consumption of a limited resource, something that is recognized or at least assumed to have a finite material life. And, when ‘finished’ or ‘used up’ the object is discarded, after being rendered use-less. But isn’t it such that everything gets used up? Sure, but there seems to be an inherent level of violence correlated to the rate at which something is used up. Laboriously accumulated or meticulously assembled things may be destined or actually created to be destroyed in a single usage: the explosive weapon. Although time is often measured relative to human perception and human life-span; this metric applies an anthropocentric stance that seems reasonable, given that many of the things used up are human fabrications. However, the speed question suggests that a slow dissolution is a constant background condition. If you don’t use me up, I will be used up anyway.
Taking-care-of suggests a stewardship that is governed by a continuity of interaction and attention meant to project the usability, the use, perhaps into a long future, perhaps a passing from person-to-person, beyond the individual’s life-time. In a way transcending the limitless hubris of the anthropocentric: it will last longer that I. However, to maintain usability an object needs to maintain its ordered existence: this requires energy and attentive care. Life-time and life-energy are drawn upon. Living is compromised. And, in the end, nothing will stop the dissolution that entropy enforces. You may be taking care of me, but I will be used up eventually.
Turns out, a majority of the ‘things I own’ are use-less to begin with: The Archive. Well, perhaps not completely bereft of function, but certainly not when in a survival mode. The Archive is the carrying of a story, of stories, forward in time. The use-full-ness of the story is directly correlated to how it augments survival—how it carries us through. The propagation of information forward in time is the core value in this. Whatever the form, information represents an ordered configuration of energized matter. However, value is relative. Information, energetically carried forward in time, compromises the viability of the carrier in a direct way. Without the compensating augmentation, it is not a good idea to participate in such a process as an organism. Use-full-ness is relative and changeable depending on circumstances, what was once useless may later become a valuable source in another context.
Using suggests a recognition that the end game is ever-present. Nothing is forever. Order cannot be maintained indefinitely. Energy runs out. We leave only the dissipating measure of our transitory presence: ripples radiating from that short cosmological pulse: use it, or lose it.
Taking-care-of suggests a refusal to recognize our impotence. Resisting the inevitable. Gentle raging at the dying of the Light. A refusal of the commonly assumed nature of reality: that caring is somehow an eternal value.
In the end, perhaps neither style of engagement with stuff really … matters. pffff!
confusion:
To fundamentally misunderstand the nature of be-ing.
How is it that the veil — the same veil that obscured and was suddenly removed to clear St. John the Divine’s apocalyptic vision — so deforms life in the moment? Shaping a path, gambled upon, while in mind a removed reading of the world: to gather fulfillment, touch transcendence, to be joyful, and arrive at a plateau of satisfaction within the life well lived…
The efficient utilization of energy by humans — those energy sources that are more or less available — has determined the wide and confused distribution of the species. This is the wider perspective. Yet confusion salts the various wounds of the embodied self as well. Cells feel this, osmotic desiccation. Words utterly fail, falling, drops of lead in the thin mountain air. Nothing to say.
yup
Fuck, (I can say that here, it’s my goddamn blog!). No shitstorm underway, just a tiresome project at work that has long worn out its welcome as far as my tenure at the CGS is concerned. A week late from the original launch date. The site is only 40% populated.
The final straw came today when the project lead at FireAnt Studios actually said that information was left out because of design. Form trumping content, for a scientific website. No way. The design team definitely didn’t understand our mission. I feel guilty for not riding this problem from the initiation — but really didn’t begin to pick up its scope until I had the WP staging instance in my hands. Once I started to move around and deploy the information architecture, I began to see how the designers fell flat ensuring the site could be implemented information-dense at the same time as making it a contemporary-looking site. I suspect that a studio like FireAnt is primarily aimed at clients who are selling products, not proffering information.
One of the primary drivers of the mess is the layered complexity of deploying a site via WP (or any other CMS). This is combined with the ever-increasing complexity of the entire IT ecosystem. It is the same complexity that expands CO2 production: complexity is correlated with energy consumption (to maintain the complexity). Back to the old rules of thermodynamics. We’re fucked.
Well?
Another year gone into the inferno of chill living: Empire in deep decline, beset by rot, riven by conjecture, bereft of fact or reason. Disconnected from any but the most spurious link to conventional reality. The overall condition of which proposes the question: What reality should one presume anymore?
All roads lead from pickup truck and SUV factories, saturating heavy traffic with angry young men, who once were warriors. They want to kill, or, perhaps, to be killed. And the social order is drained, even the patina, scraped off to reveal the monstrous inhumanity of Life to … Life. What is it about humans? The altruistic, forward thinking are relegated to a minority worldview that almost automatically drains them of … power. And in this Age of Energy consumption, if you are *not* consuming, you are … less than.
What may come will not be what is expected: for our immediate position on the Hubbert Curve. Magic technological solutions? Nah. Not gonna happen, no matter what kind of SciFi fan you might be. The decline in available energy will precipitate the decline of everything that is known as society or culture. Yikes. The party is breaking up, and will be over sooner than later.
Anthony Zega 1962 – 2019
[Ed: I will continue with these remembrances, in the moment this is all I can manage to compose.]
I’m tired of writing remembrances, each one reminds of the passing, fading nature of be-ing. I don’t need to be reminded that Life closes off, a box canyon with sheer varigated walls, cross-cut sediments of past-time on display. Fossilized life, fragments of bone, amber protrude from the sheer layered walls. Evidence of those who went before. Where are they? what are they doing? Somehow, Anthony’s passing clears something away, psychically: that he has made the transition, into the Bardo, and beyond. Not that he deserved it at his age, but that he was released from the physical ravages that cancer was imposing on his body. Following him, and the expanding number of others, will perhaps be less terrifying.
I met Anthony on the way out the door of Parson’s photo department building on 5th Avenue, just north of Washington Square Park, in the fall of 1985.
“The primary principle of this age in the West is decay.”
Yup. That resonated, still does. As elsewhere noted, that profound and concise observation marked the beginning of a long friendship that explored the surfaces of the world and the energies and patterns of flow behind those surfaces. It maintained itself for 34 years despite the infrequent crossings-of-path. Aside for a year or so when we were house-mates in a couple places in Boulder, it took the form of a rich correspondance along with the occasional meetings-up that were always electric. Princeton, Manhattan, Peters Valley, Newton, and then all the locales experienced on a handful of profound road-trips in the US West. Death Valley (including a legendary night in Las Vegas on New Years Eve — photographing the insanity of the place); across the Rez’ in Arizona, picking up hitch-hikers; dealing with extreme weather transiting the Colorado Rockies; time at the Great Sand Dunes; and all the while, closely observing the perfidy of the contemporary capitalist oligarchies and, if nothing else, making fun of it. National Dead People. Stick Puppets on Display. The George P. Schultz Delirium Tremens Telephone. He left the East Coast in 1987 or so, and engaged in a long meander around the West, deeply influenced by his encounters with the Native American cultures and histories. His passionate, spirited, sensitive, and brilliant intellect — a full-spectrum laser — initiated a reducing flux that operated powerfully in his poetic work. None of it easily consumed, he did not share it with more that a handful of people ever.
Our last day shared together was in 2014, a long one spent at the Met, wandering through Strawberry Fields and Central Park, and dinner at the Whole Foods cafeteria on the Upper West Side near his mother’s flat where he’d been living for a few years. He had been worn down by the ignominy of working in the retail “adrenalized sporting complex”. But he had also met Maite, a Catalonian woman, who he joined in Barcelona in 2016. Best that he was out of the US for the repugnance of oligarchy and destruction that has ensued.
The written word was his primary medium in more recent years, although his photographic work was an important and powerful expression as well. It was the case, however, that he was intensely private, and most of his creative output came in the form of letters, and for the last decade more than a thousand emails that included an image, a dense poetic work, or a carefully laid-out pdf word piece, or some combination of those. In the mid-80s he did have a few prose pieces published in Marvin Jones’ The New Common Good in New York City, as their “Western Correspondent”. The only one I have a copy of is an excerpt of “The Tourist“. All of his negatives and writings up to relatively recently were apparently lost to flooding at his mother’s place in Princeton. It appears that I am more-or-less the sole holder of his remaining artistic legacy: with a fat folder of beautifully hand-penned communications.
From a letter I wrote to Anthony, back in 1991, from what was home, then, Reykjavík:
There is a bit of nostalgia in my mind, but more, there is the respect for you as a creator, discoverer, synthesist, See-er, and, um, Voice-of-Consciousness from the Mouth of Chaos, more or less. (I find meself writing in Literal ways these days, unable to couch clearly or veil rightly, no figures dancing between the words). I have your three cards sitting, always self-aware, they are, there on the desk next to the Printer. In a small attic space, ceiling too low for me to stand, but fine to write, skylights at my back open to a 20-hour sun day. (Fela doin’ “Zombie”). I can feel the plasma mass pressure of the sun Light pressing down, trying to flatten the landscape into a line, a mote, but the earth is in constant retching here, heaving basalt sky-ward, building sites, Places for the People to live. You have fed me bits from a variety of Others — Others speaking about Others — or a saying about unsay-able things or, yes, That which is … … … Thank you.
field work
trail
A shared protocol: the well-worn path that feet are prone to take when seeking advance. Critter trail (tiny markings in sand or mud); game-trail (traces are not faint); elk trail (soil dug up, rocks dislodged, trees scarred), human trail (packed dirt, shoe-prints, short-cuts, overt grooming), highway (directed flux of energy such that it may be sensed many miles away). If too many humans share the same protocol for any particular activity, the destruction is as widespread as the energy consumed to maintain that protocol.
The pathway of hydrocarbon energy augmentation is a primary (or secondary, tertiary) shared protocol that drives, among other systems, the global ‘supply chain’. We were never *not* doomed as a species: speciation is a process, not an end point. As long as there is an easy/abundant energy source, we will consume it. When it is gone, we will fade away and be replaced by another species or branch of Life.
Application: Field_Notes – The Heavens
Application to the BioArt Society Field_Notes workshop:
A native of Alaska, Dr. Hopkins is an international media artist. He holds a creative practices PhD in media studies from University of Technology Sydney and La Trobe University; an MFA from CU-Boulder (where he studied film with renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage); and a BS in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His trans-disciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative systems, distributed and community-based DIY processes, and developing empowered approaches to technology. His creative practice explores the role of energy in global techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter through performance, image and sound work, and writing. He has taught across more than twenty countries. He is currently working as an editor and information specialist at the Colorado Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado. Traces of his praxis may be found at https://tech-no-mad.net/blog/.
(1) SECOND ORDER group – With a fundamental interest in the process of information and knowledge transfer, especially in the context of deepening public engagement in science, I find the idea of (critical) second-order observation compelling. In this Gaian moment, the creative engagement of art/sci (research) practices is of great importance. The precise processes by which they are informed and disseminated – through a synthesis of engaged human encounter and dialogue, intense and centered (even meditative) observation, along with the impact of empirical information sources — is an important object of inquiry. Previous workshops I’ve led have explored the meta-structures of participatory creative action and their relationship with energy/life.
(2) HAB group – My sound/camera-based work is not about product, but rather rooted directly in the meditative mind-state of the observer, being especially aware that the “observer changes that which is observed.” Watching the sky is a daily process for me.
I contribute in two ways: listening to the Other’s stories, and sharing stories from my own experience. I hold a philosophy that says in open exchange/dialogue between the Self and the Other, there is a powerful third energy source that arises which may subsequently be tapped into as a source for creative action. Having lived as an expatriate for most of my life, I have a deep sensitivity to cross/trans-cultural communication and collaboration. This I have demonstrated facilitating and participating in transdisciplinary workshops/residencies around the Baltic Region. That and my significant background in the science and environmental/geosciences specifically will add to the collective knowledge-base. I am an experienced field researcher, and traveler, and I bring a wide on-the-ground experience with Arctic, high-altitude, desert, and arid ecosystems. My personal creative arts/media praxis is multi-disciplinary and I enjoy engaging with other practitioners about the textures of their practices.
https://neoscenes.net/blog/category/project/clui-residency
In The Presence of Networks: A Meditation on the Architectures of Participation
Application: Anthropocene Resonance: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Our present geologic era, the Anthropocene, has already mobilized transversal and hybridized research approaches by calling attention to the patchy assemblages of our environmental encounters. This symposium celebrates and encourages such cross-pollination, and invites ecologists, technoscientists, environmental humanities scholars, biologists, data scientists, creative practitioners, green economists, ecofeminists, policy scholars, environmental designers, ethicists, and others to explore shared articulations of researching and visualizing the Anthropocene, and to develop concrete modes of working together on common problems.
Specifically, the symposium will engage scholarly and creative approaches to making climate change tangible, whether through data visualization, mapping, media, science communication, art installation, sonification, or other methods. The symposium will consist of short paper presentations, followed by working groups which will concretely address the challenges of working interdisciplinarily.
Submitted abstracts should be 300-500 words, and may address the following questions, among others:
- * How can the environment be documented, visualized, communicated, or presented in ways which are accurate, nuanced, and emotionally resonant?
- * In what ways has environmental change been documented, visualized, communicated, or presented historically?
- * How has the environment and environmental change been presented in mainstream media, and what are the effects of these approaches?
- * How can counter strategies be deployed to address existing problems in environmental depiction, visualization, or communication?
- * What are strategies for facilitating interdisciplinary work between researchers in science and technology and creative practitioners?
Changing the Course of Nature
This presentation circumscribes a personal creative praxis rooted in a vision of both Nature *and* the nature of reality as a dynamic configuration of energy flows. Guiding visual-sonic explorations of elemental energy flows, the author suggests that the human organism’s impact on its proximal and distal environment—expressed through the techno-social system—may be better understood using the scientific model of thermodynamics and entropy as a creative starting point. One simple, ongoing performance series “Changing the Course of Nature” demonstrates, onsite in the desert West of the US, how life at all levels expends the energy it consumes and thus changes … everything. A brief sketch covering a ‘natural history’ of sound is included.
John Hopkins is a media artist and learning facilitator. He holds a transdisciplinary creative practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney; an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied with renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage); and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His collaborative trans-disciplinary research and teaching explores issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, networked and tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY & DIWO processes, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He is currently organizing the data space of the Colorado Geological Survey while solving the challenges of transforming geo-scientific data into knowledge that the wider public might engage. You may track his processes at https://neoscenes.net/blog/.
Online Resources:
CV/Resumé
energy (research sketches around energy/thermodynamics)
CLUI Residency (a recent residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation)
An ongoing sonic (field recording) performance series Changing the Course of Nature
really?
If we go to the root of the matter, we find that human love is in its essence merely the rutting season in a reasoning being; it increases all the vital forces of the human being, just as rutting increases those of the lower animals. If love apparently differs enormously from rutting, this is merely due to the fact that the reproductive impulse, the most primitive of all impulses, becomes in developed nerve centres more diffuse in its sphere of operations, and thus in man awakens and excites a whole province of psychical life which is entirely unknown to the lower animals.
Bloch, Iwan. The Sexual Life of Our Time in Its Relations to Modern Civilization. London, England: Redman Limited, 1909.
another shifting
The concept of living in a house sitting on the side of Mt. Zion—a house with a 350-foot mine (adit) off the laundry room—is beginning to recede as it gets cleared of belongings. Living in close proximity to 1.6-billion-year-old stuff, piled high, is … grounding. But why is there so little time taken to concentrate on place, and the energy that place imparts into the body. It’s Friday. Somehow a finality creeps in to sit next to life, a cozy acquaintance, even intimate. Instills a bit of panic, is this the last creation? Of course, what is that idea, creation, anyway, that so defines Life, even by its inverse? Answer is unknown to me.
Days spin with a ferocity not elsewise encountered. Little energy left by the end of each one, and the frequency of the cycle is ever more transitory.
Sky creates the only accessible continuity. That and the habit of watching it. A new experimental video work is budding. Not sure when I can execute, but I’ve got enough raw material, and I’ve got a fully licensed and current version of Final Cut on a new iMac Pro. We’ll see if there is enough time/energy outside of work to do anything about it.
saturation
The capacity to engage is limited. I have hit those limits hard. In this phase of life, I cannot maintain any semblance of the old networking nomad. Looking back, through the archive, through the days, weeks, months of restless movement, engaged encounters with hundreds of people, what is there left? Engaging with colleagues during the day seems to be enough. It saturates each day, not leaving energy to engage with anyone, anything afterwards, except for the mundane dimensions of the anti-creative life of Imperial consumption.
fish-like, lizard-like, guru-like realization
Scheduled to do a swimming challenge, as clued-in by Dr. Miller: 3K per day @ 0530 AM for 12 days at the Golden Community Center. I got on the mailing list and began mulling the concept. The first day was a Monday morning. The week before, I started to crank up workouts from 2K up to 3K. 2K workouts consisted of 500 freestyle w/ pull-buoys followed by 1K of the same gradually increasing speed until the last 5 laps are strenuous, followed by 500 kick with perhaps 100 fly w/ workout fins. I used to keep a pace of 14-15 min/1K. These days, it’s more like 18 min/1k what with the post-torn-rotator cuff handicap. The prior Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday: 3K/50 min. First time I’ve swam that distance since 2014 and the shoulder injury. I dropped Sarah, the organizer, a note, just to see if my times and such would generally fit in with the group. No problem.
Sarah sent out a schedule for each day’s workout on Sunday. As I scanned it, I started to mull how it would work, or how I would integrate into the organized scenario. And why swimming ‘workouts’ take certain forms. The obvious answer relates to the goal of a workout. The traditional goal, for example, in Masters Swimming, is the maintenance of ‘swim team’-type fitness, refining and optimizing strokes, swimming for times, prepping for meets (for the really hard-core), and generally a continuance of a somewhat team-style social situation.
This got me thinking about what role swimming played for me. Since I wasn’t really a team swimmer to begin with — not really into team sports at all — there was/is clearly a different motivation to be in the water. Typically, when possible, I schedule my workouts when a pool is least busy, hoping always for a solo lane. Sharing a lane, depending on who it is shared with, may be tolerable, provided the other swimmer understands the protocols, where they are in the lane, and how to stay within their half. A collision — most often of wrists/hands — can be both painful and shocking when passing at relatively high speed. One also has to be vigilant on flip-turns. And of course in all those different countries, lap swimming has absolutely different protocols, or none whatsoever. Annoying!
more “fish-like, lizard-like, guru-like realization”
friends?
Been mulling this one for the last year, since starting this regular job. Most self-time/energy is consumed in maintaining the psycho-neuro structure necessary to hand over that life-time and life-energy to someone else in exchange for cash. Nothing is left over except that abstract bank balance. Is this merely age? or a lack of fitness in this theatrical role? or a basic misunderstanding on how to be in such a situation? I do not know. Life passes.
From the hollowness of this drained state, relationships slip away with an ease that defies comprehension, much less understanding. Once gone, there seems to be no trace of them. They vanish into the darkness of failing memory, only a few tiny fragments of mediated presence remain, if anything. Impact? Affect? Impression? One may argue that, yes, I was impacted, I made an impact, they were impacted, they made an impact, but this is so abstract that it carries little to consider, especially after memory departs. We forget what we become.
After a long life-work of spending life-time with different people: traveling to visit them, I’ve discovered that this doesn’t mean very much in a culture that respects only power and its abstracted instrument, money.
And I am merely a mooch, a nomadic parasite on that monetized system. I made the fundamental and very naive mistake assuming that my presence was welcome all this time, the last thirty years, more. Solo pilgrim to solitary places — a nomad whenever possible — is and will be the mode from now on. period. It’s been this way on an increasing basis anyway, might as well make it formally so.
muse?
Musing about a muse: brings the indeterminate back directly into life, though the effect is, by nature, disturbing to any pre-established [dynamic] equilibrium. Was there ever any in life thus far? Then there are the simple images that arise from encounter, a hand, a shoulder, a torso, seen best in the resonant allowance to look beyond, through, and simply at the sanctioned. Life transitions from dry-throated mental rasp to fluid inflected neural fire — no pleural effusion — but simply the life-lubricating properties of water re-entering the body. For the thirsty, this is eau de source. Catalysis of seen and unseen, spoken and unspoken things brings conflagration to the chakras. But who needs overheated chakras? Burning up life is not really something needed when it burns up, readily fast. Energies may be bound up with lived presence, while life depends upon an unleashing of those same energies. Élan vital. It’s the unleashing that is the source of most anxiety. Pent-up energies traveling along the well-worn pathways of former be-ing end up re-circulating ad nauseum, subsequently causing pathologies in the embodied system. Stressed, sparking contact needs to find flow pathways that are … open … or needs to make openings, spontaneously. for survival.
Artificial Day
Our fantastic civilization has fallen out of touch with many aspects of nature, and with none more completely than with night. Primitive folk, gathered at a cave mouth round a fire, do not fear night; they fear, rather, the energies and creatures to whom night gives power; we of the age of the machines, having delivered ourselves of nocturnal enemies, now have a dislike of night itself. With lights and ever more lights, we drive the holiness and beauty of night back to the forests and the sea; the little villages, the crossroads. Are modern folk, perhaps, afraid of night? Do they fear that vast serenity, the mystery of infinite space, the austerity of stars? Having made themselves at home in a civilization obsessed with power, which explains its whole world in terms of energy, do they fear at night for their dull acquiescence and the pattern of their beliefs? Be the answer what it will, today’s civilization is full of people who have not the slightest notion of the character or the poetry of night, who have never even seen night. Yet to live thus, to know only artificial night, is as absurd as to know only artificial day. ― Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928
two months in and now what
This blog is rapidly becoming the site of moribund emptiness. Material accumulates, but j-o-b interferes with any creative expression. This raises many questions relating to how life is lived versus how it may be lived. As energies enter later phases and levels, life-time comes to more crucial junctures: what to spend it on. Limited supply and no do-overs raise the price to that asymptotic limit: transcendence!
I think I understand William Blake. A man who brought his soul to life, at the expense of not living so much within the bounds of the social system. “A man not forestalled by predecessors, nor to be classed with contemporaries, nor to be replaced by known or readily surmisable successors…”
But then, as Empire teeters on what is left of its decaying foundation, what of intellect, creativity, spiritual movement?
“That’s One Big Belch For Man,
One Average ( Syncopated ) ( Plastic ) Hiccup For Mankind ….”
______ Ubu Roi V
***** ( five stars )
mise en scene & mobile app by the author of
Awaken The Giant Within
^^^^
Let them believe
Let everything that’s been planned come true. Let them believe. And let them have a laugh at their passions. Because what they call passion actually is not some emotional energy, but just the friction between their souls and the outside world. And most important, let them believe in themselves. Let them be helpless like children, because weakness is a great thing, and strength is nothing. When a man is just born, he is weak and flexible. When he dies, he is hard and insensitive. When a tree is growing, it’s tender and pliant. But when it’s dry and hard, it dies. Hardness and strength are death’s companions. Pliancy and weakness are expressions of the freshness of being. Because what has hardened will never win.
Tarkovsky, A., 1980. Stalker, Available at: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079944/.
A Natural History of Sound
At Tom Fleischner’s invite I’ll be doing a public talk this evening as part of the Natural History Institute’s lecture series. Prior to the lecture, I’ll perform a 20-minute live sonic improv [along the lines of this or this]. The day after tomorrow, Saturday, 02 April, I’ll do a full-day workshop.
TITLE: A Natural History of Sound
TIME: 31 March 2016, at the Natural History Institute, 312 Grove Avenue, Prescott College Campus, Prescott, Arizona
7:00 – 8:30 PM (GMT-7 PDT/MST) Prescott, AZ
SHORT DESCRIPTION:
This presentation, opening with a brief (20-minute) live improv sonic performance, will weave a pathway through the nature of sound as an integral feature of bio-systems and human presence on the planet.
LONG DESCRIPTION:
Sound is a particular expression of energy that is present within the living global system. The movement of sonic energy is a crucial feature of life for many organisms, humans no less than others.
This presentation will begin with a live improvisational performance arising out of an on-going sonic/visual/performance art project changing the course of nature that explores the energy dynamics of natural systems and the impact of life on those energized flows. The project plays with the subtle and not-so-subtle influence of human presence on the planet.
The talk following the performance provides a wider context to the project within Hopkins’ trans-disciplinary and nomadic life-trajectory. He will present a number of international creative projects that employ sound as the primary creative medium as well as exploring the concept of sound itself. Of particular interest to Hopkins’ research is a mapping of the intersection of human presence and wider systems. He will also introduce the concept of acoustic ecology.
There will be ample time for dialogue at the conclusion of the presentation.
The performance and talk will be live video-streamed at:
https://livestream.com/prescottcollege/events/4739637
10:00 – 12:00 Midnight (GMT-4 EDT) New York, NY
0400 – 0600 (GMT+2 CEST) Berlin, DE
1:00 – 3:00 PM Friday, 01 April (GMT+11 AEDT) Melbourne, AU
The (Tantric) Science of Sound
by Rooji Saluja
In tantra, there exists an entire science that makes use of sound energy in spiritual practice. Mantras are sonic vehicles that encapsulate mystical energy and direct it towards specific aims.
How does sound affect us? Try this. Close your eyes and imagine screeching cars, blaring horns and hooting train carriages. What do you feel? Your pulse quickens, heartbeat races and blood seems to be gushing towards the heart. Now change the scene. Imagine the sound of water gushing gently over the pebbles, and a thousand anklets beating against the soft wind, in tune with the flowing stream. At once, a calm, serene feeling takes over, lulling your senses to a soft awareness. This is the magic of sound.
Vedic scholar and author Dr David Frawley in Ayurveda and the Mind argues that there is a background sound pattern to our consciousness. It may be a song we have just heard, or the sound bytes from a painful or pleasurable event. Some movement of sound is always going on inside us. Like rhythm in music, it determines the rhythm of our consciousness. Furthermore sound is the vehicle for emotion, which we can either reinforce or release. We sing with joy, shout in anger, cry in sorrow and groan in pain. Thus each emotion corresponds to a particular kind of sound, and intensified emotions usually demand stronger sounds. more “The (Tantric) Science of Sound”
ipse dixit:
New York Times comment:
Just as a mass deflects the space-time continuum around it, every organism changes the flux of energies it is immersed within merely by its presence. Ecosystems are simple models of the complexity of inter-relation that the presence of Life brings to the planet.
Humans in their current numbers – attributable to ‘easy’ energy access (resources) – are clearly affecting the entire global system. Bolstered by a glut of consumable energy sources that allow us to propagate in unprecedented numbers, we are causing a shift in global energy flows paralleled in scope only by the rise of Prokaryotic Archean life-forms.
Our ‘management’ of the ecosystem, despite the occasional successes of a holistic systems thinking approach, is based on reductive models that can never fully anticipate the range of effects exerted on the global system.
Living organisms react to abundant energy sources by reproducing; when energy sources disappear, species numbers collapse. It may be that the planet will simply have to abide the burst of human population and its attendant systemic change. Once the species has consumed all easily accessible energy, a gradual (or precipitous!) drop in human numbers will follow, and the global system will take on yet another character, managing itself very well, thank you. Life will continue, projecting itself into the future with astonishing vigor, even ferocity, until the planet and the solar system get subsumed.
So it goes: https://tinyurl.com/hfpregr
addressing technology
Regarding the Ecosa Institute‘s curriculum re-generation (this note is a draft sketch to be sent to the rest of the dev group. Contextualized, it addresses a program that has not, historically, substantively engaged the communicative technologies and the potentials for social engagement that are currently available — but it does not cover the whole of the issue, by any means!):
I’d like to insert more nuance into the technology (digital or not) discussion that we’ve been engaging in off-and-on over the course of the last half-year. I am somewhat concerned with the question of wider relevance of the program in this regard as I compare it with other creative design situations I’ve observed or participated in over the years.
To begin with, I’d like to propose a model of technology that is more of a sliding scale rather than an ‘on-off’ binary of opposites: somewhere between proto-Luddite and techno-utopian positions. Technology can be imagined as a ‘human-constructed’ or ‘human-formed’ means of directing the pervasive energy flows that we are part of/immersed within. Precisely because of this potential to redistribute tangible power, technology sits squarely in the space of the politic, the space of the personal, and the space of the collective. Altering the flows through any ‘making’ process is just that, regardless of the technology employed. Different technologies sit on different locations on the sliding scale based on how, particularly, they affect the ‘ambient’ energy flows of the infinite surround.
Along the sliding scale, there are, for example, profound shifts in the balance between the personal and the social. The issue of personal autonomy is seen as a crucial metric. This autonomy is a measure of control that the individual exerts directly on their existence in the world. What we face in our contemporary techno-social system is a situation where the technologies and protocols are largely not self-determined or determined by a localized community. Autonomy is thus prone to devolve to a greater degree of social dependence: depending on a technology and, more critically, how a technology is understood and used. This is a crucial issue that directly affects an empowered outcome from any process that questions the status quo (of global human-dominated ecosystems).
Several interconnected points: more “addressing technology”
knowing someone
It begins somewhere in the Self: what, an inclination? No, it’s much more complex than leaning towards (already language fails to offer any easy way out). There are the mirror neurons, so it is thought, that encounter the vibe, both the raw and formed energy of the Other. This reception (crucially formed in resonance) drives our actions, our expressions. This is not noise. The word sounds carry directed energy. An expression is directed (at) (the Other).
This expression is directed at No Other. This is the way we lose what we have.
From the inside, watching. It’s easier to watch the sky than to watch an Other. Or to be watched. While there is another Watcher, always, in the sky, the air. One that expects us to be present in every moment. It watches for this. And when, for a nano-second, we slip, slack, into the apathy of being elsewhere, there are irruptions that change the trajectory of living, without any recourse to mercy. This is the Watcher, Seeing us in the Light. Being watched shivers through our perceptions of ourselves and of what we are doing. Have done. And we are left with nothing but the essence of sight. As we stand in the Light.
randori
‘chaos-taking’
‘grasping freedom’
乱取
Cheap energy and the short-term bloom of humanity it has fueled have given rise to some social arrangements that are not destined to survive the onset of permanent energy scarcity. One of these is the notion that a few young people will anonymously contribute a large part of their income for the welfare of many old people they have never met or even heard of.
In the days in which most of human history has transpired, parents took care of their children as their topmost priority in life. As with many other species, it was their biological imperative to do so; beyond that, most of them were conscious of the fact that if their children did not survive, neither would they: their genes, their memories, their culture, or anything about them would be erased by time. The care of children could be entrusted to family members, but never to complete strangers. The education of children took place largely in the home, through storytelling, shared labor, and through rites of passage. The elderly, and especially the grandparents, took an active part in rearing and educating children. It was they who watched and attended to young children throughout the day, and who inculcated in them much of the ancestral wisdom – the stories, the myths, and the practical knowledge – through ceaseless, tiresome repetition.
At the trailing edge of the fossil fuel age, where we find ourselves, prosperous society looks quite different. Both parents work dismal jobs, mostly away from home, in order to keep themselves out of bankruptcy. Those who prosper most attend to their careers with far greater attention than to their children, abandoning them to the care of strangers for the better part of most days. The grandparents live elsewhere, enjoying their golden years, the fruits of their labors encapsulated in some properties, some investments, and a merciful central government that has promised to at least keep them alive even if all else fails. They are living on artificial life support that is about to be shut off.
Orlov, D. 2006. Thriving in the Age of Collapse, Part II: What Can Young Professionals and Aging Baby Boomers do to Prepare for America’s Collapse?
paralysis of power
East Germany soon ceased to exist, as did the Soviet Union following the abortive putsch in August 1991, suffering from an affliction that Mr. Putin described as “a paralysis of power.”
Myers, S.L., 2015. In Putin’s Syria Intervention, Fear of a Weak Government Hand. The New York Times. [Accessed October 5, 2015].
What does it mean that power is paralyzed? Power and energy are not synonymous. Power needs projecting, it needs to be exerted against resistance, where energy simply is, as a permeate feature (substrate) of reality. There is the omnipotent: that which has unlimited power. (Versus pluripotent — that which is capable of maturing into varied strains or specialties.) Power needs an energy source as well as a means to deliver the energy in a way that furthers the potency. Power is concentrated, collated, and projected energy; paralysis is a reification of the means of sourcing, concentrating, or projecting power. What brings it along, though? Lateral constrictions (perpendicular to flow is perhaps optimal?): obstruction. However direct obstruction requires maximum countervailing power (equal to or exceeding that-which-is-to-be-countered). Better yet, to obstruct at the sources of the projected power. In this case, at the people. Subtracting ‘the People’ from power paralyzes it.
Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification
Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):
The Regime of Amplification
Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!
*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.
Entropy and the shaping of landscape by water
The south side of the house with the drainage coming from the neighbor’s yard is the site of experimentation with the principle of entropy applied to surface water flow. Creating more turbulence is a way of dissipating the energy of gravitationally-induced water flow. Small scale to larger scale, by interrupting the laminar flow of water across a system, the energy is effectively diffused back into the local environment in a way that is not as destructive (though as I write those words, it occurs to me that the absolute energy content of the water — as a falling mass, minus frictions and surface-tension coefficients — is a constant). It’s only a question of at what scale one chooses to work at to diffuse the energy — giant rocks, big waterfalls; smaller rocks, smaller waterfalls, tiny pebbles, tiny waterfalls. These versus smoothly finished surfaces that transmit the maximum amount of inertial energy to the folks downstream.
We have given an overview of some energetic and thermodynamic principles that have been applied to hydrology. We note there are currently two distinct analogies, though we suspect they should ultimately be related. The first principle states that a fluvial system may be considered as an engine driven by the supply of water at high elevation flowing to low elevation. In this sense elevation, or hydraulic head, is a direct analogue of temperature for a heat engine. Secondly, the configuration of a river network can be described by certain statistical properties, notably an entropy. The notion of minimum energy expenditure in the network should then correspond to the principle of minimum entropy production, where the prescribed boundary conditions do not allow for much flexibility. However, since much of the dissipation of energy in river networks is related to turbulence, Maximum Entropy Production should also be applicable, although the detailed application is not clear and needs further investigations.
If the thermodynamic background to the hydrological shaping of the landscape becomes sufficiently understood, practical applications may be developed. In particular, statistical properties of hydrologic networks may provide quantitative means of classifying networks and thereby understanding the geomorphological processes by which they formed. The relationship of the observed ‘maturity’ of a river system with the Gibbs’ parameter (i.e., network temperature) may be a fruitful avenue of inquiry.
Finally, we note that exploring the thermodynamic concepts of fluvial geomorphology also appear useful for shoreline processes. Their generality may make these ideas quite fruitful for investigating networks on other planetary bodies, where the specific mechanisms and working substances may be different from Earth, but the aggregate effects are similar.
Miyamoto, H., Lorenz, R.D. & Baker, V.R., 2005. Entropy and the Shaping of the Landscape by Water. In Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy: Life, Earth, and Beyond. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
The Energy of Archive: Re-membering the Cloud
[this paper was presented at the Balance/UnBalance Conference at Arizona State University in March where I also joined a panel with Mél Hogan, et al.]
We are living in a time where the wholesale storage of information exerts a dominant influence across the entire social system. The connection between this archive and both the stability and sustainability of the social system is direct. Few people are cognizant that it takes real(!) energy to drive “Big Data,” nor are they aware that such wide-scaled archiving (in “The Cloud”) directly affects the wider global environment.
This paper reflects on the fundamental energy (thermodynamic) conditions that apply to any ordered system. Order, as a temporal state — whether arising autopoetically or whether created intentionally within a wider structured system — functions as an information transfer or communication system and always requires an influx of energy to be maintained. The crucial issue embedded at the root of any archive relates directly to this necessity. Where does that energy come from, how is it secured, and what is the cost? As a near-ubiquitous feature of any social structure, the archive — as an ordered expression of information — is one such system. As there are apparently no violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics in the observed universe, is the fate of the archive the same as that of the cosmos: a slow heat-death? Obliquely invoking an interpretation of living (or general) systems theory, it is possible to 1) demarcate the trajectory of the archive (as (social) memory); 2) examine in the widest conceptual sense the cost of information storage and reproduction; and 3) predict the path that individual and collective knowledge takes into the future.
I will briefly introduce systems theory, as well as some principles of thermodynamics that will, as models, undergird the discussion. Relating energy, order, and information, I will tie these conceptions into the actuality of the contemporary archive by exploring the question: What does it mean to have a sustainable archive? As a creative media arts practitioner and, as a consequence, an analog and digital archivist, I will include in the discussion pertinent fragments of personal narrative that arise from that lived praxis.
Keywords: archive, thermodynamics, entropy, energy, information, systems, code, analog, digital, media arts, sustainability
Posthuman Prospects
The desire to find short cuts and to invent technical solutions is indicative of the impatience of the present age. The utilization of fossil fuels that led to the creation of industrialized societies benefited from the fact that such fuels had accrued their energy potential over millions of years:
All the fossil fuels, in energy terms, are stored sunlight heaped up over geologic time. . . No human being had to put a single day’s work or a single gallon of diesel fuel into growing the tree ferns of the Carboniferous period that turned into Pennsylvanian coal beds, nor did they have to raise the Jurassic sea life that became the oil fields of Texas. The second half of Nature’s energy subsidy took the form of extreme temperatures and pressures deep within the Earth. Over millions of years more, these transformed the remains of prehistoric living things into coal, oil, and natural gas and, in the process, concentrated the energy they originally contained into a tiny fraction of their original size.
These resources, if they had been developed in more sustainable ways, and used to serve more balanced societies, could have benefited us for many years to come, but we have squandered them with our impatience and greed. In an analogous way, we are highly impatient with the technologies that we wish to invent. We are unsatisfied with the intelligence that has been bequeathed to us through millions of years of evolution and we wish to create a copy of it, as soon as possible.
What has been lost is a certain sense of balance, and a knowledge of natural limitations. Ambitious innovation is certainly a virtue but when it relies upon the false premise of unlimited natural resources, or the belief that we can short cut evolution by recreating intelligence at will, it becomes the vice of hubris. Undoubtedly, we will face challenges in the future provoked by advanced technologies. And, equally certain, as we run out of natural resources, governments will increasingly ring fence such resources for themselves to continue with unsustainable military research programs. In this sense, Faye’s two tier system will come to pass although it is unlikely to operate in the interests of European man. Instead, there will be a return to more sustainable, more rural, societies that will have to learn once again what it means to live in accord with natural limitations, and that will be forced to become reacquainted with the slow passing of the seasons.
Pankhurst, C, 2014. Posthuman Prospects: Artificial Intelligence, Fifth Generation Warfare, & Archeofuturism, Counter-Currents Publishing blog, 23 May 23 2014, accessed 29.11.2014.
cash flow::energy flow
Since money and energy/resource flow in opposite directions, the use of monetary flows to make public policy and decisions regarding the future of a country is in reality looking at the world backwards. Frequently, sound economic advice in resource rich nations recommends the selling of raw resources and the importation of finished products. Yet under such even monetary trades, the resource-exporting country always loses, sending out far more wealth than they receive in finished products. Continuing uneven emergy trades at the expense of the developing countries of the world is a recipe for global instability because it keeps the majority of the world’s population in poverty while the west tries to live an unsustainable lifestyle.
Brown, M.T. & Ulgiati, S., 2011. Understanding the global economic crisis: A biophysical perspective. Ecological Modelling, 223(1), pp.4–13.
The Prototypical Amplifier
[ed: This text is excerpted from the first chapter of my dissertation, sketching a relatively technical picture of an amplifier, and its relation to energy flows. It sets the technological image of an amplification system, and for me, it’s not clear how a non-technical person copes with such a text! How else might the same information be communicated?]
Amplification is a fundamental process that is applied or applies to portions of the vast range of what may be understood as [electrical / electromagnetic / electrochemical] energy flows that are available to living organisms. An electrical energy flow or current is the movement of charged particles. Currents are essentially modulated by causal changes — they have certain measurable characteristics that change in time — and may consequently be called signals. A signal has characteristics that are described as a wave structure of a certain frequency and an amplitude corresponding to a certain strength. As a signal, a current also has a certain coherence that is an observed quality of (subjective) recognizability or usability. Amplification is an operation performed on an incoming flow of [any form of] energy or signal that generates an output signal with an increased total energy content (gain). more “The Prototypical Amplifier”
Window Weather
[ed: this is extracted from my dissertation, so some things are unexplained. However, I didn’t want to make large modifications, it’s more a teaser on a novel definition of ‘virtuality’ and the ‘virtual’. To illustrate the principle, and to suggest the relationship humans have with it, I use one particular manifestation of energized (matter): glass]
All organisms, humans included, evolve ways of modulating and attenuating the changing flows that are potentially harmful to them. Humans are exceptionally well-adapted to utilize and re-configure available flows to secure incrementally increased viability. In one instance they discovered that they could manipulate the most common forms of energized matter at the surface of the earth — silicon and oxygen, with bits of carbon, sodium, and calcium — to create a substance that was, at human scales, relatively impervious and that could constrict extant or generated flows in a variety of ways. more “Window Weather”
sugar
Sugarcane seems to have originated in New Guinea and, between the fourth and eighth centuries, was grown in India and the delta of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The peoples of the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean introduced sugar to Europeans before the latter began cultivating the plant. In the fourteenth century the Spanish and Portuguese began production of sugar in earnest in the Madeira Islands, the Canary Islands and the Cape Verde Islands. Columbus brought sugarcane from the Cape Verde Islands to the Americas on his second voyage in 1493; it was first grown in Santo Domingo, and the first American exports of sugar to Europe began around 1516.
Sugar is a shape shifter: it can be visualized as a plant, a white crystalline powder, and a liquid; mixed with other materials, it can take fantastic ornamental shapes. In the early modern period, as now, sugar was commonly an unseen presence, lending its invisible sweetening power to tea, coffee, candy, and other confections. But sugar was more than a sweetener: it was the engine driving a large part of the slave trade and colonial commerce of the Americas, especially in the Caribbean and South America. It has profoundly changed human bodies, societies, and eco-systems. — from Sugar And The Visual Imagination In The Atlantic World, Circa 1600-1860
Sugar, more importantly, is an energy source for the body, and it was the desire for this extremely compact and potent energy source that drove the whole process. Again, evidence how a social organism’s need for energy sources to drive Life into a certain future will consequently drive the ‘optimized’ arrangement of society towards that ultimate goal. Individuals in a social collective by definition have variable ‘values’ to the system, and because of that, their lives are treated differently at the effect of the overall operation of the collective.
en route – Keystone #666
Heading back into the NYC urbs after a week in Cornwall, PA. Philly ringed by collapsing tenements and the rail tracks littered with quantities of random detritus, all iron-work rusted, signage cryptic. How difficult would it be (how much energy would it take) to clean this stuff up, return some order to the system?
Free your mind, your ass will follow! The Kingdom of Heaven is within! — Funkadelic
Haber-Bosch and global population
The following from a BBC article on nitrogen that explores the energy relationships (chemical bonds) that nitrogen forms in relation to other substances.
…
These days, explosives make up only a tiny part of the market for the huge quantities of ammonia produced using the Haber-Bosch process. Most goes to manufacture fertiliser, and all this “synthetic” nitrogen has vastly increased agricultural output across the world over the years.
The majority of the nitrogen in your body probably came from the Haber-Bosch process. And without it, more than half of the world’s population would have nothing to eat.
The incredible yields synthetic fertilisers deliver explain why obesity has replaced hunger as the rich world’s biggest nutritional challenge.
…
[The] Haber-Bosch [process] is reckoned to use 1% of the world’s energy supplies, which reflects just how hard it is to rip those triple-bonds apart.
The crop yields not only explain obesity, they explain a more fundamental concept — that the initial presence alone of half the world’s population is due to a manufactured energy source, and that source is drawn directly from petroleum for its feedstock and its energy source. Without that primary energy source, at least half the world’s population would not have arisen from healthy and fertile parentage: they would simply not exist to begin with!
we’re talking final causes here…
[C]urrently espoused, ecosystem management is a magical theory (see Ludwig 1993) that promises the impossible — that we can have our cake and eat it too. Worse, however, it addresses only the symptoms of the problem and not the problem itself. The problem is not how to maintain current levels of resource output while also maintaining ecosystem integrity; the problem is how to control population growth and constrain resource consumption. And the solution to the problem is not anthropocentric-based ecosystem management, it is rejection of the doctrine of final causes. Humanity must begin to view itself as part of nature rather than the master of nature. It must reject the belief that nature is ours to use and control. Once this is accomplished, we can accept that the land has limits, and that to live within those limits we must halt population growth and reduce consumption. I believe this rejection of the doctrine of final causes is at the very heart of the biocentric view of ecosystem management (see Noss & Cooperrider 1994). Unfortunately, the “seismic shift” in the mindset of humans (Grumbine 1994) required by this
view of ecosystem management may never occur and, if it does, it will be a slow process that may come too late.
Stanley, T.R., 1995. Ecosystem Management and the Arrogance of Humanism. Conservation Biology, 9(2), pp.255–262.
you got problems? Let me tell you …
The dialectical process whereby a solution to one problem generates sets of new problems that eventually preclude solutions is summarized in the five steps of techno-social development.
1. Because of the interrelationships and limitations existing within a closed system, a techno-social solution is never complete and hence is a quasi-solution.
2. Each quasi-solution generates a residue of new techno-social problems arising from: (a) incompleteness, (b) augmentation, and (c) secondary effects.
3. The new problems proliferate at a faster rate than solutions can be found to meet them.
4. Each successive set of residue problems is more difficult to solve than predecessor problems because of seven factors: (a) dynamics of technology, (b) increased complexity, (c) increased cost, (d) decreased resources, (e) growth and expansion, (f) requirements for greater control, and (g) inertia of social institutions.
5. The residue of unsolved techno-social problems converge in an advanced technological society to a point where techno-social solutions are no longer possible.
Stanley, T.R., 1995. Ecosystem Management and the Arrogance of Humanism. Conservation Biology, 9(2), pp.255–262.
basic facts
One of the most basic facts about North Korea is that this country seems to be unstable in the long run. In spite of some economic improvements of the recent decade, it still remains very poor if compared to all its neighbours, and this gap keeps growing. The Kim family regime can maintain the stability for long time, but the information about the success of other countries — above all, South Korea — is filtering in, and gradually ferments discontent. — Andrei Lankov, AlJazeera
This is a simple statement of situation: where the question of stability directly relates to the amount of energy available to the system. All systems have a certain instability directly related to the size of their energy sources. Food, hydrocarbons, and other resources are not easily available to the Regime, causing upward tending instability. Hierarchic control exerted from the ‘seat’ of power (where resource energy flows are dictated) projects flow protocols downward, but when that projection of power has itself a diminishing source, control structures destabilize.
Both the projection ‘structure’ and the actual energy needed to ‘project’ power are never sufficient to maintain control of the population indefinitely. Nor, in reciprocal, are those factors sufficient to ‘motivate’ the population to give unreservedly of its own energy in support of the Regime. Any Regime must maintain in deep and aware consciousness that its primary source of power is, at base, the embodied energy of its people. In more recent times, technological concentrations of power allow this fact to be distorted significantly, but in the end, no Regime will survive a collective turning away of its vassal citizen’s energy and attention. The technological factor, if effectively wielded by a Regime, will allow profound imbalances to build up, imbalances that will inevitably cause catastrophic re-balancing. The nuclear ambitions of North Korea are likely the major contributing factor to the imbalance within the technological factor. Between that and the large standing army, energies that could possibly go to support the ‘regular’ citizen are shunted off to support the rigid command-and-control structures necessary to develop and deploy the nuclear deterrent and the armed forces.
Resistance is futile when a system is returning to dynamic equilibrium. Only another profound energy source will enable a return to a subsequent form of temporary stability. Otherwise, disorder at many levels ensues.
All these concepts apply to any nation-state, and to any system.
It has been pointed out …
It has been pointed out by Boltzmann that the fundamental object of contention in the life-struggle, in the evolution of the organic world, is available energy. In accord with this observation is the principle that, in the struggle for existence, the advantage must go to those organisms whose energy-capturing devices are most efficient in directing available energy into channels favorable to the preservation of the species.
Lotka, A.J., 1922. Contribution to the energetics of evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 8, pp.147-151.)