leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it's so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.

Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:

Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo's ;-) "Bring it on home!"

It's a bit strange, sitting on an office chair rescued from the dumpster parked on horrible-cheap 1980's shag carpeting, pumping out an acoustic signal to a situated live urban-drinking audience halfway around the world. How to get the groove on? The inspiration of the moment has to be local and global at the same time. The senses of the body have to pick up every shred of remote input to judge the reaction, and with only those miniscule bits of evidence plow ahead with faith in connection. "I'm thinking about you!" Concentration, attention, focus are all keywords in the process of throwing embodied energies from here to there, across a network that is defined by thin wires snaking across thousands of kilometers. Connection is where the Self and the Other actually make energized contact, whether it is bridging 2 meters or 20,000 kilometers. neoscenes gets up early (GMT-7), studies the possibilities, brews some tea, maps out a course of action, and dives into the work-play.

First, gather stores of internal energy, then facilitate a material infrastructure, and then, with care-full intensity, send that energy out into the network.

The gathering process is critical. It starts with listening and looking while moving through life, an awareness of the surrounding fields of flow. Keeping the "be here now" above the need to re-produce history. Over time and space neoscenes accumulates a deep archive from this lived process of looking and listening, be-ing. These fragments are a very real energy bank of electromagnetic impulses waiting for the proper moment to be re-configured and revealed. It is from this archive that the remix arises. Serendipitous elements are facilitated in every performance -- unstable real-time inputs that reflect the energy of the moment. With the proper concentration, these are combined with a flow from the archive, and whatever remote vibe is coming from the receivers at the other end. It is impossible to guess the result. Except in the deep space of psycho-spiritual anticipation.

Configuring the technological infrastructure is a time-intensive and energy consumptive process -- and it's important not to run out of energy doing that, else the actual performance suffers. Fighting the technology is an old story, not a very nice one, but it comes with this kind of work, it comes with any work involving technology (which raises the question, what exactly IS technology? Well, maybe it's whatever means any human uses to reconfigure their internal energy in order to pass that energy along to an Other.) A balance between twiddling with tools and the ensuing energy loss must be precisely found. Simple = saving energy for the communicative act itself, not worshipping the binary coders. Creativity happens in unstable autonomous zones.

Finally, the performance. The flow, transmission. Point-to-point. Real time. Is the receiver open to the right frequency? Is the transmission to narrow? Where is the groove, especially when the sonic space is outside rhythm and rhyme. When it is full of Ghosts of the past. Speaking tongues gone by. From ether to ether to ether. And while passing through bodies again and again.

You had to be there. Revolution is a live praxis. But you can still be here now, in which case, you can pick up the vibe still ringing from radiostadt 1, through the trans-temporal ether.

so. ethernity today. good food, good energy. good fun. good.

visit the Kunsthalle for a Paul Klee exhibition. find this on the wall, along with all the Klee objects, many of them from his teaching time at the Bauhaus. I had forgotten that he was there along with all those other intensities of life.

black gate because the marketable commodity art object is disintegrating under the energy of Light black gate because museums and galleries are sterile advertising factories black gate because we are the primitives of the space age black gate because space is a fluid concept black gate toward Light as a social totality the concept of art has disappeared the energy of Light is giving birth the octopus spreads in many directions under one core to Light as the new embryo giving birth to black

-- aldo tambellini, black gate?

weekend ending. reflecting in the office. swimming two days. more swimming pool commentary. wide 50-meter pool that is hardly ever open, and when it is, it is full of the breast-strokers. no pull-buoys to be had, at least the Russian attendant gives a good looking around, but the useful objects are locked away for the special-interest groups. so, some 50- and 100-meter sprints, just up to a kilometer is all I can force myself to do. no measure of relaxing and meditating. but at least some upper-body work-out.

conversations with Frieder are long and intense. and traverse new territories in mind. would it be possible to finish my doctorate here? hmmmm. it would seem to be an ideal place, though after the Media Lab experience in Helsinki, I am skeptical. there is the common phrase "ahead of his time" that does seem to apply to the general trend of my situations. where I attempt to do something that is against the flow of the situation. the digital media thing at the Icelandic Academy: where I had to struggle, on a salary scale that rivaled Eastern Europe, to get people to believe that the Internet was something to pay attention to, getting the school up on the web -- the first Icelandic school to have a regular website. but then retreating (as I was leaving Iceland anyway), tired of trying to pull others into that vision. then the school eventually privatizes, salaries quadruple, the technical infrastructure blossoms, and a former student is hired to do network-based teaching... or, applying for digital media jobs in the US, using a portfolio on a floppy disk back in 1995 or so.?

a long day and the end of a long electric week that ends up behind the Bahnhof, downtown, underground, a throbbing d'n'b scene. with the informatik posse re:sorb doing the vj-ing. I'm the guest. groove. so many grooves grooved upon, grooved through, in the last decades. but it's the same, different, each time, the focus, the concentration, the groove. it makes something happen. here and there. in a groove. to be taken very seriously. loud pictures and all.

and windows open on future praxis. embodied mind praxis the most important route.

the workshop is incredibly successful, thanks to the dedication and open-ness of the crew. again, a series of in-spiring tableaus. free-wheeling conversations, the efficacy of the dialogue assignments are clearly demonstrated. optimal situation. Frieder's facilitates a true trans-disciplinary program -- experimental even though it's at one of Germany's most liberal universities -- drawing an eclectic group of students who are able to care for themselves in a wa that those embedded in the US system can no longer.

dinner party, bed late, up early to jump on the train to Bremen, Steffi cuts x-ray legal class at the clinic and drives me to the Kieler Bahnhof. change trains at Hamburg Dammtor bahnhof. Frieder and Susi meet me at the Bremen Bahnhof an hour later. not having a mobile phone is annoying already.

preparing for the intensity of the workshop that is to start tomorrow (Monday) morning. it should be quite interesting, especially after the impulse from the last two energized/energizing weeks. breathing the air of 'old Europe,' I don't find this problematic, it's more stimulating than shopping, consuming to save the world economy, that's for sure. don't wanna live with that burden.

arrive the night before Valentine's Day in Kiel following the first European workshop of the Second Nomadic Phase. if things proceed like this all the time, there is no going back to the core of Empire, in retro vision, it is too corrupt. is this too simplistic a diagnosis? maybe, but the energy flow patterns in that set of structures is ... oh hell, can't describe it, it's just a bunch of abstracted words.

anyway, Christian brings Steffi flowers last night. Valentine's Day. I bring some Lübecker marzipan.

yeah, reflecting back on the two weeks, I had forgotten how powerful dialogues can be when there are engaged individuals at both ends. the system in Boulder exerts such a high degree of psychic pressure on the students (and faculty) that the conditions for humane dialogue are almost impossible to achieve. they need some breathing space of chaos -- or some a root ground that feeds any contingency of flow. if the degree of insistent social flow-framework is too rigid, then there is no possibility of inspiring breath. and there is suffocation. embedded in the situation at ISNM is, for now, a degree of chaos that is not particularly uncomfortable, but it is at least available.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

-- Karl Jung, hanging in Frieder and Susi's kitchen

space, time and again the accuracy of a model to circumscribe the actual experience is a measure of the model's validity. as the individual dialogues proceed here at ISNM, their intensity and energized proceeding illustrate the ideas.

Saturday. working online to catch up. (with what?) could be online for a month 24/7 and not catch up. and though the stable inbox volume has been whittled from 150-plus to around 70, the magic number of 52, which equals one screens-worth of messages will surely remain beyond possibility.

maintain a good session through the afternoon for some hours. the hard-cores survive. Darwinian? or just the happenstance of synergetic paths. can't input into a closed system, nor receive in fear. so it goes. more tomorrow.

Caffeine, sugar, violence, drugs -- these are all the things we were raised on. And as things start to get more and more out of hand in America, everyone's trying to take it all back and give you Nutrasweet and PG-13 and safe sex, but how can they take it away and try to start over? It's like we're listening to a cassette tape of the end of the world. I just want to fast forward it and turn It up louder. -- Marilyn Manson?

gotta laugh. swimming a quick 1500m this evening at the Central Pool, not far from my flat. the entrance fee drops to half-price at 19:15, so there is a small line to get in. I find yet another set of protocols for social interaction in the water. the lifeguard is friendly enough to hunt down a pair of pull-buoys for me (in German I ask him what they are called -- he replies "pull-boys"). close enough.

unlike other public swimming places in Finland, Iceland, and the US, this pool has no lane markers out at all. seeing this, I ask the guard how it works. "you swim where you find a space," is the reply. it is a thrashing swarm of breast-strokers with flailing, frog-kicking legs. apparently the fast swimmers work out elsewhere. so, it is a challenge to keep going, given the necessity of weaving rapidly between scything legs and head-on collisions. flip turns are risky, but I maintain my concentration out of sheer desperation to get a through a work-out after more than a week off.

day two here. gray, rainy. in the office.

first day in chaotic flux. alarm system, including the iPod and the PowerBook fail to go off despite testing the previous evening. wake up by chance at 0745. can't think of any single thing that starts a busy day off wrong. way too much adrenaline expended getting ready to go in 20 minutes. drinking water then tea too fast, grabbing breakfast on the way in, checking mail. and diving in. riding on the chaotic wave of structure around the program.