network problems rear ugly heads in the morning. again, the phenomena of the Finnish hitech hype, and the reality of the situation. unstable connections, bad connections.

still on the verge of rolling things over to another server. isea2004 press conference this morning. there's the Helsinki crew. the cost places the event off the map for me coming from the US. looks like I'll just be going to Iceland in the fall, on the Akureyri residency, not back to Finland. so. now begin the logistics of the alternative plan.

after an intense conversation break with Sophea at Corona, dinner at Atabar with Tapio, Minna, Sophea, and a couple Brits who are deploying a "locative media" project for isea.

a quaint reminder of it all. snowing this morning. hard to believe it's almost the end of March. I find it's easy to forget the season, or at least what it is like elsewhere, when here.

As painfully to pore upon a book
To seek the Light of truth; while truth the while
Doth falsely blind the eyesight of his look:
Light seeking Light doth Light of Light beguile:
So, ere you find where Light in darkness lies,
Your Light grows dark by the losing of your eyes.
-- William Shakespeare

dinner last night with Sophea, Andrew and Jodi, impromptu gathering. on the island. finally got to the pool in the morning, doing 2500 meters in meditative solitude.

stay on the island today, another dinner here tomorrow.

As for the radio's object, I don't think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back cosiness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction. -- Bertold Brecht, The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication

reconnecting with dreams. perhaps that's what this residency is about. after a drift this morning that starts in a graying Light of 0500. a drift through family images and the cares of Light future. the whining Light hum of Boreal summer has not arisen from the earth yet, but will soon. dreams, Light, and a contemplation of the past, present and future at the same time as being in the moment.

reading the introduction to Saussure's "Course in General Linguistics," a few pages into the text helps me realize that the energized world-view I hold is a valuable point from which to view the world, and, more significant, it is worthy of re-creating for others in the form of a text. this is a realization of self-worth. nothing more, nothing less.

the balanced condition of equinox, the self converts to a stasis, reinforced by the insular location, and very little happens except the nervous activity of time-filling which takes the form of tidying-up the immediate surrounding. no art project. decisions wait. travel decisions. and such. and head fills with vibrating plans and potentials. expression is key this morning as the falling snow keeps me sitting in bed drinking a cup of tea instead of launching out to the swimming pool. last week's weather interpreted as 'spring has arrived,' which, indeed, has, but spring here means snow possible until the end of April. sunny days are brilliant, but they do not rule, yet.

the equinox. walked some in a peace march yesterday. a thousand or so people marching down Alexanterinkatu and Esplandi in the afternoon. another performance, ambient, with sigma at Koetila in Kallio. the bad-ass neighborhood in Helsinki. mkk and others are there.

all day laundry and working with Reason, slogging through a learning curve, but make some good progress -- enough to realize it will be some time before I can use this as a sonic production tool. living in an ice-bound snowy citadel. Sunday. with no place felt to be gone to, except the cerebral ones. along with the general drift into (snowy) work. or chilled leaden ambulations with, for the moment, balanced footsteps.

there is a large peace march snaking through downtown Helsinki on a cold damp morning when I head from the ferry to the workshop.

so it goes. last night out with Mukul, Manu, Sophea and some of the other artists. feeling resistant of scheduled being somewhere sometime. searching for the optimal pathway. oracle on the island, socialite, hard(ly)-working artist, attacking learning curves. answering email, teacher, project developer, and still contemplating documentation of tens of projects melting into invisible history, re-tooling the website, adding new material, filming, enjoying the isolation of the island, planning dinners, meetings, lunches, path-crossings, next teaching steps, summer airline tickets, how to get funding to go to ISEA here in August? ain't gonna happen.?

dinner with Timo and Catherine.

real-time notes, uploaded later (Sophea): invite someone to listen. permission to listen. what to do with sounds around? move them, translocate, transform, remix. real-time. mediation does not occur in real time. it occurs in a second time. cancellation. spatial elements. additive easy, subtractive difficult. control of acoustics. presence of observer. hear-er. location, pathway. subtractive relates to filtration of input energy. humans use a variety of devices for sonic filtration. cupped ears, ear plugs. psychoacoustics. withdrawing information and re-configuring it. based in pure harmonics and resonances. (acoustic properties). adsorbtion, reflection, reverberatory. waiting for lunch. existing resonances. hearing works. Bill Fontana -- back when he was in Boulder, waiting to set up a project with CU, with live sonic connections from a field at high-altitude to a network space. but he never got funding. live, not-live. what about real-time?

Ken Nordeen comes to mind. as does the stomach's desire to consume. lunchtime.

the workshop continues.

wishing to implement some kind of content management system. for this site. having an interactive blog instead of this. maybe I switch over to that when year 8 comes to a close. issues: editability, portability, stability of server, interface design, customize-ability.?

already every evening filled this week. as the low thrumming outside signals the passing of one of the daily cruise ships through the narrow channel at the south-east end of the island.

workshop underway. listening. meditative, but this is how I always am anyway. wandering through foreign streets, as the observer. listening.

but along with that way, there was a flash, an indication, that all social interaction is a skin over ... what? an intangible absence. and that the skin held little, maybe the absence was not hold-able. in the end, social connection or relation falls away. and does not carry into the next state of being. and while the proposition that the next Other offers the realization of transformation, of Buddha-hood, is powerful, that transformative process appears to be almost entirely internalized, only triggered by the con-frontal Other. (not even catalyzed.)

having to present my 'work' in a limited time frame to a fresh audience is always a challenge (where part of me resists the social framework that generates such pre-tentious configurations.) of course, encounters with an Other are encounters, but it always feels like the anticipation and formality are far too rigid to de-power. I have done this on a more general scale by denying a relationship with PR. keeping documentation minimal, subjugating the value of presence over re-presentation. and paying the consequent social price. arbeit macht frei. but paramount in personal relations, that PR.?

the next step. not trying to catch anything particular into the face of mind except to slap it around until, in it's silliness, it breaks apart, oozing, so that the local dogs of strict engagement can feast and bloat their bellies "gimma 'nother one." addicted to the carbon/hydrogen mixture. energy, compacted energy sources, in carbon/hydrogen wrappings. why not eat both? exuding methane anyway. spend the evening listening to Bern Porter, Burroughs, and Debord. people doing with they wanted.

and drifting through all the old images, scanned negatives, just sitting there. on the hard drive. filling with more and more data. then sleeping next to the archive, seeing if the magnetic dipoles will leak inspiration.

head to the Taidehallli to meet Kaisu and Risto for the opening of a group show that Kaisu is in. downstairs to the "ArtBar" for a noisy and smoky beer.

days alternate: hiding on the island, and going to meet folks. wandering to the ferry through the ice-fog. while meeting Sanna in Café Succés on Korkeavourenkatu, Visa sees me and drops in. on my first visit to Finland, in 1994, and then in early 1995, when I did a gig at Media Lab, I stayed in what was his printing studio, around the corner from the café. to save money on the Nordplus teaching exchange, I had a tea and wienari (a cinnamon and glazed pseudo-spiral of pastry dough with a berry jam center) for breakfast. earl gray. bergamot. it was enough to carry me until the institutional lunch at the university which packed belly with the standard fare. pea soup with ham on Thursdays. all across the country. anyway, it's my favorite café in Helsinki, they have the largest and best wienari in town, made on the premises fresh daily. there is a constant level of coming and going, intimate meetings, where old lovers can have tea and conversation that drifts through all the subjects that once were whispered with entwined and humid breath in nights of late spring, no longer dark in these latitudes. tulips on the table are chosen with a color to match the only dressy shirt available, and time is mapped in eyes and souls. nothing changed, and only the future is left. the past is past. dialogue after dialogue. one, another, another, yet another. life spent in this vocal dance. and occasionally in the Lighter dance of embodied soul, where centers of gravity press close and don't need calculus to predict a forceful trajectory.

if only. on the edge of the seat, looking onto the eyes. averting when the intensity of that looking is too much. trying to see heart behind glassy lens. but, after awhile, nothing to do. effort for this is neither rewarded nor punished, only just tolerated. better to stay in the moment, forget past and future. be an oracle for the self.

the issue is, on this residency, what exactly to do? or not to do??

spending life-time, putting energy into organizing my immediate surroundings for comfort, focus, and convenience. yet another office, arranged in one of the many military administrative buildings from the period of Russian occupation of Finland.

and what to do. reading, cutting down the email inbox but still many texts to generate, to get out for network facilitation and future logistical planning. how to balance this with the opportunity to NOT be slammed all the time. let go of the tendency.?

almost a full moon, Venus brilliant. walking around the island this afternoon, after realizing I could. no agenda. and already thinking ahead to tomorrow when I will head into town to catch what surely will be a sincere show -- nazca with mika and mkk. three former students involved. fine to see. of course, how to measure anything like that. I only intersected with them for a few of life's many hours. what does a teacher take credit for? some microscopic catalytic event which leads ... nowhere? or simply the estimation that the teacher's heart has been transformed. is it such that a change in One must be reciprocated in the Other for the change to be real and sustainable? if the change in One is not real, than the Other remains the same as well? is it possible to fake change? it is possible to simulate it for some perverse purpose of social engineering, but what's the point aside from command-and-control??

already 48 hours back in the white land defined by thin strips of black horizontal lines. horizon lines of bare trees, far away across the ice of the chilled Baltic, protected by all the islands here. frozen. back on Suomenlinna. ice fog greets Sophea and I as we land from the ferry. Niko also. he's there to drive us the kilometer to my flat. one and the same tidy room that I have stayed in on two previous occasions, both documented in this exact travelog. way back in 1996 and 1997 and possibly other times.