streets will fill with people starting in early afternoon, tens of thousands ready to party, partying. students with their graduation hats which will not be white by morning. when May Day arrives. while naval and military exercises take place within sight and earshot. large rounds, heavy machine guns, Light weapons, naval vessels painted with dull, jagged edged black-greenish-brown camo park in the harbor, come and go at any time and in any direction. one is the newest addition to the small Finnish Navy, the fast-attack "Hamina-class" aluminum-and-composite hulled vessel equipped with South African guided-missiles. fetish culture of technology. another drags a set of large floating targets in from the open sea south of the island. rumbling, grumbling, rattling concussions. all day.

preparations for a war that will not come in the near future. does assumption of future war come from historical precedence, or does it come from a desiring well-spring inside certain beings?

through the only open window, raucous party voices begin to drift, along with the rumbling noise of the city beneath, propping up the fun. if there was only pure silence as a backdrop for the party, things would fall into the void, lack reflection, and draw all energy into itself. making the party fail to become the relief that it is.

interviewing snipers parked in Baghdad. on NPR. one guy, 25 kills. they're allowed to pay a couple bucks to a household for using their upper floor as a sniping point.

good morning.

dinner with Amanda, David, Maria, and the island crew.

and then some. conversations on the ferry, swimming, then a meeting at siba with Shinji about the new AccessGrid portal he's starting to set up. one of the programmers of the Marcel Project was up from Wimbleton to do the rather complex install of the system on a souped-up Pentium machine.

Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv'st unseen
Within thy airy shell
By slow Meander's margent green,
And in the violet-embroidered vale
Where the lovelorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
That likest thy Narcissus are?
-- John Milton

another shot at making lentil soup. free-style as usual. garlic, onions, carrots, curry, red Spanish peppers, stock, bit of oil, and the lentils. probably missing something. but it will get me through a week or so of non-bourgeoise eating. while shuffle-playing the entire audio contents of the hard drive. samples from the randomsystem gig, from downloads, from quicktime files, and then some. mix. what is it about the remix, smaller and smaller samples. as time progresses. sampling. it is the gradual filling in of the social Wall around idiosyncratic being, at the same time the wall is being eroded by the simple action of entropy.

burning a candle in the sun, just to get rid of it. to be rid of, to consume, to use up, to finish. instead, to synthesize, to accumulate, to acquire, to gather together, sort, label, order. input-process-output. may as well let the days drain down to nothing. dry of time, dusty. sneeze in the sun again, twice always.

boat-spotting. is it the boats, of the phenomena of the boats moving through the water, the huge size disrupting the incompressible fluid, pushing it up, away, but never compressing it. potholes form this way. starting with a small crack, it fills with water, a tire rolls over the crack at high speed, something like a hammer coming down. the water has no place to go, but remains incompressible. it has to go somewhere when pressed down from the top, so there is enormous pressure on the side and bottom of the crack. it slowly expands, or rapidly, depending on the strength of the paving material, the rolling pressure of the tire impact, and the persistence of water. ever done a belly flop or slapped water flat with your hand, hard? like a brick wall. that's what happens to bridge-jumpers. ouch.

late to bed, up early. to town, to swim. and anticipating a nap at some point later on.

nope, no time for that. already evening. too late. ferry ride becomes a trance-dance across thoughts of water, movement, and the Other. the art student, flipping through a tablet of sketches, large hands, he dozes for the transition. girl, thirty-something with a silver band around her second finger, like the one that Gary made for me, and traded me for a sepia print of aikikai-tiasa, Chalon-sur-Saone, France, April 1986, she closes her eyes, and is gone, while I study the traces in the ether, traces her body left, impressions, ear, cheek, neck, hand with that silver ring. to myself and only a few others I call my ring a Ring of Power. then I close my eyes, I'm gone as well. nowhere.

the address book creeps over 1000 entries. laboriously going through all contacts, updating, purging, correcting.

We use narratives to impose order on our circumstances, and that will to impose order on reality (instead of discovering order in experience and attempting to conform oneself to that order) is characteristic of modernity. -- Bruce Elder

narrative as a form (well, form itself has the explicit 'meaning' as an 'outcome of a human re-configuration of energies,' an intervention). so, although there are a plethora of po-mo critiques of narrative, and a certain level of critical art-making around/against narrative. even e-narrative and the hyper-text -- that free and utopian post-narrative writing environment is fundamentally mired in the same 'problem' of having this applied form. it's the same! Elder's name comes up, synonymous in my pantheon with Brakhage, partly through formal connections, but also in the energized lived experience of his film work. only frustrating that nothing substantial of his writings are online. so, not available to me here. found a paper copy for sale of a short monograph that he wrote for the epic 42-hour "The Book of All The Dead" film on the occasion of it's screening at the Anthology Archive in 1988 (a show that I was at and subsequently had coffee with Bruce later at his hotel). would not have missed that, as it was the last installment of the work, the first 19 hours of which he premiered at Boulder one weekend back in 1987. reel after reel, sitting in a small classroom with about 8 other people. transformative experience. a primal inspiration for subsequent duration-related works undertaken. pushing mind and body through many limits. buried in my archive is a copy of that document, it was required reading in one class in 1997 at CU, and I would like to make it available online if Bruce agrees. but that's another time issue, when there are more pressing things to deal with. like logistics, as usual. most plane tickets are purchased to get me through the summer, but there is still the extant question about teaching in Tallinn before I leave this region; sending out emails about scheduling gigs for the next academic year; participating in an online conference at V2, and in several online events as well; presenting at RAM5 in Riga in a week, and so on.

massaging the database. updating all contact information. what else for the archivist to do? something that has been wanting for years. re-contacting folks, mostly making open distribution channels for current energy.

sun up early. real early, comes in exactly to strike the eyes as it rises over the roof of the quarters opposite ours on the courtyard. that Lightening buzz begins to stir somewhere in the troposphere.

slogging through the people database/archive. updating addresses, web sites, emails, making short are you alive? messages pulse out on the network. to re-establish long-quiet pathways, cut dead connections, and establish new conduits. and so, run across things, reminders, blips, cliques, and pops, along with re-radiations, re-compilations, and re-mixes. not sure what the outcome is, but, for the archivist, having such that is up-to-date is a critical task. along the with people, continuing to gather video material.

running into new material, old resting in peace, idling servers.

These nomads chart their course by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics - and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, and surprises. -- Peter Wilson, TAZ

dinner last night with Sophea, Teemu, Andrea, and Alison. along with the usual race for the ferry.

early bright morning ensues, not much later. but up with the sun, a serious matter in springtime at this latitude. but what else to do. todaze slip in yesterdaze. time to leave a new pathway into the space of dreams.

have the chance to catch The Lost Films that Stan Brakhage made in 1995. so in-spiring to receive these energies of his life. after he has passed away last spring. an honor to have been taught by him. even when he would sometimes leave the room when screening a film, and forget to turn off his wireless microphone on the way to the drinking fountain or the bathroom, or in an encounter with a colleague in the hallway. when I was doing my MFA back in the late 80's and again when I was a visiting faculty in the fall of 1997, my office was next door to his 3x6-meter cubby-sized office with a sloping roof on the upstairs hallway where the photography grad students had their darkrooms. it was in that little office where many of his hand-painted films came together, on a glass-topped desk. with the pigments standing ready. how did he conceive, map, from working tediously frame-by-frame with a loupe, the projected brilliance of 24 fps? astonishing crystal clear will-to-see, and to apprehend the world as-it-is, and as we adsorb it through wide-spectrumed eyes, corners of eyes, through eyelids, blurred tears, and squinted eyelashes. Light-receivers, life-receivers. and how he conjured humor to arise from chaotic abstraction, magmatic? no, more like a tremoring breeze through new aspen leaves. the coursing of wind mingled with the temporal deflections, resistances of leaf. and the leaf laughs. "it's the same." as Lightnin' Hopkins says, "if you cain't say it, then, SING boy!"

notes for The Lost Films:

1) A travelogue "nocturne" on the City of London as illuminated by "glaze" finally off the surfaces of Turner's paintings.

2) A travelog to the north of Finland, shepherded by the midnight sun.

3) A hand-painted work, a "midsummer's night dream," still reflective of the previous summer in Finland.

4) A multiply pastel-toned balloon of optical fog triumphing over the barest hints of photographic representation in the lower right-hand corner.

5) A mountain meditation primarily in blue "mountains" of the mind shaped by amorphous dull yellows and faded violets.

6) A hand-painted film, some of the same colors of the previous films moving through sandbars and oceans of thoughtful recollection.

7) This is the eternally ephemeral process of attempts to remember imagery "giving-way"/ being-displaced-by the contemporaneously practical sighting of what confronts any given viewer at every shift of open eyes (or, as in the film, at every shift of camera, optical focus and montage of edit) -- the skeins of the Atlantic, the particularities of Boston night Lights, and illuminated points West, ending on a garbage truck in a parking lot by the deserts of New Mexico.

8) A dark "sea chante" of absolute photography.

9) The color negative of "truth" -- that is to say it is the whole truth (insofar as hand-painted film might aspire to achieve it) and a counterbalance epiphany to any such "truth" as might be put in quotes.

-- Stan Brakhage

Once, I think it was in 1997, Stan and I were talking about his trip to Finland for the retrospective at a small film festival, he was telling me of a peak experience he had while in a rowboat coming from an island in a lake after a sauna. the Light. he broke down and cried from the seeing.

hustle into town yesterday evening for some dance performances, with Aki doing one on the steps of the Atheneum to a composition "Everything but the city" by a young Dutch composer, Rijndert van Woudenberg. two other performances, one accompanied by a Stockhausen composition, the other by Henze, were 'normal' modern dance, and although there are probably a multitude of subtleties about the genre that pass the un-tuned eye, this normal dance is about the body and it's forms and the parameters that body training apply to the possibilities of movement. clearly a difference between that and butoh.

I work with dance as it involves the changing of the senses. If your senses do not change, the dance does not change. The consciousness of the body comes into the picture with the changing of the senses. Generally we believe that in dance no matter what happens in our senses the physicality does not change. But to me, when the senses change, consciousness changes, and the physical body itself changes. In a bigger sense is the larger question: What is matter? So with sense and consciousness working together, the physical body itself does change, matter changes. -- Kasai Akira

later, lunch with Sanna at Carusel. time and times. drifts through comfortable, warm places, once occupied, absorbed, diffused, permeated embodied be-ing, present, past, divided.

recalling the time, Kevin and I driving the rental truck full of Conran's Habitat furniture and location gear from NYC to Acadia National Park for the catalog shoot, stopping in to see Bern, but he was out. cruisin' around the town, found a place to buy Maple Syrup which I loaded up on to take back to Iceland for French toast and corn bread later. I took a picture of Kevin in front of Bern's porch. don't have that neg scanned, but it does exist perhaps as an artifact in Kevin's collection of my postcards. or actually, I think I sent one later to Bern as well.

Bern says:

I finger zero, readjust my couch in a void that sloth built, the better to do nothing.
...
Obsolescence revolts me. The alleged modern is a repetition of the ancient decorated in chrome, styled with air-flow and color-engineered to abomination.
...
Thus, communication-wise I junk drum beats, smoke signals, semaphores, flag codes, light flashes, telegraphs, telephones, radios, television sets and all other such systems, devices and developments for my own sensory organs wherein desiring to make known my wishes I merely think them in a frequency universal and in a tongue world known and whomever wishes to hear, receive and understand does so.
The spoken word, printed and tele-dramatized word becomes a particle of thought energy.
The drawn, photographed, painted and kinescope-picture becomes more of the same.
All of the devices of locomotion, subterranean, surface and aerial equally reduce.
I am at all places, in all forms, at all times.
What were books became word sequences screen projected, then free-floating vibrations which impinged upon my mind as I desired them.
What was art left museum walls to become gaseous fusions in color similarly projected, then all prevailing rhythms of radiant energy that stimulated my eye whenever I wished them.
What was poetry became equally transformed to responses for feeling.
Architecture became constructions of ether and light.
Clothing a logical extension of skin without embellishment.
Theatre a pageant of masked spectators.
Automobiles, body rockets.
Toys, fondling in the dark.
No civilized thing was left unmodified or unreverted to its natural, logical and true state.
I transformed the world and in so doing I found myself.

workshop continues this morning. after the performances last night at Blå, the state-sponsored club across the bridge from notam.

walking around Oslo, there is the sense of the cosmopolitan that is almost completely lacking in Helsinki. bits of material and social chaos that are hidden or tidied-up in the Finnish system of propriety flutter, clatter, and clash on the streets of Oslo.

workshop ending, I'm not there, had to leave early to catch the plane, not sure how I made the reservation that gets me to miss the last evening of concerts, and the conclusion of the workshop. before leaving Bjarne, Kim, and I sit down to discuss future possibilities.

so many impressions again, and the mapping of these over into the representative space is a immature and delinquent action. another set of human encounters which translate into a viable if unstable future. Norway rises on my terrain map again. not quite sure how it made its original appearance, except through the Icelandic Nordplus connection back in 1992. true, I was quite focused on central Europe, France and Germany almost exclusively. between 1992 and 1994, though, the IT culture was on the rise in Scandinavia. that and the art educational exchange opportunities. hmmmm, how about those histories.

Kim's work. extreme, lean. subtle, sharp, mapped, choreography of chaotic textures. picked up a couple cd's to be tracked asap. (they're mini-cd's so, can't run them in the slot drive on the PowerBook). he mentions the Cassette Underground in passing, and, aside from others who were active in that anarchic pseudo-network, like Lloyd Dunn and Bern Porter, I haven't personally run into any folks from those real tangible and underground US art networks ever. only through the network, not f2f.

so, in the way of human connections. this movement since leaving Boulder is simply evolving, electrically. so good to be back in tech-no-madic form.

early in to notam to do email, Kim Cascone gets there shortly thereafter. great to finally meet him. randomsystem workshop starts up. energy begins to coalesce, form. hypostasis. configuring, constellating. such is the vibe of the synchronicity for dropping into this moment that, well, it seems right. what more to ask? clearly a moment in time, a place (both only dance with concepts that Newton was cruel to pin down!)

and all the streams of living, they seem so convergent to a transformation that will be complete. someday.

anyware went down last night, but it was not a very satisfactory event despite the level of activity. I should not have joined in without a better understanding of the arrangements. the concept was not really clear, and I didn't have access to enough of the program information until very late. and when I started delving around, I couldn't get my questions answered in a forth-coming way. another one of those things where I will not appear in the program credits, the paper propaganda, or banner headlines. perfect deployment of tactical media in networks: avoid PR whenever possible. made it as far as to edit the wiki pages, though it ended up that my time-frame, being the most easterly of participants, except for someone in Tokyo, and having an early flight in the morning the next day, I couldn't reasonably be online streaming when NYC prime-time hit.

was thinking this morning on the way into town on the early ferry that I function best when there is a clear understanding of the particular social framework within which a particular event will be operating. not that there is a need to actually operate inside that framework or even respect it, it just gives a more comfortable starting point. a bit like what happens when one has not been yet introduced to a stranger, and the specific opportunity for a self-made introduction passes, there are those awkward moments of disconnected collective dynamic. an unbalanced flywheel, hlaup, hlaup, hlaup. this principle inserts itself into many diverse situations. object making: knowing the film and developer (paper developer, paper, and enlarger); knowing the duration for a time-based medium; knowing the network architecture, connection speeds, firewall configurations, and available bandwidth. I tend to set those most base parameters, then leap into the project, feeling free to proceed intuitively and creatively.

these thoughts deserve more exploration, but I now have to read the article Open Content and Value Creation that was suggested in preparation for Kim's workshop. seems like he is not 'just a musician,' but is into some good hard-core social criticism AND mapping out alternative ways of going.

Bjarne meets me at the hotel and we go to the new Atelier Nord offices to meet Atle. good to catch up with him. been a long time since being in Norway, and now he's the Atelier Nord director.

evening performances at Blå alog and Next Life, around the corner from NOTAM, finally find Alexander, the festival-meister.

so, the conclusion: to Oslo for the weekend, thanks to PNEK, the organization I was set to become the director of a couple years ago, before I left Europe for the Colorado gig. and the schedule is such that I can do the streaming performance on Thursday evening with Milos in Prague and NYC -- Beyond the Dream Syndicate which is part of the anyware project scenario. fly to Oslo on Friday morning and stay through until Sunday evening. excellent!

another dinner this evening, David and Maria will come out for this one, along with the local crew. it's been slow getting the dinners thing happening, there are so many people that I would like to invite out, but the time seems to just race by. and the fact of not having a mobile phone, strange the impact of that contingency. and, the whole issue of making food. I realize now that what cooking skills I used to have since have slid by the wayside. still can whip out a brutal chili, proper Mexican when the right ingredients are available, decent spaghetti sauce, and of course the garlic pasta is a solid standby, but quite out of the loop on other improv standards like anything asian. still impressed with a conversation with nick many years ago where he described his quest to learn how to cook. not the surficial process of combining packages and cans of pseudo-food, but the real and necessarily deep praxis based on a dynamic understanding of the principles of combination of scratch sources along with a solid knowledge of raw materials

the inbox overflowith and among the jetsam, the gates of paradise

M y end e a v o r
i n the shadow is to c r e a t e
a l i ght effect that goes d o w n p a s t
t h e walls of habitual prejudice, d o w n t o
t h e training broken buried Se l f, t hr o u g h t h e
s c a ttering of ideas, images, and wor d s, t o o q u i c k
o f s ad or happy for the mercilou s d o g t r a i n i n g
to r eject. My endeavor is to no u r i s h t h e b u r i e d
r e al human inside so t ha t i f t h e b u r i e d S e l f
e v er arises to take its plac e i n t h e co n s c i o u s
l i fe, the unb o u n d S e l f w i l l b e s t r o n g
e n ough to surv i ve t h e v i c i s s i t u d e s
For human beings breath and change are the same: And they are different: The same is the gate.
o f o ur daily life. Fi n d y o u r S e l f.
B e your Sel f. L i v e f r o m
y o u r S e l f.
-- David Daniels

then what can be commented on? in the face if it all?

hanging in the Kiasma Café, waiting to meet Aki again. just got word on funding for a short trip to Oslo if I want. to the Random System Workshop with Kim Cascone, but I'm also scheduled to do a streaming gig to Prague and The Kitchen in NYC on Thursday evening as well, what a problem to have. too many interesting things to do! incredible the difference to life in US academia. but the instability is taking some getting used to after the two relatively sedentary years in Boulder. especially the issue of buying plane tickets. feel like that is draining the up-sides.

finally finished one text, a project proposal. now back to the thesis proposal, again. cleaned the windows, well, at least one of the two, so the outside comes in better. despite the reconfiguration that the SiO2 applies to the view. ancient amorphisms, resulting from eyes casting through glass at what's out there. the threat of the chaotic flows of energized nature. dynamism.

vacumed all the considerable dust in the room and the landing, and the limestone steps from the entrance. fourth from the bottom has an Ordovician cephalopod about 30 cm long replaced with (white) calcite or dolomite in the typical gray matrix. the steps are rounded and spit-shine worn from hobnail boots and whatever else the officers donned for the work of running this vast warren of 18th century militarism. over dinner, a group of us artists-in-residence decided that there were no ghosts here, though, well, at least malevolent ones. probably for the fact that aside for one night of heavy bombardment, (a million pounds of steel fell from British naval vessels offshore -- sounds like a lot, but if you consider the size of the guns and the consequent weight of the ordnance, combined with the sheer size of the four-island fortress complex -- maybe not to horrific), so, aside from that, no real violence took place here, so it is said. if you ignore the tendency of wife-beating in the region.

the Alvar Aalto vase in the corner of the room is full of a bouquet of tulips I picked up at the Market before getting on the ferry a couple days ago. why so rare that I buy flowers? un-necessary expense in a tight year. and all recent last years have been tight. seems all years have been tight. and yet here I am living rent-free in a small flat in a Unesco World Heritage site complex, getting a small stipend to be an artist.

but anyway. pure silent morning, even the far-away sound of the city has vanished, warm, the frost on the roof across the courtyard is only lingering in the shadows. probably should do a ride this morning with vidcam. pick up some quiet ambience. but will take the day slow whatever.

son(net) subterfuge over. didn't get a de-brief from Josephine yet. seemed to go okay, I had one VDMX glitch, and a restart, but since she also had a stream from NYC, it seemed to work okay, from the limited view I had of the performance via their QuickTime stream. choreography could have been tighter -- at least my knowledge of the cycling, but overall, I think it went well. probably the most formal outgoing streamed performance I've had before. I was nervous even!

19
Devouring Time, blunt thou the lion's paws,
And make the earth devour her own sweet brood;
Pluck the keen teeth from the fierce tiger's jaws,
And burn the long-liv'd phoenix, in her blood;
Make glad and sorry seasons as thou fleet'st,
And do whate'er thou wilt, swift-footed Time,
To the wide world and all her fading sweets;
But I forbid thee one most heinous crime:
O! carve not with thy hours my love's fair brow,
Nor draw no lines there with thine antique pen;
Him in thy course untainted do allow
For beauty's pattern to succeeding men.
Yet, do thy worst old Time: despite thy wrong,
My love shall in my verse ever live young
-- William Shakespeare

after a brilliant sunny day yesterday, today is wet. (snowing!) good for washing the long winter accumulation of ground-up road and sidewalk gravel dust away. still in bed at 1000, reading, and writing. determined to flog away on thesis things, alternately, each minute, feeling empowered, and feeling lost. strange process. looking for a structural framework that makes sense, and somehow gives cues as to how to limit the scope of the discussion so it doesn't get totally out of hand.

delve, ponder, organize, shuffle. and run across the field of Light

There is a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure Light of a representational discourse. -- Michel Foucault

hmmmmm. woulda neva started this thing here, if I had read that nine years ago. or woulda tatooed meself from head to toe and enlisted in the merchant marine. wholly Madre de Dios! nada mas.

okay, ready and set up for the son(net) stream / performance. crossing fingers after setting up in my normal office space, and both ethernet jacks were dead. talk about stress, I ran to the other side of Gallery Augusta, the long low building that NIFCA uses for offices to check to see if the network connection was working in the main offices. weewsh. race back, rip everything down (two dv cams, two powerbooks with the accompanying 400 meters of cabling), drag it over to the office, set up. only 20 minutes before the sound check.

so it goes. performance over. after a testing connection earlier in the week with Josephine via irc, and then later she sends a nice video of the performance.

Manu sends an image from Tryptichon, with Amanda and I standing after the performance. a blue-Light special.

Foucault falls into my hands, though I am not particularly fond of the French School of philosophy, or, maybe to say it more concisely -- I dislike the widespread invocation of his name. but, a book from the library is here, so I pick it up. immediately the term microphysics pops out from the intro. along with the observation by the editor that Foucault's work never was successful in addressing the dynamic of social change and the autonomous nature of social action. ahah. my model does this explicitly! another spray of Lighter fluid on the fire kindling under my thesis. doubts remain, many, but as I bang words around, there seems some hope that this task gets done.

dinner last night with some of the other residents.

and then, the thesis issue keeps popping up.

Certainly, fantastic theories must not be arbitrarily invented contrary to the regularity of experience; nor must there be any departure from the harmony of Nature, since she tends to be simple and always consistent with herself. -- Isaac Newton

cranking with Josephine in Amsterdam on the dress rehearsal for Son(net) Subterfuge which takes place tomorrow evening. a distributed dance/network happening, I'll be supplying one of two incoming audio/video mixes that Jos will re-mix to be projected into the dance performance piece in Waag's Theatrum Anatomicum. everything was stable last night. knuckles rasping to a bloody pulp on wood -- to ensure the same tonight...

spent much of yesterday online, remote. talking with the http://archive.reboot.fm crew during their collaborative re-streaming project from Berlin. Thomax from the old orang.orang radiostadt project was there as irc host, and many net-amigos dropped in during the course of the 12-hour stream. by day's end. though, I was wondering about the effect of a full day online, again. 'the price you pay' is a very general and deep issue regarding technological implementations, technological consumptions, technological deployments anywhere, anytime, anyhow. the cost that is extracted from the individual and collective psyche is always there, this is a principle. as soon as one begins to make a re-configuring of the natural conditions of flow, that re-configuration itself, because at least part of it is contrary to the flow, costs in that the self has to expend internal energies, or, to get Others to do the same. huge discussion to try to launch into here, now. part of that greater schema that I have been promoting on a granular lever in teaching.

it may be that the schema never gets to a formal representational package beyond the actuality of a stand-up/taught lecture/discussion. the process of re-presenting it at a higher level of social order may require too much energy, more than I have. though Frieder is really inspiring me with his questions and reflections on the new thesis proposal, it is incredibly difficult to get much done about it.

now have to run to catch a boat. not the ferry to town, but I am making a new short video work, another simple ambient work called action at a distance which is a single shot somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge on the island over a smallish inlet. when the large cruise ships go by about 100 meters away, through the very narrow channel that guards the main harbor, there is an intense though subtle oscillation of the water levels that slowly moves the remaining chunks of rotting ice back and forth. an example that human perturbations in the world are not only felt in the immediate vicinity. but that they reverberate and extend themselves in subtle forms, perhaps infinitely. and that is the question. is it possible to devise a work that tests/illustrates the idea of simultaneity. where quantum suggests that any change in the universal energy continuum anywhere is simultaneously 'experienced' by all points in the continuum. seems only an accession to Buddha-hood would contain the 'proof.' and just this morning before I started writing, I had this strange impression that my need to 'prove' my model is a total caving-in to the scientific method, that dominant driving model. sheesh. how to avoid that and remain socially viable? might not be possible.

in conversation with Sophea last night, I realized that, yup, I do have a streak of anti-sociability. it does not affect individual relationships, per se, but it affects abilities to interface with the socially mandated pathways of institutions, and the positions that individuals carve out for themselves as a result of participating in such structures. hmmmm.

nauseating quote about camera-phones: "This is no longer about disposable cameras. We call it 'disposable photography,'" said Ben Wood, a wireless analyst (editor: that is an analyst w/o wires), "There's no such thing as a bad photo. The delete key takes care of the headless body or any other misfire. There's no cost for making mistakes. ... "Everyone stages their own reality." ...

loss of memory, or the cost of memory transference from the body, lived, imprinted, to the external, re-presented. what is the cost? the archive is a playground for ghosts. like the hungry ghosts of the Japanese Obon tradition. belly distended, gnawing, grinding teeth loose in ratcheting jaw, yellow claw fingernails tearing at anything living. the prototypical consumer.

shifting formats from the former travelog, built in HTML 2.0 with a sprinkle of java scripting, presents, no, really forces an interesting transformation in the flow from mind to finger to server to your eyes. spontaneity is, for some moments, shunted off into the space of "how do I execute what I want?" reading help pages, taking some time to dig around for the principles of how it all works. again, the most problematic area is the need to get images in reasonable form up and happening. gotta have pictures. it is, after all, an illustrated travelog!

also thinking of how much from the art/media related activities that I am presently involved with should I note down here. I have a history of taking copious notes at presentations and meetings, but not committing the thoughts or reflections to the travelog. had I done this from the beginning, it would have been a much richer historical document rather than the personal meander. oh well.

into town for a swim. love that pool. pretty optimal. only would wish to go every day. need desperately to work on my kick strength which is almost totally atrophied.

booooooring. just can't get the hang of the medium yet. plz be patient. or go back and peruse the eight years of previous posts and images...

pixelache finally finishes up with Tuomas' and Mukul's analog vs digital dual in the Kiasma Theater. enjoying a quiet morning without a particular agenda except for catching up with communications, especially answering Frieder's pro-vocative recent email that is inspiring me to think and write toward my doctoral studies. heavy work, but ultimately feeling quite good to commit to paper (well, hard-drive) a concise framework for the explorations that may ultimately become the thesis. even if not, the exercise is extremely valuable.

ambienttv also performed their work TRiPTyCHoN, a complicated work-in-progress that is rooted in mapping human experience across a physical space. in this case, messages sent in from participants who were invited to make a walk between the Parliment steps and the steps of the cathedral, about a kilometer. along the walk, using a gps unit connected to a gprs-enabled palm with a custom interface, they were to write text messages. these messages were then sent to a server which recorded the location and the text into a database. I did a walk on Friday afternoon, slowly making my way, avoiding satellite shadows, and drifting through a space of emotional history. spontaneity was somewhat inhibited by the Lightweight but cumbersome physical interface. cold fingers. despite, I ended up drifting through parts of the history that was mapped across this very neighborhood through relationship. cafes, clubs, theaters, bars, corners, bus-stops, trams, shops all had a tangible memory overlay. poignant, as memory can often be about what has been lost. direct, as the triggers of place are very much real. silent, internal. Mukul called me after I had returned the device to Antony in the Kiasma Cafe, saying that it was a nice performance, the best one they got. He and David were on the island, actually neighbors in one of the nifca residency flats, they were monitoring reception of the 'wander' in real-time.

interesting experience. it was a measure of my ability to push through a technological interface, enabling some kind of flow-through. drawing focus, projecting energy, emotive force.

ready for another day of media art. so to speak. brilliant mornings, after night, the nights where suddenly one is aware that the sky has lost its complete darkness. buildings, lit by night city Lights, are now silhouetted against the sky. along with some aurora borealis, which, once back on the island and away from the city's Light pollution, was quite intense, while still diminished by the coming summer Light.

trying to get the rhythm of this new format, along with the dis-satisfaction with the interface (or my own ability to control the format...) taking is easy by necessity, hardly able to do more. wondering at the exuberance.

jumping into pixelache things, meetings, presentations, parties, performances, but it's technically Sunday morning after getting home at 0100. so, will comment on that later. after today's schedule of events...

here goes, after a couple abortive attempts to get something happening with this php-based travelog, here it is. still haven't figured out how to do pop-up image blocks, and so on... wrestling with technology is fun! not.