text chat with Trace in Denver. or Longmont. starting the discussion on the net.art project in Tokyo.

31. We hypostatize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of the information; the message has changed. This is a language which we have lost the ability to read. We ourselves are a part of this language; changes in us are changes in the content of the information. We ourselves are information-rich; information enters us, is processed and is then projected outward once more, now in an altered form. We are not aware that we are doing this, that in fact this is all we are doing.

36. In summary; thoughts of the brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements - change - in a physical universe; but in fact it is really information and information-processing which we substantialize. We do not merely see its thoughts as objects, but rather as the movement, or, more precisely, the placement of objects: how they become linked to one another. But we cannot read the patterns of arrangement; we cannot extract the information in it - i.e. it as information, which is what it is. The linking and relinking of objects by the Brain is actually a language but not a language like ours (since it is addressing itself and not someone or something outside itself). -- Philip K. Dick, VALIS

really hard to imagine what this place is. how it fits into world systems. how it is to live here. week after week, year after year. fishing. Simmi has kept up the Arnarberg, Jón's old boat, in a deal with a mechanic on the island, they split the use and maintenance of the boat. Simmi has also built a small harfiskur 'factory' shed where he can prep fish caught on the Arnarberg for fileting and drying to make a delicious fish jerky. the boat is out of the water now for the winter, which has definitely arrived.

back on the island, after many years. Hildur and Simmi come by and pick Loki and I up late in the evening to catch the 2330 ferry from Árskógsandur. they bought the house of the old Czech priest who died some years back to use as a summer retreat. ever since the fish-packing plant closed down in 1999, the regular population of the island has been slowly replaced by now about 40% of the houses as part-time inhabitants. the first person settling in the fjord from the 800's was Helgi The Lean who sent Steinólfur The Short to build the farm called Sythstibaer on the island. Many famous characters lived at Sythstibaer including Thorvaldur The Ancient, Narfi Thrándarson, and Jörundur The Shark-catcher. in the mid-19th century, Norwegians used the island as a based for salt-herring production, later taken over by Swedes at the beginning of the 20th century. this activity is the reason for the existence of the present village. there are still small fishing boats operating from the island, along with cod and mussel farming and the national animal quarantine center which provide present livelihoods for the 200 inhabitants.

Loki and I take a walk around town, checking out the new playground (which makes innovative use of old fishing nets), the new breakwater, and the old hut where we spent several summer holidays in. we took a quick look at Alda's house, next door, to see that it is not in good repair, and the little hot-house rose garden that she was so proud of, is slowly dying.

Of such great powers or beings there may be conceivably a survival... a survival of a hugely remote period when... consciousness was manifested, perhaps, in shapes and forms long since withdrawn before the tide of advancing humanity... forms of which poetry and legend alone have caught a flying memory and called them gods, monsters, mythical beings of all sorts and kinds... -- Algernon Blackwood

drop by Galerie + to give Pálina some papers and to check out the show by Krístján Steingrimur, a former colleague of mine at the Art Academy, and the present Rector of the Fine Arts department. very direct work. intriguing were the samples of stuff (literally) from different locations (GPS/UTM-defined). reminded me of my sand collection. several hundred small round plastic pill-boxes filled from locations all around the world. then, at one point, during a move-related purge, I took all the samples and layered them in a one-liter pyrex lab bottle which looked great, sitting on my desk in my UNOCAL office. it wasn't quite full, and I never sealed the top layer, so the first time it tipped over (when I was moving to Boulder from Santa Monica), all the beautifully colored and layered sands mixed to a bottle of uniform grey material. so much for anti-entropic efforts.

so it goes

Brassica oleracea var. acephala -- Although more highly developed forms, such as cauliflower, broccoli, and head cabbage, have been produced in the last two thousand years or so, the kales and collards have persisted, although primitive, because of their merits as garden vegetables. These leafy nonheading cabbages bear the Latin name Brassica oleracea variety acephala, the last term meaning "without a head." They have many names in many languages, as a result of their great antiquity and widespread use. Kale is often called "borecole," and in America collards are sometimes called "sprouts." "Kale" is a Scottish word derived from coles or caulis, terms used by the Greeks and Romans in referring to the whole cabbagelike group of plants. The German word Kohl has the same origin. "Collards" is a corruption of coleworts or colewyrts, Anglo-Saxon terms literally meaning "cabbage plants." -- Our Vegetable Travelers

check out this 10-minute farewell speech by an outgoing US president. and you might understand better the position that we are in today with the US internal (and consequently, external) politics dominated by the military-industrial complex. pretty surprising, considering who it is coming from. General Dwight Eisenhower. but the mapping out of the consequences of allowing a society to be under the shadow of this conglomeration is chillingly prophetic. the situation is grave. and I DID cast a vote in this election, after some years of not doing so, based on my experiences in the 1980 presidential campaign which was a farcical face-off between Carter and Ray-Gun, with John Anderson making the most credible and successful campaign as an independent candidate to date. I worked as campus rep for Anderson, and saw clearly that the electoral college system was stifling democratic expression in the country. it's good to see that the whole structure is under deep scrutiny these days, now in Colorado and California (Maine and Nebraska already award proportional electoral college votes based on popular votes). scrapping it would at least bring a surficial element of democracy back into a system that is hardly democratic in the sense of one-man-one-vote. instead, direct or indirect cash reserves are the true test of a candidates viability (not intelligence or fitness for the job), and campaigns burning up billions of dollars in media propaganda confirm that only those with access to extreme wealth have any possibility of acceding to power. that base fact along with the rapid evolution of the realities of life in the US to a space of absolute fantasy through the power of wholesale mediation of what once was direct human connection.

the studio has a fire door that leads into Deiglan, a central community cultural space that is presently the location of a vivacious women's get-together with the requisite collective song-fest following dinner and speeches. behind the door.

just as I had observed and inferred from bits of data that I have seen over the past few years. that the US is in serious crisis regarding the precipitous drop in the numbers of creative talent entering the country. graduate students are not turning up in droves as they used to, populating all the hard-core science, business, and technology programs at the best US uniersities. they are staying home or going to European, Asian, and other societies which are not so repressive and paranoid as the neocon facists in power now in the US. so, reading the article "America's Looming Creativity Crisis," in the Harvard Business Review that enumerates the extremity of the situation only confirms my observations. empire continues its decline with the deluded self-knowledge of ascending to the millineal realms of power and righteous glory. ideological and religious dogmas constricting scientific research along with repressive and exclusionary visa and immigration practices lead the way to a rapid decline in creative capital that was once a primary mechanism in US global hegemony. in the metric introduced in the article, the Global Creative Class Index, the US already ranks behind 11 other countries, including Iceland -- a statistic that somehow hasn't reached Icelandic eyes yet, for it is sure to make front-page headlines "Icelanders More Creative Than Americans" when it does.

rok it is. whole gale in English, as opposed to strong gale, fresh gale, or moderate gale. grounded. no flights north today, most likely. so it goes. the rok brings restless sleep and no relaxation, the flux of energy is so intense. wind speeds between 40 and 50 meters/second in some places. flights north are cancelled all day until 1800 when they mobilize a 757 to do the hop. luck out with a business-class seat, at the front, the first place to go in a downing. next to me sits Brad, I think his name is, a basketball recruit for the Akureyri team. all the way from Connecticut. his first time in Iceland. says it was the worst plane flight he's ever had. I told him he was lucky we were landing in the dark, as the sight of the mountains that the plane threads through on the way into the fjord are hairy on a good day. in a rok, the whole machine is bucking, thumping, and revving like a Huey under fire over the Mekong. bless me, father, for I have sinned... whewsh. and a 30 minute wait for my bag, and a further 30 minute wait for a taxi. the entire local infrastructure groaning under the stress of a full 757's load of bodies itching to get outta R'vík and back to winter-enshrouded northlands.

up early, eat the rest of the food in the fridge for breakfast. veggie omelet. and head out. back in Ice Land, where the landing was preceeded by some minutes of rough buffeting, and at the gate it is hard to remain standing in the parked airplane from the wind shaking it. rok it is called. roaring wind from some direction, this time from the northwest, from Greenland. so, cold. bitter on exposed skin. so, stay inside and wonder if flights north will be delayed tomorrow, not too keen on doing the stol (short take-off-and-landing) Folkker hops to Akureyri in bad weather. not at all. will call in the morning to see what the status is.

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

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

title: drawing technologies into a sustainable human practice: open source living

1.0 -- Presence

if you cannot hear, you must come close

- there is a gap, an abyss, between the Self and the Other

- it is a struggle for the Self to configure and release internal energies in such a form that will successfully cross this gap to the Other

- it is a struggle for the Other to do the same

- it is a challenge for the Self to remain open to the possibility of change that engagement with the Other suggests.

- it is a challenge for the Other to do the same

- mediation is that-which-carries energy between the self and the Other

- mediation is the multitude of ways that human energy is materialized

- the expressable energy of the Self is always attenuated or mediated by the internalization of coercive and dominant social systems

- mediation is a lossy algorithm

- the process of mediation filters energy transfer

- technology is a subset of the possible mediations of energy movement between the self and the other.

- technology fails -- that failure is expressed by the lossy algorithm

- technology re-presents freedom

- technology creates, supports, and enforces defined social behaviors

- utopian technologies often devolve into technologies of command and control

- technologies often evolve from warfare

- when the Self engages the Other in open exchange of energies there is a surplus of energies arising from that flow, that dialogue

- a prototypical human network is built from a multiplicity of these inspiring dialogues, these flows

- these dynamic distributed structures, with creational energies moving on multiplex pathways and means may be called an open source network

- the source is sustainable human dialogue - for it to be energized, it must be open

- the distributed structure built from these granular human connections, a network, is a site for the accumulation of this surplus energy, generating substantial energy flows

- open source is not about code, it is about living with the distributed energies of human connection

- open source is not about opposition to monolithic givers of law; it is about creating new pathways for human connection.

- technology re-presents the material aspects of human connection

- representation is pre-tension

- representation is not it!

- (I want it, that which is represented, not the representation)



2.0 - Absence

when I hit 'return' I am closer to death

it hurts to only speak at you return
it hurts to only hear you return
it hurts to only see you return
it hurts not to hear you return
it hurts not to touch you return
it hurts not to see you return
it hurts that you become an abstracted re-presentation of you return

or does it? return

the pain will leave when the re-presentations of freedom are adopted as the thing itself return

or does it? return

why does the social system not acknowledge this pain? return
why does this pain not show up on financial balance sheets as a cost of doing business? return
why does this pain show up as modifications of human behavior? return
why does this pain seem to vanish as I consume your re-presentation? return
why does this pain seem to vanish when I consume? return


it hurts to only speak at you return
it hurts to only hear you return
it hurts to only see you return
it hurts to only read you, to only see the tracing of your self in the curves of your written word return
it hurts to hunt for you in between the straight lines of laser print return
it hurts to not find you in between glimmering pixels return
it hurts not to hear you return
it hurts not to touch you return
it hurts not to see you return

I can't stand it return

attenuation keeps the blast of lived intensity in check return

so I can stand it return

human interaction is modeled with a lossy algorithm return

I touch your text return
I smell your poem return
I kiss your icon return
I love your algorithm return

I die a little each time I love your algorithm return



3.0 - Return

return from remote presence for dialogue and questions: this is still the question.

how to create a pathway for integrating technologies into a sustainable life practice?

some suggestions:

-- we recognize that there is a loss encountered in all human connection, that networks are the site for lossy connection and at the same time they are the site for energized flows where the energy of each engaged individual is multiplied by the intensity of the human connection between that self and the Other

-- we acknowledge and mourn that primary loss

-- we remain constantly aware of and grounded in the primacy of multiplex human connection

-- we use that connection as the site of electric be-ing

-- we acknowledge that technology only represents freedom. it is not the thing itself

trondheim matchmaking cranks up on Friday morning. presentations begin a bit late. Lassi Tassijarvi talks about the demo scene, promoting his book on the history and philosophy of what is framed as a movement. gintas K. gives an overview of the Lithuanian sound art and experimental scene (as well as later doing a live sonic performance). Letizia Jaccheri talked about the trans-disciplinary IT/humanities program she is a facilitator for at NTNU. Kristin Bergaust talks abou the Lofoten locative media project.

pedestrian bridge over the Niderelva. can't seem to find out the actual name of the bridge* via searching on the internet. could go outside and walk over to it, there's a big sign, but that's too easy. it's a beautiful structure with the nearer half on tracks that allow it to retract and open for small ships that occasionally moor up the river.
* Trine later sends me a possible name -- Verftsbrua, related to the word 'wharf,' or place for building boats.

get online early to prep everything, stream at 1400 local time. as per usual, a single glitch pops up when I begin, something that I have not experiences before, but that is also a typical characteristic of glitches. this time, my outgoing audio stream had a scratchy noise overlaying it. so, when I started the actual performance, laboite suggested a few fixes (restart the encoder - MacAmp on a separate G4, or reboot the system), which I did, along with swapping and testing cables and on. all during the time that the performance is running. sweating. so, the stream went down twice, but laboite kept me calm (this by no means the only technical glitch in the 24-hour program!). ended up just having this noise over the actual work which some listeners on the IRC channel liked. I didn't. but so it goes. I have a hunch that it was an aliasing function between playing mp3 files and then encoding that (albeit an analog output through a mixer to the encoding machine) output to a mp3 shoutcast stream. I could hear that the G4 output was messy, but the output from the mixer was clean. or, something wrong with the USB audio input device, or the audio circuits on the G4 (not outside possibility, as my own G4 has some issues with that), or, or... endless possibilities. that finished, I wandered over to TEKS to meet Espen, and ended up talking with Trine at the Contemporary Art space where an exhibition paralleling TMM is taking place. then back home to catch up on logistic arrangements (buying 4 transport tickets for the coming month).

(no)music arena started in the night and goes all day today. got a small streaming situation set up at the Academy and was testing and irc-ing with some of the other participants -- Jerome, Steve, laboite, and others. I'll do a set mid-day. then matchmaking cranks into gear in the evening. meanwhile meet with Per Erik, another workshop participant for a focused dialogue on an even-morphing range of subjects.

since the workshop unraveled in this strange dynamic at the Academy, I spent the whole afternoon with Professor Jaccheri -- one of the two workshop participants -- from the IT department of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. trading ideas about university existence and the facilitation trans-disciplinary art:science studies. late in the evening, the walk home over the -- bridge, and to the north, faintly, the Aurora Borealis shimmers.

workshop starts. dinner with Trine. apparently the student situation at KiT is the same as before. students too 'busy' to attend a workshop. given that this is the only place where this has happened -- twice in 4 years -- I just don't understand it. two students showed up for the first day. one of them a Spanish exchange student. and two other people from the 'outside.' thank goodness. else the trip ends up not really being worth it. though it's been great meeting some new and old acquaintances in the meantime. while hardly earning my keep. such an extreme difference in the students between here and Bremen, for example, the ones here simply absent. don't get why they are in school except for the social infrastructural value purely. which has nothing to do with art, only commerce. if they only knew. of course, there could be over-arching infrastructural issues affecting their presence. the effect that the faculty has on the long-term base emotional confidence of the students can be immense, though very hard to quantify. but absent teachers make absent students. Trondheim suffers from the drain that all the Nordic countries experience -- that of having a single dominant city that is the seat of fiscal, political, and cultural power. all other cities are second-rate. so, the milieu outside urban Oslo (Stockholm, Helsinki, and Reykjavík, Copenhagen, among other small countries) is always stretched and even under threat of not remaining viable in extreme instances.

end up at Klubb Kanin, again at Jonas' invitation, to catch an interesting show that he was instrumental in putting together. vocal sonic performances from a wide variety of artists including Morten who studied throat singing. it dawns on me at some point that nobody is smoking inside anywhere, an effect of the new Norwegian law that bans smoking in any colective space, bars included.

workshop starts tomorrow, today spent in synchronous remote comm with Lexie (Prescott), Steve (Baltimore), laboite (Strasbourg), Loki (Reykjavík), and the requisite asynchronous email load over at TEKS, along with reinstalling OSX on one of their machines, and getting a stuffy head in the poor ventilation. retreat home for dinner, stretching, and bed.

a field trip starting early, meeting Jonas with a crew of 25 11-year-olds from a workshop at the science museum. we meet on the frosty lawn of the main administration building for NTNU, and after a short exercise to sit for two minutes and list all the sounds they could hear, we proceed to break into small groups and visit the anechoic and echo chambers in the Department for Electronics and Telecommunications. nothing like kids in an echo chamber testing the loudness of their screaming with a Db-meter!

back in town. first visit in three years, since right before I went into internal exile in the US. Trine shows me around the new TEKS space (situated in the brown river-front building in the center of the photo), Espen away on necessary R&R leave for a few days before trondheim matchmaking 2004 begins Wednesday after next.

sheesh, aserious sleep problem the first night. had to re-arrange the whole room before going to bed the second night. bad: feet at the heater and under the open window, head to the back of an empty bookshelf, with the door opening unseen behind and above the bed. absolutely horrible night with little sleep. rearranged, slept the whole night without moving. how to explain it? well, there was a bit of sugar consumed with the airplane meal as I had not prepared a carry-on meal myself. next time. just can't remember everything all the time. back in the same flat I was in several times in the past on the top floor of the Trondheim Art Academy. though they split the two large bedrooms each into two smaller rooms each. more mobile teachers to acomodate. the wireless network I pick up is unfortunately not from the Academy, but some other establishment, so I have to go three flights down to the lab to catch a connection. nice to be back in Trondheim, though, good vibe.

a trip to Hafnarfjördur to the city exhibition space yesterday, Hafnarborg to see the show that Valgerdur organized and put up with a couple of print maker colleagues. the Italian artist, Paolo Ciampini's work shows much skill in a variety of mark-making techniques, but with a few exceptions, the subject seems banal, with the work in the larger gallery upstairs far out-stripping the rest in the lower gallery. of Valgerdur's installation: the visceral quality of the hanging substrate suggests the various accretions of time on skin, while the sonic background sustains the viewer's motion in relation to the object fields. the slabs of black basalt ground the embodied self as it moves through the Cartesian space while the etched basalt pebbles exert a field of visual gravity -- enabling a kind of orbiting passage through the psychic space -- good feng shui! Deborah Cornell's work complements the overall show, although there is an overtly cerebral -- with definitive Amerikan elements -- where art is posed in opposition to competing (academic) "fields of inquiry" -- in this case, big, bad science.

today is of travel and movement, starting late in the day and ending up much later, in the early morning. but arriving in Trondheim with only minor inconveniences.

enroute already again, away from this land, moving ahead with relative purpose, dancing. gray day, low clouds, rain on the inward-slanting airport lounge windows, Scottish accents drift in tour's end quiet across the coffee shop / boarding hall. got here too early as well, but as the moving inertia took over from that of comfortable stasis in a certain place, rang up the taxi place. as usual, for the pre-boarding chill-out time. a pick-up truck drives the landing strip. English Football, the Euro corollary of the American League, entertains with silent subtitles.

last night, a concert in the church with the St. Anne's Girls Choir from Copenhagen, actually, across the street from Björn's flat, I think St. Anne's is, maybe. voices of angels. would seem so.