Milk was a bad choice. -- Casey Johnson

out to Wendy's farm for Christmas dinner. it's a 75 acre almond farm in the Central Valley.

regarding the DVD I pseudo-released a year ago. feeling for an "explanation" of why it is impossible to make a release of a work that is based in an art form that is performed live, juxtaposed with the wide issue of re-production and re-creation.

A performance of a composition that is indeterminate of its performance is necessarily unique. It cannot be repeated. When performed for a second time, the outcome is other than it was ... A recording of such a work has no more value than a postcard; it provides a knowledge of something that happened, whereas the action was a non-knowledge of something that has not yet happened. -- John Cage

few stars last night. high clouds move in right after the 1700 sunset. by 1900 there is a massive halo around the moon. there is a mouse in the back of the truck, with me. after several wakeful moments waiting to determine the situation, then, seeing the dang critter in profile against the window, I end up getting out of bed and ripping everything out of the back, piece-by-piece until I find a little brown desert mouse and shoo him out. finally fall asleep.

shifted locations, heading north towards Kelso, after a long detour to check out the fossil beds near at the south end of the Marble Mountains. after some poking around, and dredging up very fragmentary memory of place, engaging a coyote in a call-and-response dance around the steep and rugged terrain, I finally focus in on a rich location for the trilobites, or at least, the right place. finding a complete trilobite is something of luck and persistence. in the end I come up with a few fragments that are interesting, one with a head about 5 cm across, but very fragmentary (inarticulate, that is). all the while the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe rail line just to the south stays busy as long trainloads of stuff go by every 15 minutes or so. I make a recording at the Cadiz crossing, but find that my microphone is screwed up, between that and the heavy wind blowing. decided not to tour around too much, so, just headed into the Granite Mountains, stopping in a jumble of granitic intrusives something like Joshua Tree. the wind continues, but the altitude here is about 1000 meters higher. it's COLD. missing a warm hat. the camping spot has sizeable cholla cactus, juniper, and mesquite between the huge boulders. but it is north of the mountains, so the sun goes away at 1530. I cook half-a-dozen eggs, eat them for lunch-dinner, make some tea to warm up, but end up sitting in the cab of the truck to keep warm. hoping that the wind breaks enough to start a fire. if not, it'll be an early night to huddle in the back.

no break. gusting, chilling. bright moon, few stars shining over orderly and neat blobs of buff phenocryst-laden slow-cooled granite. almost stumbled into the cholla tree that I parked too close to. gotta file the location at a high-level memory for night-retrieval in the case of a bathroom run. it would be a sad time to run into one of those in the dark, or anytime. so, no quiet sky-gazing, or fire-sitting. the box of firewood that I have been toting since the Dolores River trip with Loki, Lexie, and Janet will go back in the truck in the morning. and it'll be up and away to Livermore as soon as I get up and start moving.

oh, dang, sleeping in the back of the pickup. plenty of room, but my back just can't handle it anymore. tossing and turning, trying to find the combination of padding underneath, from available materials, to compensate for the flatness. always this way on the first night of camping. now breakfast, it's windy, so, writing here instead of getting out and putzing around. trying to read and determine the location of the geological photos I got online compared to where I am now.

articulate or inarticulate trilobite (genus Olenellus or Dicellomus) hunting. first gotta find the local outcropping of the Chambless limestone, then trace down in the stratigraphic sequence to the bottom of that. or, figure out where the Zabriskie Quartzite is and trace upwards to several tens of feet of thinly interbedded quartz sandstone, shale, and limestone stringers. the Latham Shale is not ridge-forming or resistant to erosion, so it is found by default, identifying the two sequences that respectively over- or under-lie it to determine it's location. a geologist can identify the rock types, but that information is no longer resident in my head in large or intact quantities, so, it'll be haphazard. I have a few possible locations in mind, looking at the mountain directly above the wash, along with an old mine site which I want to check out.

inexperience and lack of sleep makes the surface seem rougher than it is. hiking is an acquired skill, and bush-whacking, the art of hiking off-trail, is no trivial pursuit. here in the desert it is made somewhat easier by lack of vegetation, and a clear view of objectives, but that fact does not make the scrambling across the surface and the constant calculation and re-calculation of optimal pathway any less processor-intensive. that and the fight between staying upright and the effects of gravity.

but. after a day of making two long hikes, it is possible to stand on an uneven talus slope and make a visual traverse without starting to fall over. the body beginning to adapt to the situation. a heavy climb up the stratigraphic column. no trilobites, but I did locate some nice samples of horizontal borrow structures -- most likely the Latham Shale, but otherwise, it was difficult to figure out where in the column I was. the nonconformal contacts between several formations are not smooth, flat-lying, or revealed by the topography so well and have absolutely different strike and dip (zip and stroke we called in CSM daze). so, while making an ascent and some traverses, I was jumping through many different samples. of course, my geologic knowledge of the area is extremely limited, with no petrologic lab background or even background reading except for the one field-trip document from Rick Miller at SDSU.

this is the winter solstice: no better place to spend it than the Mojave Desert. bumping slowly into a canyon that dead-ends into the Mojave Wilderness area, in a cirque of sorts, nothing like a cirque in the Rockies or the Alps, but still, a surrounding of rough garbled slopes leading upward into what are definitely mountains. Larrea tridentata (creosote bush), and a variety of small brittle brush plants, sand, rock, desert armor, cryptobiotic soil, and that's about it. animals are here, but seldom seen. lizards by day, a few insects around sunset, but otherwise it is silent except for the throbbing of blood in ears and the assorted noises of body, movement, and living. machine takes on a massive presence by its sound. stove heating water can be heard 100 meters away, hard drive chattering to itself, an loud insect in a box.

dream of the Mojave on 12-14 September 2001. stripping away the frequent aircraft would be the last hurdle. though the drive to get here illustrated that this area is under assault from every quarter. the air itself is hazy up to 2000 meters or more. this must be auto pollution from eLAy, immediately upwind. there is a huge dust storm that rakes from north to south, near the Cadiz dry lake, along a cutoff that I was going to take, but couldn't locate the road properly as I hadn't a copy of that quad map. had to go on west, skirting Joshua Tree National Park, and take Iron Mountain road to the Amboy road and north across the Bullion Mountains and the Amboy dry lake, the Chlorite works, and finally to Amboy, more deserted than it was in 1983 when I first visited. actually quite rundown at this point. east towards Cadiz and the Marble Mountains where I choose a bad gravel road, make a few detours, and finally enter a wide wash right on the perimeter of the Wilderness area. and presumably quite near the Latham Shale. have to triangulate in the morning, based on some field photos that I found online.

this is the first time I have returned to a place like this since Internet-time has come. it is quite interesting to research a location, using topographic, historic, cultural, and scientific names to find online info about many aspects. for example, a report detailing the eco-recovery of areas that were used by General Patton between 1942-44 for massive maneuver practices (over 1,000,000 men!) which destroyed huge swaths of the desert ecology in California, Nevada, and Arizona. thanks George C. Scott!

getting colder already. sunset early, around 1700, and just two hours later, the temperature has dropped 30F. got to go get bed set up in the back of the truck. maybe tomorrow I'll sleep on the ground. such a rare opportunity that it shouldn't be passed up.

what is it about the insularity of the US population that makes it so hard to see relations and connections between actions and results. take for example, the issue of Chinese economic advancement. almost every object that one can buy in the cheap distribution points like WalMart, CostCo, K-Mart, and pretty much all other consumer institutions is manufactured in China. the Amurikan consumer is able to consume at such a rate primarily by the subsidization of the Chinese worker by the Chinese government. not through some kind of controllable mechanism related to the government in power: the relative hegemonic position guarantees a certain stability of markets, but it does not control the procession of wealth and movement of global capital.

"Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind ... And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar. -- William Shakespeare

The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree... As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications. -- Charles Darwin

On the other hand, we denounce with righteous indignation and dislike men who are so beguiled and demoralized by the charms of pleasure of the moment, so blinded by desire, that they cannot foresee the pain and trouble that are bound to ensue; and equal blame belongs to those who fail in their duty through weakness of will, which is the same as saying through shrinking from toil and pain. These cases are perfectly simple and easy to distinguish. In a free hour, when our power of choice is untrammelled and when nothing prevents our being able to do what we like best, every pleasure is to be welcomed and every pain avoided. But in certain circumstances and owing to the claims of duty or the obligations of business it will frequently occur that pleasures have to be repudiated and annoyances accepted. The wise man therefore always holds in these matters to this principle of selection: he rejects pleasures to secure other greater pleasures, or else he endures pains to avoid worse pains. -- Lorem Ipsum
Ipse Dixit!

If thou art worn and hard beset
With sorrows that thou wouldst forget,
If thou wouldst read a lesson that will keep
Thy heart from fainting and thy soul from sleep,
Go to the woods and hills! No tears
Dim the sweet look that Nature wears.
-- Longfellow

something to check out: Sonic Supper is a friendly venue for curious music. We use the telephone to share sound with a large and broad audience. Yes it is that simple: call the number to listen to a few minutes of music. Leave a message to tell us what you think. New music is featured weekly.

surfing around, finding activity online to fill star-skyed nights. it is precisely these micro-scaled actions that have meaning far beyond the macro-scaled political manuvering.

more than I bargained for, accepting Marianne's invitation to head downtown for the music night. wheeeehooo. the tuba band in the men's clothing store was classic, but there were so many kinky juxtapositions between commerce and music. I kicked meself for NOT bringing my vidcam, sheesh, that was a lost opportunity -- the harp-opera duet, the masked karaoke duo, the swing band in front of the stuffed marlin in the realty office, the cowboys in the ice cream shop, the washboard king in the saloon, the punk band in the framing store, blues in the asian-imports place, and on!

what to be said. reading Science ('zine from the AAAS), and The Lucifer Principle, by Howard Bloom. thinking, but not writing.

the netart exhibition is opening tomorrow, well, today, as Tokyo is ahead of Arizona. here's the blurb posted as my curatorial commentary.

where is netart?

When invited to join this year's netart curatorial crew, I was somewhat sceptical that such an exhibition -- with the attendant baggage of dusty artifact carried by the traditional Art World -- would be a satisfying way to spend life-limited time when there are always other things to be done. That and the continuous nomadic movement that underlies my participation like a slippery mat, allowing only sporadic concentration of my remote presence hunting for and looking at network-based art and actually thinking about it.

However, collective curation with people who I knew were sensitive to the contingencies of remote collaboration and very aware of the limited understanding that the Art World has regarding net art makes the project interesting. So what then? Do I trawl the now-vast network for something brightly shining or sounding attractive? Eye candies? A hopeless task. The only thing to do was to sift the daily flow of content, during interstitial times when local presence was not demanded -- that flow of information personally customized by the networker to form a vital link with the remote macro-network -- while keeping the overall blast of data at a comprehensible level. Not always possible: getting ever more difficult with each spam-filled day. Especially given that the networker is not fond of reductionist activities which concentrate attention on particular nodes.

In order to proceed at all in a project using the words "net" and "art," it is useful to start by reaching back into the recent past of teaching for several proto-definitions which follow:

-- network -- a distributed and dynamic configuration of humans engaged in dialectic and sustained exchanges of energy.

-- digital art -- artifacts/performances enabled by or realized with a digital device.

-- (computer)net art -- art(ifacts?) on the net (what's the net?) Internet? Any technological network? Any human network?

-- web art -- specific art(ifact?) located on the WWW (and possibly interacting with that particular network dataspace).

-- networking art -- art activities that take advantage of, or use the concepts of, (human / technological) networks -- use of those spaces for active expression (creation of spaces for others to create in) -- networks which are an extension of socialized being.

Meditating on these definitions suggests certain defined spaces where creative activities might take place or be placed. It also suggests rather different forms of creative activity, or that even the concept of classifying art by traditional material parameters might not aid in the understanding of creative manifestations existing in networks.

The definitions perhaps eliminate much of what is considered as "art on the net" -- those artifacts which are nothing more than extensions of very traditional art forms: sound, static image, moving image, and text. But what then is left beyond these apparently all-encompassing formal typologies?

One possible space beyond artifact is the set of creative practices which, in their immediate operation, may be as ephemeral as presence and being in the world.

Ping Melody, the winner of this year's competition, is as ephemeral as life. Humans are constantly configuring and re-configuring the architecture of the technologically-networked space of the internet -- a space that is embedded in the greater dynamic social system of human be-ing in the world. This constant flux of connection and dis-connection governs the actual pathways in which energy moves between individual humans when crossing this massive network. These pathways may be traced in their momentary configuration via a technique named after the sound that a war-time sonar system makes when it senses reflected sound energy from an enemy vessel, a "ping." "To ping" in the telecommunications sense is to send a small digital signal out into the socially constructed human/technological network. The ping is aimed at a particular distant point in the network, and if that remote point is active, the signal is "reflected" to its origin. Fundamentally, the pathway that the signal follows is a direct expression of the momentary (and very much human) connectivity of the network. Ideal networks are dynamic systems where momentary state-of-being information is distributed throughout the network so that any single point in the network contains information about the whole network. Thus, a traced pathway through the network space is an elegant expression of the momentary state of the entire social network. Incorporating this state information into a live sonic performance brings the richness of that dynamic state into juxtaposition with the creative potential of the single human node in the network, the artist. This is a network collaboration in its most fundamental form.

One of the runners-up works, Gridcosm, explores this participatory space more explicitly, where there are several critical elements juxtaposed: the concept and the programmers of the collaborative space, the people participating and interacting in that defined space, and the resulting artifact that spins out of the space.

It is precisely this interaction, a deep participatory action -- between the individual node and the collective human network -- that makes both these works the epitome of net art by the definitions proposed above.

But where is the actual art? Is it the concept? Is it in the ephemeral traces, pathways through the network? Is it the artifactual evidence of Gridcosm? Is it the programming code of the "pinging" software? Is it in the live sonic performance? Is it the idiosyncratic imagery of Gridcosm?

I leave those questions to be pondered be visitors to the netart exhibition -- with the observation that networks are the site of creative activity, networks are a means of creative production, and that net art is about the dynamics of human connection.

John Hopkins, Ukiah, California, 22.November.2004