the sheer indeterminancy of ideas about things and actions and events:

Bohr was the first to recognize that the new quantum theory presented us with a view of experience in which different interactional arrangements resulted in complementary perspectives that need not be logically consistent, compatible, or commensurable, and in many critical cases could not be so. The reductionist trick was predicated on the assumption that the different 'pieces' or views from different perspectives could always somehow be neatly fit together. But we now know that material processes cannot be comprehended, cannot be exhaustively described within any one single self-consistent formal discourse. They always overflow the limited possibilities of our semiotic models of them. It is only by building more and more semiotic-discursive models, each internally self-consistent, but not limited by requirements of mutual consistency with each other, that we can, by adding together such 'complementary' views, attain to the most complete possible account of material phenomena, including semiosis itself. Thus we still come back to a version of 'assemblage' but hopefully a more sophisticated one, one that takes into account our own role and perspective as observers, as well as the material means by which we observe, compare, and assemble -- the material mediation of our semiotic practices. -- J. L. Lemke, in Material Sign Processes And Emergent Ecosocial Organization

illustration of a Julia Set by Scott Hotton. Dynamical Systems Theory (a branch of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex systems by employing differential and difference equations) is another limited framework for modeling complex systems. more accurate than linear and non-linear models, but none-the-less reductionist. (well, talk about restating the obvious when it comes to anything mathematical, as the concept itself is a reduced language for expressing natural phenomena -- I don't subscribe to the early Greek concept where mathemetics does not represent but is a universal and perfect thing itself). while human-generated system solutions (say, engineering problems such as placing satellites into orbit) are solved through classic computational modeling with linear systems, natural systems like the brain need something more.

chaotic systems are especially sensitive to initial conditions. initial conditions are necessary for any reductive system analysis because in the abstraction process of reduction, the system is extracted and disconnected from the continuum of life. good for mathematical (computational) modeling. but when defining a real-world problem, how feasible is it to define initial conditions at all? Is there a way to not define initial conditions?

A chaotic system is defined as one that shows sensitivity to initial conditions. That is, any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter how small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict the future behavior. In other words, the system is chaotic. Its behavior can be predicted only if the initial conditions are known to an infinite degree of accuracy, which is impossible. -- Gollub and Solomon

John Douglas and I met virtually back in 1995 or so, as a result of the PORT MIT exhibition. his creative feeds to my inbox are a hard-hitting deLight to bring solid soul back into life when psychic drift and political psyop-subduction are rife.

down to the City, delivering the kids to Jason, stay the night, and return to the mountains late today. Camelback Avenue is lined with 1950's - 60's architectural jewels, many which have been razed in the last few years during a gentrification (replaced with horrible mega-stores and strip malls). this car dealership sign is about 30 feet from top to bottom of the flying wedge. it's a beauty!

you are in a dark space. not just dark, but black, so that neuronal firing is perceived in the mind's eye only. subterranean. wandering in a drift 200 meters below the surface of the earth. look around, check the area for obstacles to movement and potential dangers. position the Self in relation to the Other who has accompanied you. turn off the Light. extinguish the candle. wait until the last vestiges of red-shifted radiation are gone. wait until the eyes finish their craving for form and visibility. perhaps the occasional cosmic ray tracing is seen, or at least sensed. bring the arm up, palm aimed inward towards the face. feel the flux. palm outwards, scan the immediate region thermally. sense your partner. feel their thermal presence impinging on your palm. it's like warming your hands at a fire. a life-fire. reach towards each other until the explosion of contact occurs, separate, come together with only a finger, or palm. as though applying paint to a flat panel with the palm, paint the air, back and forth, receive the energy of the other, transmit your own energies.

over the Hopi reservation. coming into Phoenix. back in the southwest. a day of subway-subway-subway-bus-plane-van-car. with a bit of walking in between.

on balanced spin, equinox framed, about to board a flight. maybe the first, maybe the last, I can't remember. who is who. asian lady pressing cucumber slices on her eyes. halves the slices and rubs the edges around her temples, forehead, and face. a traveler. with some shamanistic knowledge about cucumbers. they keep away all sin and corruption. now a small group of children. with two women. the children are in varying stages of difference. bodies shaking and shivering, or crooked bent, but through that mere material be-ing, there are brightness shinings. words sound from shaking throats. life takes all form. any form, any way. two hours to the flight. and eleven hours on the plane. hours to arrive and depart.

London always is a memory. and what a racket at Heathrow. fire alarm goes off as I am perambulating around Terminal 4, almost making me miss my flight. automated grill gates roll down in front of all the duty-free shops. no shopping in an emergency! a crowd of anxious people, many of them obvious foreigners, wondering what the hell was going on. now on the plane, over Fargo, thought about Ken when just puttering over Winnipeg. encased in ice. might as well be north of Hudsons Bay.

dinner with Joanna, Jo, and Pete. Joanna makes/brings a sumptuous dessert of fresh fruit, ice cream, raspberry sauce, and meringue dollops for six-to-twelve that the four of us finish off.

daylong conversations range from Northern Soul to Arts Council politics to management theory to Chelsea's UEFA cup aspirations to cooking dahl and curried eggs to locative media and media art.

finally arrive after a routine flight and no luck locating my sunglasses at Heathrow. so, this is the biggest loss I've had on the road in years -- actually can't recall losing something that critical and expensive (impossible) to replace. the frame-style are no longer available to purchase, though perhaps I might be lucky to find an old pair somewhere as I did with my regular glasses. got those for $5 at a flea market in Maine in 1991. nice gold wire-rims. glasses are another one of those items that I have great difficulty in selecting. and actually, I haven't had a different style since 1980 or so. the temples on my present frames are from glasses that I would wear after surfing, and the salt water in my hair corroded them a bit. the idea of having to get a new pair is daunting. and after getting a pair of reading glasses a couple years ago in Boulder (using the really small round frames that I bought in Paris in 1982), I found that it is brutally expensive to get glass lenses anymore. I don't like the plastic ones as they are so Light they fly off the face easily, and they just don't wear well over time (scratching). but I think this is a paradigm similar to the ink-jet printer business -- where lenses are made to 'wear out' quickly, and you have to replace them on a regular basis. oh well, not facing it yet, but as soon as getting back to Arizona it becomes necesary to deal. it would be impossible to spend any time outdoors this summer there (and in Colorado) without having sunglasses. the UV radiation is exceptionally strong and I get fried eyes even with the old and very dark sunglasses. hmmmm.

Pete is into a finely eclectic range of music (fantastic vinly collection!) -- resonating my own criteria defined simply by the maxim "whatever sounds good." he gives me a great intro to the whole Northern Soul situation from the 60's and 70's with a collection of 25-plus cd's that, after I do a clean install of OSX on his G4 tower, I proceed to rip the collection for him.

give it another go. it's the first day of Easter holiday here in Germany, the airport is packed, unlike yesterday. supposed to call Pete before flying, but there are no phones inside the security area, and there's no way to go back through with the huge lines. and the T-mobile hotspot won't accept my one-time enrollment.

in relation with. impending movement. gotta leave books behind. finished the incredibly depressing but enLightening book on the Hopi. I had not been aware of the sad history of the Hopi as a people. a view that encompassed the entire world and all of history. speaking of floods, that we are in the third world, waiting for the conditions to move to the fourth. a major transition that is predicated on the arrival of the true White Brother. the problem of Navajo encroachment on the ancestral land (this augmented by numerous broken treaties and a lack of enforcement by the bureau of Indian Affairs). will keep all this in mind when in the region shortly. and will pass some of the stories along to Loki during the summer.

up at 0525. breakfast, walk-through of the flat to make sure everything is in good order, walked to the bus to the train to the strassenbahn, to the airport. first item of business is to locate the lost & found to see about my sunglasses. no luck. checked in, waited for the flight. waited, waited, and waited. something wrong with one engine. no more flying of British Air. gave them this chance, and the experience has been dismal. I had even planned to keep one of the keys to Volker's place just in case, but didn't at the last moment. otherwise it would be easy to just pop back to the flat for the night. at least the internet connection would have been free. here at the hotel it's €4.50 for 30 minutes. ridiculous. will go online though, tomorrow morning or this evening to let folks know in London what happened. and will hit BA with a complaint and request for a refund according to the new EU statute covering delays and so on.

so, sitting in an airport Holiday Inn waiting for another flight tomorrow, rather than getting bussed around Germany to another airport to squeeze out today, I just gave up. fortunately no real schedule except to get to Pete's and check out some experimental video work this evening. but the whole process and how the ground crew handled things was pretty poor service. quite a few Americans on this flight who were making connections through Heathrow, so their plans are in more disarray than mine, but either way. funny, though, how conversations start up, when the suspension of movement breaks down, finding out stories, how complex lives are, how rich and adventurous it is to travel. many dialogues today with many people.

and, re-reading some travelog entries from Dinosaur, talking about auras. where energy of a 'thing' radiates outwards, cannot be restricted to 'the thing itself' because the thing itself is not a thing and it is NOT of itself. the edge is only change, it is not difference in materiality, just present noesis. or so.

very hard to recap the dullness that ensues when enroute. as I denote that always in notebook and travelog. good night.

trawling, ANT (actor-network theory), social network theory, many many theories, some incomplete descriptions. mostly there is a neglect of the energy-transfer. most stay in the realm of abstracted social relation with only oblique reference to the actual embodied dynamic. why facing someone is different than standing at right angles. why eye contact is 'important.' and reading a book of Justyna's about the architectural uses of glass (the airport here a good example of that usage. letting visible Light in is the normal paradigm. resisting natural flows, reducing the total possible bandwidth. from the asymptotic infinitude of blasting flows of the universe to something more manageable. the numerous graphs showing (transmissive) attenuation vs frequency only focus on the visible. a holistic approach would consider the full range of attenuation (what is not allowed to pass). glass is great for a narrow range of Light and some EM radiation off the incredibly narrow range of visible Light, but that's about it. it stops everything else.

wind (as a formal naming of the flux/movement of air) is a form of energy. sit in a clear glass box in a tropical paradise. and you will die shortly. a glass box is the predicate for scientific (reductionist) experimentation. with a glass (optical) window observing.

again, back to the history of glass. a fragment of an idea that I have often explored with class groups. the history of glass.

They tore down the bus station
there's chain link there
no buses stop at all
and I'm walking through Chiyoda-ku
in a typhoon
300
the fine rain horizontal
umbrella everted in the storm's Pacific breath
tonight red lanterns are battered,

laughing,
in the mechanism. -- William Gibson

parallel to everything else, a close read of "Book of the Hopi" by Frank Waters, along with Truth of a Hopi prepares me for the return to Arizona. springtime and rioting wild flowers. need to get to some petroglyphs to read some located media. with a sonic environment generated from nasa tv, Alan Watts, and raudio @ park.nl, along with helicopters flying over.

the iconic presence of Einstein is brought into mythological format with the advent of the 100th anniversary of the "miraculous year" of 1905 -- the International Einstein Year along with the somewhat desparate hyping of the World Year of Physics tries to connect to a public which largely ignores science in the blinding speed of shopping.

tripping along with setting up the rss feeding frenzy. feeding. suggests. consuming. once again. media production, and its consumption.

spring is here. birds in the garden are in a frenzy of be-ing.

Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements instead of systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic. -- Michel Foucault

make the trip to Mechernich -- via the regional mass transit system which has gained the attention of local taggers, actually to quite a nice effect -- to visit with Peter & Kersten and the kids. we spend part of the afternoon at the Rhenish Open-Air Museum , arriving too late for the special exhibition on German immigrants (Auswanderungs) to America entitled Brave New World: Rhinelanders Conquer America. pity, it sounded interesting. Germans began immigrating to the US early in the 17th Century, with more than 45,000 in "Penn's Sylvania" alone by 1745. Driven by religious, economic, and environmental factors, many made their way from the old Palatinate region (the present Rheinland Pfalz or Rheinland Palatinate and part of Baden) to England where Queen Anne passed them on to America if they would swear allegiance to the British Crown:

I, ---, do solemnly & sincerely promise & declare that I will be true & faithful to King George the Second & do sincerely & truly Profess, Testifie, & Declare that I do from my heart abhor, detest, & renounce as impious & heretical that wicked Doctrine & Position that Princes Excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any Authority of the See of Rome may be deposed or murthered by their Subjects or any other whatsoever. And I do declare that no Foreign Prince Person Prelate State or Potentate hath or ought to have any Power Jurisdiction Superiority Preeminency or Authority Ecclesiastical or Spiritual within the Realm of Great Britain or Dominions thereunto belonging.



afterwards Jonas makes a short guitar concert for us. then a fine dinner that Kersten puts together.

spending much time on research of network theory and history, but not finding much online, -- most journals are still not available online to the public. I could access some sites when I was in the Uni-Bremen network, where I could download any paper from the ACM site (which includes hundreds or thousands of papers), but not when I am logged on normally from here,

also contemplating the blogging thing again. seeing how it has evolved from the simple posting of html content (here are pictures of my family) to a massive intertwined "blogosphere" with its own social hierarchy-of-consumption. the interlinking and comment possibility seems productive, but there is an element of incestuousness that makes it often the victim of circular illogic.

Putting the pieces of the puzzle together, we find that real networks are governed by two laws: growth and preferential attachment. Each network starts from a small nucleus and expands with the addition of new nodes. Then these new nodes, when deciding where to link, prefer the nodes that have more links. These laws represent a significant departure from earlier models, which assumed a fixed number of nodes that are randomly connected to each other. But are they sufficient to explain the hubs and power laws encountered in real networks? -- Albert-Laszlo Barabasi

the speed of religious innovation. words to wake up with from a sleep of a thousand dreams and groping around for the pathway. these two thoughts come to me: the despair I face is of my own making; and fearlessness is paramount. it is always this internal relation to the world, where change is framed as something accomplished by introspection, not in relation with the surrounding presence of spirit. although there should be no distinction between the internal spirit and the external spirit. they are One. but connection to that dynamic flow remains elusive and transitory in the confusing rush of noise that the social brings. (how this sounds an anti-social position, but this is not the case, merely to recognize the effect of social structures (as they enhance material survivability) on the individual.)

interstitial awareness, and Brakhage's rise to the surface of my consiousness through meeting certain Others. the sheer animated viscerality of his expressions that so activated my fascination. the further individual projections can be stripped of the restrictions of abstracted and impressed social channeling, the closer the impulse comes to pure energy.

The light of power is waning. The eyes of individual subjectivity cannot adapt to mere holes in a mask, which are the eyes of those fog-bound in shared illusion. The individual's point of view must prevail over false collective participation. In total self-possession, reach society with the tentacles of subjectivity and remake everything, starting with yourself. The reversal of perspective is what is positive in negativity, the fruit which will burst out of the old world's bud. -- Raoul Vaneigem

good nights sleep. waking up in the grey cold gloom. Justyna and Volker are away in Poland, and will probably not get back before I leave for London. but so nice to have use of the flat while they are away. so, here in the remote 'burbs of Köln for a few days.

Marcus gives me a paper about Bernard Noël.

What is it to be face to face?

From the depths of the window comes
the self that is not other

Through the eyes he casts
a cry of smoke

Then the knowing is
the torn off fingernail

Head and knife are cold
in the thought

and this excerpt from the powerful essay "The Delicate Oppression"

Therefore, behind the appreance of a free and universal culture, is the attempt to seize entirely the cultural field and the mental space of cultural subjects, transforming them into simple consumers. The mechanism of this transformation is so simple in principle and practiced so regularly, that it becomes imperceptible as soon as it goes into action. It can be summerized in the following way: every cultural action always involves a certain effort of comprehension, learning and of listening, its movement leads to an exchange of pleasure. Cultural consumption, on the contrary, only requires a bit of passivity. A show serves as mental activity, an activity which is only agitation and ends by discouraging reflection, to the advantage of the voracious appetite of ones own nonsense. It is sufficient to sit in front of a television and watch, in a totally natural way, and what you are watching will drag you into its movement and become your thought.

this would apply to any form of re-produced, re-presented cultural manifestation, and in-authentic constellations of be-ing. so, again, a reaffirmation of the power of authentic be-ing in the world. not a retreat or return to some 'primitive' state of living, no Luddite protestation by refusal or opposition, but simply an awareness of the extreme psychic danger inherent in the collectivization of human expression.

noting the yet significant differences between Czech Republic and Germany. like the cost of rail travel. it will cost me more to get from Dortmund to Rösrath today than to fly from Prague. and if I was doing the same trip in in the East, it would cost about a tenth of what it costs here in the West. no wonder people are making counter-migrations to the East. though there seemed to be fewer Amurikans evident in Prague, there were plenty from other places. not much to say. enroute on an ICE train right now. deciding the connections to make. surely a 'nicer' system here, but not to a degree to justify the cost. the long-distance rail runs must be getting killed by the short-hop discount airlines. what does competition do to a previously nationalized system? it forces privitization. Frieder was mentioning that there are now private regional rail lines (actually they share the same rails), that was a surprise. it would be a pity if they move in the direction of the British Rail system which is a real mess. ach. whatever. doddering words. full of nothing. noticing that International equity market funds are pegging a good upward stride this last month.

take a long walk with Marcus around the city. talking film, he lent me a tape of some of his experimental film work, excellent. Brakhage has been a frequent topic of conversation in the whole week here. snowing, windy, bitter cold. then later meet with Milos and Dana for chai. snowy walk across the Charles Bridge. still tourists wandering about. despite any dislike for tourism, there is the platitude that the city is beautiful. from my penthouse in the Lazansky Palais, I make some nice ambient shots of the rooftops and the snow. that along with abstract tele shots of two people doing tai chi in a blizzard on the island park in the river. it's a good address.

about to have a meeting with Lloyd Dunn, a networker from the US who a few years back fled the regime and settled in Prague. we've never met f2f before, but have had contact through the MailArt network since sometime in the late 1980's. he one of the Tape Beatles and the editor of the classic 'zine PhotoStatic. very interesting to be able to compare notes on our similar creative backgrounds, pathways, and situations.

but first head to the perpetually crowded Tesco, chaotic but almost silent, long check-out lines. a rough-looking fellow in one line hands me an empty shopping basket. I'm surprised at this, though it is a necessary process for anyone coming into the store -- more shoppers than baskets. and a stop in at Galerie Václava Špály on a powerful exhibition put on by the Právo na krajinu (Right to Landscape) movement in cooperation with the Ochrana Fauny Ceské Republiky (Czech Wildlife Protection Association). one floor was devoted to individual works in shopping carts, some of them containing sharp and sometimes harsh critiques of consumerism. I wasn't supposed to make any photos, but got one. on the lower floor, there was a powerful installation by Miroslav Páral of a series of full-size sinks made out of enlarged dental castings of a lower jaw done in what appeared to be lead. inscribed in the lead were texts about consuming. the lower walls covered with roughly black-painted canvas. unfortunately a gallery guard followed me down, so I couldn't make a photo of that. maybe they thought I was going to steal a sink.

Lloyd comes by FAMU at 1400 and we head out for a walking tour of the old town. plenty of tourists. recalling the distressing afternoon with Sanna here, and the warm evenings. those while-back years ago. dark and rainy. warm in the hotel room. interior heating is an extravagance. anyway, tea and a dinner with Lloyd.

moving down the Berounka River, back towards Prague, only a bit faster than the floating ice. melancholic in the brown coal inversion haze, winter settled deeply into the Silurian limestones, all the way into their own holy karst hearts, a single winter. only just a blood-pulse of all the winters of the Bohemian Massif. back to when it was a shallow tropical sea.

deciding last night not to tell the students when to arrive for morning start-up for the workshop, so they are up until 0300 or so, keeping me in uneasy slumber, Marcus as well, who ended up staying over in the dorms too. so they are nowhere in sight in the morning. after a hearty oatmeal breakfast which Marcus says is the highLight of his impromptu visit to Beroun so far, we wander out into the landscape to shoot some. ending up on a intrusive gabbro sill, standing high above the railroad station. later, all but two of the students leave for Prague, and later in the afternoon, Milos comes back from Prague, mostly for a meeting with students of the Technical University who are working on some media projects. it is disappointing that this workshop imploded. but I think it is due to the extreme fragmentation and lack of focused attention in the first two days.

later in the afternoon Dr. Cílek, the Director of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology pays us a visit and delivers a fascinating talk that wove the human historical, mystical, and mythological elements of the Bohemian Karst region around Beroun with the underlying geology and speleology. we were supposed to go on a day-trip with him tomorrow, but Milos had to cancel it because of a lack of interest of the students. a real shame. it was a stretching excitement to meet someone from a geological pursuit who also shared a profound interest in phenomenal life and be-ing with a clear trans-disciplinary role to re-form traditional thinking models. I would hope for another opportunity to make a tour with him. googling silurian devonian beroun karst trilobite tells much! especially the French-Czech paleontologist Joachim Barrande who generated a yet-unparalleled series of comparative studies under the title "The Silurian System of the Center of Bohemia."

All told, the complete "Systême silurien du centre de la Bohême," published between the years 1852-1911, consists of eight volumes in 29 tomes in quarto, 8224 pages of text and 1606 lithographic plates. It contains descriptions and figures of 4565 species, with a few exceptions all coming from the Lower Paleozoic marine beds of Bohemia.

dinner later with Milos, Boyana, and Victor at the pizzeria, after visiting a photo exhibition installed in the Lower (Prague) Gate tower of the Beroun city fortifications. a view over what once was a drawbridge. it is too cold for walking around.

second day of the workshop. hard to read the situation. everyone is in an unfamiliar environment. the ambience in the place is calm. but hard to decode. we are strangers. landing from one planet to another. it is unusual for me to be sharing the direction of the workshop, or at least trying to. there is an internal process of deference, but that clearly is not collaboration, I need to retune myself. it is hard for me to find a balance because of this. on my part. waiting for the students to make the 0900 morning start request to appear after losing most of the first day to stragglers who arrived late into the evening. there is a lack of awareness of the meta-structural social dynamics that would facilitate a greater intensity. but this is the normal condition. intuitive actualization is possible, but going through the gymnastics of cognitive understanding first seems the only way to bring back the operational authenticity of that intuition.

I think what we need is critical consciousness. Critical consciousness towards the entire construct of technology. Technology is not neutral, it's not God-given, it doesn't come from the burning bush, it doesn't emerge from the world of antimatter. It's something that human society makes. So all of human society is inscribed in the machine in this sense - and then the machine becomes a force to reinscribe something on society. And you can have the negative aspect of this, and you can be truly creative - why not. I'm absolutely not denying anyone's creativity. All I'm asking for, for myself, is critical consciousness about technology. -- Hakim Bey

Milos and I , along with all of two students, a Czech and a German, catch the 1000 train to Beroun, up the Berounka River about 50 minutes. already this slacking show of the other 9 confirmed participants bodes ill. in the presentation yesterday, there are some glimmers of interest, but also, afterwards, a student in the typical Goth black leather trench coat walks up and aggressively demands what I will provide for him (later determined to be an Estonian), I turn him away when I try to briefly review the nature of an evolving distributed system, that it works only when everybody puts their attention in. he snorts and stalks off. thank god for that.

a few of the rest trickle in over the next 8 hours, but I do not want to start until I have the undivided attention of a more-or-less stable constellation of people. nothing more disturbing for concentrated focus than having to repeat the same thing over and over.