dig the soft romantic glimmer focus, Josephine, did you do that on purpose? just the effect for a New York state of mind at the Empire Diner again, twice in the same week. FINALLY meeting the sparking online collaborator, maker of funksoup, sonnet subterfuge, viroid flophouse, and when you dare -- and to top it off, she is charming, sharp, and doing even more cool things.

former student of mine, Eija Mäkivuoti, announces an exhibition of her photographic work titled As Everyone Else at Gallery K in Helsinki. the work is about the everyday life of disabled children at the Tornionseutu school. it also includes Polaroid photographs by the children themselves. there is a selection of these images and other photographic work by Eija at her web space.

enroute from Grand Central to Bedford Hills. lunch with Anthony at the Empire Diner, we walk down there from meeting at Penn Station in the morning. an eatery where I used to go on occasion when working in Chelsea. long time passed. groups of tourists stop on the corner and take photos of the diner. it's a land mark. marking the land which can't actually be seen -- it's all paved over and dug up. so, the city as one big land mark, and nothing else. no land left to mark. we mark time with dialogue. conversations which are continuous registrations, trajectories from the past. launching into an immediate and present future. stopping at waypoints to register the locus, then rocketing onward. upward. bouncing through some Beckett. ah, Beckett -- when the priviledge of having a conversation about Beckett? rare. to explore the textures of a literate vision of such elemental power, circumscribing the moment, being, and the perfect intertwining of both to create life. hmmmm, been in the country too long. though the sight of stars is nothing to feel inferior about. they leave different traces in the self than the traces of known and historied voiceful lives.

while the infrastructure labors along. trains slow and imprecise. although arriving in the same places from day to day, the time of arriving changes the place to another, given the slowness. barely able to stay on the track.

through Harlem with hardly a look into the structures of the past years, the rennaisance, onward, northward. up the Hudson, on the Hudson River Line. I'm inna New York state of mind-full-ness. greasy face from lunch of fried veggie lintelburger.

back to thinking about Kevin. what to say on Wednesday, the memorial. thinking how that maxim of avoiding any pre-tension. that is to be remarked. as well, the power of being to invoke collective presence.

pressed into spontaneous service. the task? a Treasure Hunt for the pirate-themed birthday party. hmmmm, had to think about that one. four teams of four kids each, two of older kids, two of younger. forgot to collect the cue cards with instructions and clues.

on the road. it's been nine months exactly since arriving in Prescott last. and aside from the short tour with Christian, been stuck there the whole time. I have to go back a couple decades, maybe more since the last time I was in locare habilus for such duration without boarding a plane. imbibing of this life in the middle class. planes instead of busses or trains. flying cattle. this time of rehabilitation has worn me down at the same time as charging me up. time to look at projects done over the last decade, documentation, rooting trough the mail-art archive. that busyness of postal creativity and networking. thinking it woulda (coulda, shoulda) been nice to have made good documentation of the many events and projects that went down in that process. too late. gone. digital archive will not survive the EMP of nuclear war, but that seems so foreign a concept, that the world will witness an instant catastrophe. more like a gradual poisoning of the environment.

was reflecting on the dis-connectedness of this blog (ugh!) from the blogosphere. how the blogosphere is extremely self-referent and only occasionally populated by stronge individual voices.

ahhh, making a cross-connection between nodes in my personal network. very satisfying, when there are inspiring results. or simply good energy flowing. what more could a networker ask for? but to initiate pathways where the chances of flow are much higher than random. yes-sir-ee.

so on. scanning all sorts of crap into the archive so I can continue to liquidate hardcopy. thinking about shopping. thinking about film-based photography, thinking about digital photography, thinking about video, thinking about cars, thinking about moving. thinking about stopping, thinking about flying, thinking about sitting. thoughts over done on being stationary. thoughts about work. what is possible, what is not. maybe all is still possible. doesn't look like that, except when one runs into one of those supremely un-qualified jerks making money for nothing (and the chicks fer free). so, everything is still possible.

Sarah decides to apply to KHIB, hope that goes well. I send out information to the network to aid in the process. networking.

as a test-review for furtherfield neoscenes reviews a random online project by Sandra Crisp

Hmmmm. Recalling a review I did some years back for kunstnet in Oslo, it seemed interesting to pretend for a moment I was a novice user who had just received a URL of interest from a good friend who's critical opinion I trusted.

Now a novice user perhaps wouldn't be using FireFox on a Mac, that's clear. More likely Safari. When I attempt to go to the project from the introduction page, as the Java applet loads, waiting, waiting, until finally I get an error window with the following text:

WORKING VARIABLES NEEDED FUNCTIONS ***************************************************
// SET UP ALL THE VARIABLES FOR THE IMAGE BLISTERING void setup() { // CREATE THE TIMERS AND IMAGE COLLAGERS size(WIDTH,HEIGHT); t = new Texter(width,height); timer = new Timer(500); collager = new Collager(); collageCount = new Counter(3); // <- CHANGE IMAGES PER TIMER COUNT //load a sound and loop it soundA = loadSound("SURSHLOOP.wav"); //this loads the sound soundA.loop(); ...snip... timer.setTarget(floor(random(500,1500))); // <- CHANGE IMAGE DROP TIME } // TELL THE COLLAGER TO PUT A RANDOM PICTURE ON THE SCREEN collager.paint(); // MAKE IT ALL NICE AND SMOOTH smooth(); } loadPixels(); performDblBuff(dblBuff, pixels); updatePixels(); t.paint(); //updatePixels(); } / ******************************************************

Somehow I want to add the e.e.cummings text:

this is the way the world ends,
this is the way the world ends,
this is the way the world ends,
not with a bang, but with a wimper.

I try Safari, Firefox, Explorer and Opera on the Mac. Slightly different error returns, but none work. The piece is authored in Processing -- "an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and sound" -- so I go to explore their site to see what the platform issue is about. Most of the example projects run on Firefox/OSX, but some do not. There is definitely a platform-dependent issue. Rooting around the Processing site I find where the authors, Ben Fry and Casey Reas comment: "Windows is by far the superior platform for running Java applications. It's not because we like Windows the best but that's just how it is. Java on Mac OS X is steadily improving (especially when compared to Apple's previous efforts), but it's still far slower than Windows and even the older Java that ran on Mac OS Classic. We think OS X will be a great bet for the future, and Apple is putting all their feeble weight behind it, hopefully it will evolve somewhere." The question now is, do I go pester my sister to borrow her PC laptop for a while?

Emailing the Canadian artist, Sandra Crisp, I find that she's unaware of the platform problem, so she updates the project page with this kernel of information. I am disappointed not to have yet seen the visual work. Sandra offers to send a CD, but this won't address the fact that Processing is optimized for Windows.

Somewhere a splinter of irony creeps into my mind? Much is made of the fact that the Processing "development environment is released as open source under the GPL." Is it such that even under Open Source, Java apps are still deeply bound to a Microsoft OS?

Okay, so I have to go get my sister's machine.

Back on surfing territory, thanks to Bill. Visual art is visual art is visual art. What makes a visual work attractive or engaging or satisfying or inspiring? First let's make the assumption that there are two kinds of two-dimensional visual works. Ones that move and ones that don't. The kind that move seem to attract more attention these days than ones that don't. The GenerativeCollager moves. It reminds me of Keyworx output, except that I don't have much control on the content. I have some control of the style of change, but not the content. I see an image masked in the shape of a Valentine heart with a person, an Asian person. Maybe a farmer in Thailand or Mayanmar. Then it's gone, buried by other images masked in shapes of flowers and hearts. Strings of text/code shimmer across parts of the images. The GenerativeCollager "will run infinitely forming a time-based journey revealing endless permutations." My limit in full-frontal engagement with the infinite is much shorter than that. Montage is not a random process of checking all possibilities of image combinations in a limited database. So this isn't about montage. Is it about a purely visual experience? Well, it could be, although the range of color palette seems a random after-thought. And form arbitrary. Apparently it is also a narrative "of fragility and unpredictability of climate." Random generation is a formidable mathematical algorithm, but in application, compared to the inherent instability and chaotic nature of natural systems, it is a pale surrogate. John von Neumann warned: ""Anyone who uses software to produce random numbers is in a state of sin."

Whether a recognizable image is masked as a heart or a flower, the second time around, it is the image, not the mask or the location in the frame which matters in the apprehension of 'content.' Nor does a momentary juxtaposition or layering, especially a random one, generate a narrative from the chosen database of raw images. Maybe not even a well-chosen database.

This project left me wanting a more compelling visual experience. It did not leave me with a sense of the visual intention -- that to explore the complex theme of climate (change). Coming from a background in experimental film, having the project framed with the usual browser window and in the backgound the usual collage of desktop artifacts is unsatisfactory -- a work like this needs to be deployed in a dedicated space via projector, with perhaps a body-activated user interface. But then, won't further technocratic consumption accelerate climate change?

Nice start, needs development.

into the second decade of this travelog. following through the long and winding road of countless kilometers of body movement and mind floating above the surface, suspended in the dark matter between two infinite half-spaces. leaving reduced fragments of primary technology -- words -- behind, scattered in frozen wake-full-ness. no thought that it would persist so long, accreting volume and visuals and sonic samples. until it becomes a primary manifestation of present being. no more no less.

it runs into several days of cloudy weather. so the snow persists a bit. nice to see.

back to the iDC list -- consistently marvel how the topics on the list draw me out, especially when I am so overwhelmed with the local in-ma-face reality. the following in response to Josh Levy's comment (which one in a series of comments under the subject -- undermining open source: iTunesU):

> i think Apple has been let off the hook for a long time especially by cultural
> activists. Bill Gates and Microsoft have been an easy bugbear, but Apple are
> monopolists too and have been since they first started making an OS that works
> only with their own hardware.

sotto voce: every social institution seeks to guide (a polite term) the relational expressions and impressions of participating nodes in discrete reductive pathways which may or may not suit each individual node: adopt or become a non-participating node in that social structure. acquiesce to that worldview and participate. resist (or simply turn ones back on that whole system) and create new pathways: be prepared for those who are heavily invested in the dominating social institutions to 'not get it.' only those who leave channels open aside from the dominant pathways will be able to receive alternate expressions and impressions. every social structure of any scale greater than two nodes will be reductive because of the need to correlate three or more distinct view-points (points-of-view) -- that requires a system of observational/experiential interpolation (protocols) to identify fundamental like-nesses between the points-of-view. this correlation process -- the development of a mediative 'technology' to carry (shared) impressions and expressions between nodes -- is a fundamental (and necessary)process of social development. and leads to exemplary structures as are mentioned above. the two examples differ only in scale, though the organizing principles and goals of each are similar (the same!). That is to induce the greatest number of nodes to acquiesce to their protocol-of-relation. the greater the personal acquiescence, the greater the general feeling of alienation.