psychogeography, yet another buzz-word in contemporary media art Worlds. usually applied in the context of the controlled environment of urban human-scapes. a gravel and sand bar at the confluence of the Yampa and Green rivers makes an ideal counterpoint. despite scaring off the wild geese and beaver. where to go? the water's too cold to ford the river, and the canyon walls too steep to climb. around-about, then.

fleabane (Erigeron glabellus) fills Pool Canyon, along with the huge sage brush bushes.

My own opinion is that belief is the death of intelligence. As soon as one believes a doctrine of any sort, or assumes certitude, one stops thinking about that aspect of existence. The more certitude one assumes, the less there is left to think about, and a person sure of everything would never have any need to think about anything and might be considered clinically dead under current medical standards, where absence of brain activity is taken to mean that life has ended.

My attitude is identical to that of Dr. Gribbin and the majority of physicists today, and is known in physics as "the Copenhagen Interpretation," because it was formulated in Copenhagen by Dr. Niels Bohr and his co-workers circa 1926-28. The Copenhagen Interpretation is sometimes called "model agnosticism" and holds that any grid we use to organize our experience of the world is a model of the world and should not be confused with the world itself. Alfred Korzybski, the semanticist, tried to popularize this outside physics with the slogan, "The map is not the territory." Alan Watts, a talented exegete of Oriental philosophy, restated it more vividly as "The menu is not the meal."

Belief in the traditional sense, or certitude, or dogma, amounts to the grandiose delusion, "My current model" -- or grid, or map, or reality-tunnel -- "contains the whole universe and will never need to be revised." In terms of the history of science and knowledge in general, this appears absurd and arrogant to me, and I am perpetually astonished that so many people still manage to live with such a medieval attitude. -- Robert Anton Wilson

long hike onto the bench above the campground and above Mitten Park. lizards, snakes, birds, jack rabbits, mule deer, limestone, sandstone, chert, black widows, other spiders, textures, sounds, steep climbs, looking over several precipices. there is nothing here. mind reflects back surface noise and shapes, so far. noise of social engagement. clearing will take time. and will ultimately bring back more power to the spirit. hoping that no job offers arrive during this period of being offline.

darkness falls drifting slowly upwards from the ground. under the huge cottonwood Light is lost. in the branches of the piñon. blond dead grass radiates sunshine recalled from noon. sandstone walls the heat. moon begins to Light canyon walls after twiLight. high-pitched bat chirps ping fast when bug is echo-located, otherwise, slow twirps as they sail around the heard space, defining its dimensions. this unseen to eye.

as Anthony stated once: rearriving simultaneity. back in Echo Park. brew some black tea, and wander down to the water's edge. after craning neck to look at Steamship Rock. the river seems high but not near flood stage.

frogs texture the air with the only sounds except for birds. a few people in the small camp ground. maybe a total of 5 people in the whole place. and one just left. hoping that there will be only silence and nature this evening. as my small stove roars while heating water. taking glasses off when NOT looking at this screen. what is it that the glass shields us from? full tilt apprehension of the world. blurry.

different amphibians make sounds now, others stopping, the texture becomes more varied as I listen more closely, something I can do only when I stop typing and sleep the hard drive. so, I do that now. the battery is low anyway.

fast visions, from the top of canyons rims, looking down, from the bottom, looking up. eyes play across surface that shows infinite ages, black sun-stain, and the textures of frozen dunes. cracks, shear zones, friable under-cutting, plants growing in cracks, fracture zones 200 feet high, they plunge beneath the alluvium into the crust, contorted from slow tectonic spasm, grey on the more horizontal areas, psychedelic lichen colors blend to grey and at the same time, divulge each frequency direct to a single rod and cone. life is exciting.

through the tamarisk-free zone that park managers have created as an experiment. started that some years ago, and the regular riparian species appear to be re-colonizing the area. wondering if they used some kind of herbicide on the tamarisk -- it looks like even shoots are dead.

standing, neck cricked, for long periods looking at the stars. first time to identify naked eye the Andromeda Galaxy. dim but massive. so far away from any significant Light pollution, the sky takes a couple hours to fully Light up after sunset. so that one can walk by starLight. though there are almost no details.

Sarah, a former student from Boulder, has a show running between 09.23 - 11.16.2006 at Hooked on Colfax at 3215 East Colfax in Denver. couldn't squeeze the opening into the schedule, but would highly recommend the show, I'm sure it's interesting.

hanging out at the condo in the morning, then out into town for some cycling in the afternoon. funny to be hanging here, it's been YEARS since the last time -- with Collin during the 4th of July 1986(?). don't have the negative scanned, but it was the location of the portrait Miss Liberty (a little girl dressed like the Statue of Liberty riding a trike in the 4th of July parade) that was used for the poster for the Niepce show.

winter closes in. early. Stef contacts old amiga Mary who encourages me to stop by and stay in their Steamboat condo until the Echo Park road re-opens in Dinosaur. haven't seen her since 1989 perhaps, she and her husband and kids are based in Laramie, about a two hour drive from Steamboat. the drive from the Front Range to the (north)Western Slope is routine. scrolling landscape behind windshield and tinted windows. but winter seems to have come faster and heavier than is recalled easily. thinking there is some risk to be moving around without chains at this point. chainless.

raucous evening with the college room-mates and partners and kids. retrospecting, eating, discussing, and laughing. meeting some new folks as well: stimulating, into a very late night. bed is sleep-worthy, but sleep doesn't come so easy in the lateness. the new job possibility seems to find a space in self and mind. a retreat to the mountains after twenty years of urban intellectual activities. time to mull, digest, and re-create the documents of all those times. at the same time, working with children, revealing the wonders of the natural energy systems of the Sangre de Christos.



watch/hear elk rut and bugle in the back yard. a big stag riding herd on a sizeable harem of cows. not seen this kind of wild-life action in Golden before. a cow charges big friendly 120-pound Milo, Don's Rottweiler. Milo retreats fast from the backyard fence -- if possessing a tail, it would be between legs.



later in the evening, to top the day off, Natalie loses a tooth while playing with Sonya and Alex in the basement.

Alex and Sonya present a short informal piano recital at my request the last evening that I am visiting their house in Boulder.

meet Rafael in the morning, speaking about the political economies of soft game authoring; lunch with Steve, we decided the last time we saw each other was 21 years ago when I walked out of the corporate headquarters of Union Oil Company of California, times past, and catching up on the intervening years. then a wander around the CSM campus to see what's new. strange vibe. being no stellar student, but Sara, the Geophysics Department senior secretary recognized me (surprise!), got Dr. Keller's email address. wander around the campus looking at the new buildings, and allow place to seep, an overlay of history, into senses. Thomas Hall, second floor, the first dormitory experience, 30 years ago right now. formative? de-formative? time past, time passed. never conscious of the eyes of a 30-year alumni scanning the place back then, did it ever happen?



one of those fall afternoons, brilliant sunshine, Colorado blue sky. down to Clear Creek, once a gravel ditch, now a sculpted kayak, mountain bike, jogging, and strolling corridor. how things develop in the West. to this standard of tidiness.



dinner with Rick, Sally, and Natalie.

crisis of the now. crisis of being in the past moving into the now, and on into the future past.

friend Varsha sends this image: in performance at the Tate Turbine Hall

Swathed in a shell of white embroidered fabric, two bodies appear in the urban landscape, adapting to the architecture of the site. The straightjacket-cum-exoskeleton that links two artists -- Tejal Shah and Varsha Nair -- is joined at the arms, forming a connected 'bridge' that nevertheless speaks of distances between people.

In generating this project, Shah (Mumbai) and Nair (Bangkok) exchanged ideas by email about their respective interests in the edge of everyday normality and in the loneliness evident within the teeming cities in which they live.

dinner with Fran and Mark.

fortune cookie: An enjoyable vacation is awaiting you. Lucky Numbers: 05 18 27 31 33, 25.

dinner with Kevin and Linda. after dropping off the National Park Service application.

fortune cookie: Your life will be prosperous. Lucky Numbers: 08, 12, 24, 32, 44 17.



and look at those fine tomatoes and peppers they've grown this summer. all right!

sotto voce: A model is reductionist. A model will never be the thing itself. (A map is not the territory). Consider an isolated individual -- he/she looks at the world, receives energy into his/her body system. Recognizes patterns of flow, and behaves according to such patterns (over time)... (Learning). Building a model by which to interact 'successfully' with the flows around him/her. OR, an individual is told the parameters of the model (non-experiential learning), accepting what an Other tells (because of the position of power-relation where the Other is more powerful in that social relation). Science is a collective phenomena at the cusp between these two situations. Which do we trust most? Our own analysis of the energy flows impinging on our body-system, or the system of the Other? I believe that over-socialization -- a global trend perhaps based on the simple facts of growing population and lessening room -- is an inexorable force which demands the second condition to the exclusion of the first. The first is dangerous (to the social): unpredictable, unstable, and requires one to be living at the very front of experience, to learn in the moment, to exist in the momentary flow of being. The second allows leisure, taking the word of an Other about survival parameters, 'good enough at this time.' As a teacher I facilitate confidence in the first -- trust in ones own sensory input -- at the same time as acknowledging that we are products of the second system (more and more) which has interfered with the first process of immediate feedback from body system -- embodied learning. Technology is the means for a social system to codify and implement the (scientific) model such that it may be literally im-pressed on the sensory system of the individual (the collective hallucination). Thus, to counteract this process and to have embodied learning, the im-pressions of technology and of surrounding social system need to be removed (for at least a moment) to allow the individual to feel their socially un-encumbered body, and the flows of life that are impinging on it -- without the intervention of non-experiential, second-hand socialized models. Based on this description, technology is very problematic in that it socially codefies a point-of-view (world-view) which is then applied to the individual who is participating in that social system. You can chose to trust the momentary sensory input to your system (and be marginalized by that same social system), or you can choose to assimilate into the social system and take on the collective world-view instead. It's a sliding scale of participation and reciprocal marginalization, but I believe we are sliding ever towards the second end of the scale. This slide precipitates the long-term denial of embodied and creative life in the stead of socially mandated 'solutions for living' like Songdo City. Uff... So, coming back to Situated Technologies -- they seem to be the result of an (continuous) evolution of the social system -- which is now intricate enough to apply/deliever these im-pression systems at an ever more individual/granular level to insure socially 'proper' worldviews... yikes!

ever have one of those days... Pia Lindman will be doing some performances at The Storefront

Fascia refers to the body's connective tissue, to a sheath or protective membrane surrounding wheat or bodily organs, a collection of objects that gives the appearance of a band or a stripe, an opening or doorway, or the layered surface that creates the illusion of dividing architectural structures. Engaging with many of these meanings, Pia Lindman's Fascia project unfolds as a series of live performances, video recordings and drawings, that engage in a visual dialogue with Steven Holl's and Vito Acconci's renowned design of the Storefront for Art and Architecture façade. Like Acconci and Holl, she challenges the traditional notion of façade as constituting a membrane that simultaneously separates and erotically joins the inside with the outside. Fascia departs from the definition of the membrane-wall as both a marker and an embodiment of space...

walking around institution, meeting old faces, seeing how it goes... and the dark storm of cancer seems to loom in almost every life encountered. what is this beast? it is the package that mortality, a gift to all, arrives with industrial efficiency.

plowing through connections that will be inductive to progressive evolution. so that fluid state-of-being constructed today is different than that of yesterday. attitude to be adopted is that of the vital. means is not thought but embodied action. although it is correct to say that we are never the same from moment-to-moment, this is at the finest level of be-ing. the more gross and dominant levels, change is incremental and often subducted by the inertia of comfort.

soaking away in the Valley View Hot Springs for some hours with Sage tagging along.



If we set ourselves down on the bank of the moments so as to observe them as they flow by, all we are able to recognise in them in the end is a meaningless succession, time which has lost its substance, abstract time, a transformation of our inner void. One step further, and from abstraction to abstraction it becomes more and more threadbare through our fault, it dissolves into temporality, it become a shadow of itself. Our task now is to give it back life, and to adopt a clear and unambiguous attitude towards it. -- E. M. Cioran

sotto voce: reading list from the alter ego: the sky in the morning (re-mix of the previous day, delivered direct to the eyes) the sky in the early afternoon (especially passages on primitive turbulence of pre-strato-cumulescence) the sky during later afternoon thunderstorms (the chapter on electromagnetic radiation in wide frequency bands is stimulating) the sky closing in on sunset (the chapter on red-shift) the sky 2 hours after sunset (requires adjustments to the eyes from black on white to white on black) the sky in deep night (the chapter on the Milky Way is most spectacular in a post-Debordian way, as is the anti-spectacle of getting eyes to read nebulae in any detail) whups, just tripped over my feet, gotta read more of the ground as well, but that'll have to wait until tomorrow -- as I try to remember to stay motionless when doing close readings...

on the west flank of the Sangre de Christos up about 400 feet above the valley edge. parked in a leveled area -- a mine dump. debris and slag and a Lazy Boy recliner. altered landscape. pondering the routes that got me here in this moment, and the whole long term of life. how the School of Mines was a turning point, and the great feeling I had when I first drove in between North and South Table mountains into Golden, 30 years ago. what was another turning point? leaving Big Oil? perhaps. certainly led to a long road of different activities, culminating in the move to Iceland. and having a child. way points in life. while some set a course early in life, and never stray from it, making progress in an endless sea is a relative condition. while this life has been more stopping to check way points, and re-setting the heading, bearing, route based on what was discovered at any one point. not having a particular destination. but sometimes feeling as though the boat is sinking. listing, taking on water, swamped. stoved-in, derelict, drifting, rudderless, without compass. but, still moving.

and still the big issue is the desire and idea of getting word committed to paper. in such a way to boost productivity and profile and prospects. an investment of a year. but the deep doubts on

mountain sides changing colors already, high up, and when backing away from the verge, the roots of the mountains, seeing the peaks dusted with night snow.

still mulling Marc Tuters article in Leonardo; mulling how the praxis model for supra-academic success entails generating texts that fit into book-forms; mulling rhetoric; mulling spin; mulling at the inertia which keeps social institutions functional. as long as individuals are willing to place life energy in representative forms.

when co-option takes place -- it is often (always) from a form of exhaustion of the self to resist the social inertia of a situation. peer pressure in a vastly more brutal and subtle way. although one popwerful solution to this creeping anti-autonomy is to have a sustainable/sustained lived praxis that is authentic -- with spiritual presence and active engagement.

Maps are power. Either you will map or you will be mapped. -- Nietschmann

a shot from Loki -- prepped for whitewater near Varmahlid in Iceland.

sitting in the lobby of the Y this morning, resting for a moment between swimming and having to cycle back to the car place to pick up my truck after a front-end alignment. two day-care folks are in the process of herding a group of 4-year-old's in the front and through to the locker rooms. there are sounds coming from them. not really coherent, but remnant vocalizations of something they were engaged with before they entered this interior space. noisy, one might say. suddenly a jaunty harmonica tune begins, filling the entire space with its irresistible energy. the kids are instantly quiet. the beast tamed by a song. as I turn around to look, the kids are reverently walking by an elderly guy sitting with an over-sized baseball cap on, letting the music flow from his mouth. marvelous. I catch the eye of several other folks within the sonic range, everyone acknowledges that the event is significant on a granular scale of life.

(photo of Mariah by Cheryl Gerber for NPR)
when listening to an NPR report last Monday covering the one-year anniversary of Katrina, I heard a short interview with a woman by the name of Mariah Furze. could it be the Mariah Furze? recalling a recent conversation with another high school friend Meredith where she was saying that Mariah was living in Pass Christian, Mississippi, and was one of the many who had lost everything in the hurricane. we all attended high school together in Gaithersburg, Maryland, way back in the deep dark past. I found a number online and gave a call, and there was Mariah at the other end! still a jolt to be able to leap across such spaces and times in an instant. couldn't really place her accent, but it's been a long time since I been to that corner of the US. (back in the days of working on an offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico off the Mississippi delta.)

at any rate, it was great to hear the basics of her story first-hand. she also pointed me to further information on the town, starting with the extensive web documentation put up by Dan Ellis -- recovery, katrina, and the pre-Katrina town site. see for yourself the massive scale of destruction and the lack of progress in rebuilding as a result of un-responsive local, state, and national bureaucracies. indeed, following all the media hype and excitement over the "next big thing" to report on, it is hard to really comprehend the experiences of folks living on the coast there. except to say that empathy is necessary, and "you had to be there." volunteers are still very much needed and warmly welcomed to Pass Christian. numbers have dropped sharply in the recent month (mostly because of the August heat and back-to-school), but the town is still in heavy and hard times. Mariah is the head of the Volunteer Taskforce with headquarters in The Grey Hut in town along with Amy Hardee, a volunteer from North Carolina, and others. Mariah is helping to lead the fight against the bureaucracies and to help folks get their lives back together, including her own by heading to the state capital to meet with the governor next week to literally lay it on the table. more power to you Mariah! they can be reached at 228.452.7270 if you can volunteer or perhaps have donations to help folks out. stay tuned for updates on the situation.