Everything depended on geology. Any damn fool could see that the vegetation was directly responsive to the bedrock. Hence birds and wildlife were responsive to it. We were responsive to it. In winter, our life was governed by where the wind blew, where snow accumulated. We could see that these natural phenomena were not random -- that they were controlled, that there was a system. The processes of erosion and deposition were things that we grew up with. An insulated society does not see how important terrain is to someone who has to understand it in order to live with it. Much of it meant life or death for the animals, and therefore survival for us. If there was one thing we learned, it was that you don't fight nature. You live with it. And you make accomodations -- because nature does not accomodate. -- David Love, to John McPhee in Rising from the Plains

City of Angeles approaches. first announcing raw presence in air quality, flushing through the pass, spreading out across the desert's invisibility, making air visible. then the Light at night. not able to compete directly, from east rising lunar fullness to western post-solar glow. but it's there in the whining of high-performance vehicles wrapped out to extremity of rpm. and the Marine base, long across the high valley. night flare drops, leisurely falling stars, choppers circulating around, thundering low-frequency rumbles that speak of war and preparations for war.

back in, around Joshua Tree. choosing two places to try and see some raw landscape, the first pull-out and hike ends in a maintenance yard out in the middle of nowhere. the second, simply ends up next to a big parking lot. landscape littered with detritus of this tourism -- multi-liter Big Gulp cups, cigarette butts, and bleached aluminum cans -- it's a wonder how we impact the world. the maxim in wilderness-designated areas of "take only pictures, leave only footprints" seems so ... quaint. when the foot-stomping now includes the air breathed so regularly by the body. maybe there's no answer to this.

French tourists loudly remarking, "écoute la silence!" repeatedly. making it clear that in order to find the same, one would have to leave the park entirely.

Adriene's CD, Mauve Desert, based on the novel of the same title by Nicole Brossard, circulates around the space that is this place: the desert. I've never found it circumscribable with my own texts, or in images that I've been able to spin out from the hours and days spent wandering in these liminal locations. images, with still attributes seemed to have some potential to gather the loose photons but hardly re-present the fullness. nor do they touch on the possibilities that allow the heart to be monitored by internal ear. finding indescribability a surmounting way of this time of life. where a complex mélange of life problems flow through each day. job, location, art production.

The desert is indescribable. reality rushes into it, rapid Light. The gaze melts. Yet this morning. Very young, I was already crying over humanity. With every new year I could see it dissolving in hope and in violence. Very young. I would take my mother's Meteor and drive into the desert. There I spent entire days, nights, dawns. Driving fast and the slowly, spinning out the Light in its mauve and small lines which like veins mapped a great tree of life in my eyes. -- Nicole Brossard

Adriene's compound, Hobe Chobe, on the outskirts of Twenty-Nine Palms, is a funky array of block houses, sheds, a 1950's vintage travel trailer, a Buddhist bee hive, and assorted spaces shaded by some nice eucalyptus trees. dusty, I'm wishing for the fat shop-vac in Prescott to tidy things up from the infernal entropic advances of the desert system on this modest infrastructure. Adriene calls it humble, but Brad and I find it quite inviting, and in the end, after we figure everything out, comfortable. the weather is perfect for the situation -- a bit warm for the season, high 80's during the day, low 50's at night. as the full moon wanes, the stars begin to appear.

arrive at Adriene's Hobe Chobe compound after a long morning and day of roaming through the lower Mojave. Old Woman Mountains, Turtle Mountains, Marble Mountains. end up here at the compound in Twenty-Nine Palms, seven miles south of the primary Marine desert training base.

Siddartha.

elevated fiery thoughts, no mindless sheep in the great herd. moving across vast landscapes, finding smallness in the world, finding dimensionless spaces in the blasted washes of empty moonLit darkness. connecting theory and practice.

no one teaches the path that should be taken. it is only taken or not.

full moons flush the stars from the sky, leaving only the strong and the man-raised devices in the sky. temporary mindlessness.

back up a familiar wash, close to another Wilderness-designated area. arriving at dusk after an intermittent drive across the Sonoran desert from Prescott. conversations range over media, culture, education, social systems, software, teaching, art, and, uh, what else? weather, geology.

full-moon hiking up the wash into a zone of chaotic conglomerates, alluvium, diorites, granites, limestones.

another Furtherfield review

All phenomenon have the potential of being converted into infinite data-streams which become an archive of knowledge through which it is possible to organize social behavior.

Vholoce is one project in a long line of projects which seeks to creatively engage the ubiquitous data-streams that are flooding our virtual world. The rising flood of data is useless without sensible display. Visual (and sonic) display of digital data is a fundamental contemporary issue. But what is sensible display? Using a data stream as a basically random source for visual display is one way to play with the stream. The syntax of visual display (possibly) becomes the site for expression by the creative producer. The data-stream source, the method of (and reason for) display, and the overall creative process need to be interrogated in order to find the basis for type of digital engagement.

For the visual consumer, is it worth learning somewhat arbitrary visual display systems if the only outcome is the time-intensive distraction of indoor eye-candy? Maybe that is what is the norm is in this time -- time-intensive gazing 'out' through indoor 'windows.'

What did the Creek tribe's word for cloud (or cloudy), vholoce, refer to? That which crosses the sky? That which brings rain, that which changes the colors of the world as it passes, that which clings to the ground in the morning? That which dances around the sun, that which covers the sky, that which imitates the forms of all things, spirits? What did the word mean to them, how did it operate in their system of being -- as an evocation of life, or merely tacit knowledge? I wonder how a member of the tribe, in centuries past, viewed language. What function did that abstracted vocalization take on in the continuum of being in the world. Did the Creek have written language? Most likely they transmitted important knowledge through oral narrative. Did they value re-presentations of their world more highly than the world itself? How did they re-present a world that was simply an extension of the continuum of embodied presence?

The Creek definitely did not have windows, and except for sitting inside some kind of hand-built enclosed structure they could not escape the weather. They could not see the manifestations of the weather when inside. Hear and feel, yes, but not see. They generally experienced weather as a full-bodied set of sensations.

In places and times other than pre-Colonial North America, I may sit inside and watch the weather outside the window. There is a word in Icelandic gluggavethri meaning window weather. This suggests a kind of weather where it is much more comfortable sitting on the inside of the window than on the outside. Windows came to Iceland early, but glass was a premium commodity, so the half-underground sod huts of early Iceland might have only one 15 x 15 cm window set in a wooden door at one end of the hut. Better to be watching out this window than experiencing the full-bodied wrath of a winter storm, a rok, a storm with the power to remove life from the body. By putting the sheet of silicon dioxide between the body and the storm, a sort of virtual world appeared -- one that could be seen but not felt. Toasty warm inside with the sheep, blizzard outside. A virtual situation is one where the full range of sensory contact is attenuated through technological mediation.

Science is a collective process of observation of the world along with the creation, testing, and refining of reductive models against what is observed. Science is not data. Data is a by-product of science. Technological development (not science) brings us devices which read the sky and other phenomena. The data is the detritus of automated observation, the excretions of these data collecting devices. The data coming from measurements of atmospheric systems is not science. Humans construct devices to read the world because they do not trust their own sensory input: if they miss something, or make a mistaken reading, they might die. This reading process is a reductive process, a mapping, it is not the phenomena itself. We can read material aspects of the atmosphere, even the microscopic constituents of the flux of things that we toss into suspension in it from our technological development. The notes from these readings are, at first, analog corollaries to what is being read, in a temporal or spatial framework. Voltages, deflections, alterations, charges, changes in time -- distances, depths, widths, heights, volumes, masses. With the weather, the changes are in thermal activity, velocities, pressure, precipitation -- generally changes in the states of the envelope of high-energy particles that surrounds the harder stuff that we walk upon.

So, it is worth it to point out that there are several levels of synthesis or removal happening here? First there is the flux of weather itself, then an analog device is used that reacts with that flux of energies. The change in the analog device is most probably measured electro-mechanically. The result of this electro-mechanical deflection is converted to an electronic signal which is then converted to a digital numeric value. This number is then related back to the original analog device and calibrated to give a 'sensible' number -- that is, a reading that we might make sense of. These numbers are then compiled and posted via a global network to end users who might read those alphanumeric codes to ascertain whether or not to go outside or to carry a brollie if doing so. Rather than poking head out the window and taking a sniff, a look, and making a prognostication as to the future.

Reading is as critical in our system of social control as is writing. Now we have machines that are reading and writing for us. What does this mediation bring us? What are the lessons of the mediated narratives? Are they the same as the narratives of the stories told to us by others? Are they the same as the knowledge gained by direct sensory experience and insight?

We now store these stories as data in data spaces. Volumes of data packed as zeros and ones on a magnetized disk. Zero and one stories. We can retrieve these stories and tell them in time, as a narrative, or out of time, as a simple data space fly-through. Either way, they form streams. These data streams flow in the culture-scape.

The sky feeds us one temporal way, the screen feeds us another:

Watching cloud streams flow in the land-scape brings a knowing that indeterminacy is a ground state of being. Watching water streams brings us to dreams of the unknown -- that-which-will-become. The sky becomes the present when we allow the radiation from the stars to leak into our body system. It is an arrival in the moment that carries us into the future.

Watching data-streams flow in the culture-scape brings a knowing of social relation. Watching data-streams brings us to dreams of that-which-has-been made. Data streams surround us, bind us in visible waves, susserations that sooth the harsh realities of the day. Mediation is about the past. When the weather system is in rising chaos, who wants to watch? Better to close the door, latch the window and watch the silicon dioxide screen. The Outside is dangerous. Unpredictable.

We are surrounded by glass screens showing us virtual life. So, we might as well make pretty pictures to feed our eyes if we are watching the screen instead of the sky. There is always reason to make pretty digital pictures, provocative re-presentations; make pretty pictures to play by, to live by, to die by. Whiling away our virtual indoor lives, Vholoce keeps us company, keeps us safe.

a warped Haiku spawned deep in the recesses of Grand Canyon Village:

painfully red and glistening
some cubic afterbirth
Hummer