a house that EJ's company Arch11 recently finished shows up in Sunset Magazine. nice work!

over in Lübeck, meet miga and then head to lunch with Andreas at Nui which I remember from the teaching at ISNM before. had to get some outline of what is happening to the slowly sinking Titanic and what is required from me when I do a short course on e-culture in the spring.

Content: This seminar will explore the entire global regime of the transdisciplinary field called "e-culture" as an intersection of digital technologies and cultural practices. Using case-studies to find out what is working and what is not, we will examine the technologies which most affect this sector, the political and economic policies which form it, and the social systems where it finds its place. As one model for the engagement of "new media' technologies and social systems, "e-culture," along with the "Creative Industries," are the scene for much innovation, research, hype, and media reportage. This seminar will hunt for some truth by examining specific case studies, precedent, technological infrastructures, and current trends.

Key phrases include: infotainment; web 2.0; economics of attention; locative media; wearable computing; technology globalization; media research; reception, storage, and transmission of culture; creative industries; cultural patrimony; cultural computing; corporate culture; jobs?; non-governmental organizations (NGO's); ubicomp (ubiquitous computing); e-government; society of spectacle; globalization/dislocation of culture; Ikea for the Art Market; European Union effects; Soros Centers; networking; creative action; Road Warriors; First or Second Life?; the Finnish Model; future scenarios; borders and cultural difference; collaborative presences; and so on.

Japanese climbing Hydrangeas (Schizophragma hydrangeoides) cover the southeast corner of the house here.

Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.

Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcastings and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.



and the Dworak's are off to Brussels for the weekend for Milena's daughter Karla's baptism.

waiting for Deutsche Telekom is not unlike waiting for Godot. there is a tacit sense of inevitable loss and failure. of lack and dis-communications. or a return just at the singular moment when one has to run to the toilet, to the post, or just to the garden house to fetch a tool or to bring a case of empties onto the terrace. the T-Kom guy is waiting down the block with a pair of binoculars and a high-sensitivity microphone to catch these moments, whereupon he runs to the door, knocks Lightly, and runs back to his truck, driving off in a fury of absence, already composing in mind the scenario to type into his PDA. nobody home, case closed. ISDN? DSL? T-Online? Festnetz? upload? download? surfen? HotSpot Standorten? fahgettit. case closed. wait until next week. or so.

yeah, it's frustrating, participating in this techno-social system when it doesn't work. when it does, the frustration in sublimated by the satisfaction of social functioning.

a trip to the T-Com office in Kiel ends up not really helping, the pretty girl behind the counter only knows the scripts that she is taught and how to keep her shirt slightly unbuttoned so that her lacey black bra shows. so, no real problem-solving can be accomplished -- on the contrary, she adds another layer of problems by issuing a modem which is incompatible with the data speeds of the service that Christian has ordered. crazy. and the way the corporation makes the usual stupid move of constructing a proprietary face/interface on the network. to cover the complexity with a non-functional layer of bullshit. more than annoying. and the worst is the propaganda of the advertising showing ubiquitously grinning models who clearly are not real people.

what else is new? another book Noise Media Language about (fluxus) (sound) (artist) Yasunao Tone put out by errant bodies -- looks real interesting.

former student Sarah lets me reprint this article she wrote recently about her creative practice:

Sarah H. Chung ::
http://www.ropeswingcities.com/hdot :: http://www.myspace.com/sarahhdot

I am an experimental multimedia artist, a student, and a teacher based in Denver, Colorado, USA. My latest artistic pursuits are a combination of various mediums including still image, video, sound, sculpture, light, and performance. Most recently I have been collaborating with another female artist, Heidi Higginbottom, to choreograph audio/visual performances using found objects, homemade instruments, contact microphones, and film loops. We make homemade contact microphones out of easily attainable and affordable materials and use them to amplify the sound of the movement of objects. We have used objects ranging from dishware, tile, typewriters, music boxes, sewing machines, thumb pianos, toys, water, or any curious object we can get our hands on. Our intentions are not to make melodic pieces of "music," but to isolate and arrange pure commonplace sounds that would normally be easily lost in the proceedings of everyday life. While these objects may be ordinary, they refer to a vast web of associations and marked memories. By arranging them, we create a new resonance in the relationships the objects and symbols have with one another. These relationships are meant to be memory cues that can be triggered by sensory experience. We are in the process of experimenting with different technologies and digital software to incorporating projections, audio delay, editing and looping.

As a studio art major I was largely focused on traditional forms of art such as painting, drawing, and photography. It was about six years ago that I began to pay more attention to the intricate and beguiling aspects of the digital art culture. I was introduced to it from digital art courses being taught by visiting professor, John Hopkins, who is a working artist and has taught and traveled internationally. Projects included collecting and arranging self-generated media and media filtered from outside sources. These included field recordings, videos, still images, and lines of text. I had not dealt with this kind of medium prior to this, so I approached it the same as I would painting and 35mm photogrpahy. While the navigation of new software in a limited time span was challenging, the results of the projects left me very intrigued and curious about digital culture. I believe that the success of these projects were due to the non-linear process of collecting media without a finished product as motivation. Filtering media (books, internet, video, music, sound clips, etc.) provides an intuitive process for choosing content. It becomes a dialogue that interacts with an individuals sensibilities and social views. Whether I am drawn to content or pure aesthetic, some aspect of the media strikes me, and I collect it.

With human interaction, technology can be used as a tool to express emotion and the individualized perspectives of human experience. Technology brings with it an efficiency that adds new timelines within our culture. Ubiquitous media screens flash loaded images and sounds that are intended to influence feelings and opinions about products, services, and perspectives in government. These messages compete with each other and have conditioned us to receive information at an exponentially increasing rate. In a society saturated with advertising, I feel a responsibility to express and tap into more emotive, internalized feelings and memories, and to offer a situation for slowing down. This desire is what caused me to seek out the tools and skills that could connect me with the vast and accessible network I was experiencing.

I believe it is of utmost importance for individuals to be informed about technologies so that they may exercise basic democratic principles. I had been intimidated by technology before, but I felt that placing myself outside of the existence of it is like surrendering my own rights. Technology is propelled by human curiosity, but is often used as a system of control. History is constantly redefined based on documentation. Dominant historical theories are based on those with the power to document and expose others to their material. It is crucial to actively participate in the documentation process of our own history in process.

Links: (check them out!!)
http://www.neoscenes.net
http://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html
http://www.pierrebastien.com/
http://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/
http://www.mutek.org/
http://www.haamu.com/launau
http://www.colleenplays.org/
http://www.skoltzkolgen.com/

with the hectic schedule of my hosts, I am able to help out by doing errands and babysitting during the day. meeting Frau Pries, Fritz's day-care mama, who talks to me as though I understand German fluently. not a bad thing, though I still can't follow things 100% by any stretch. I do learn she has two brothers who lived in the US -- one in Boston, the other in San Diego who recently passed away, dropping dead after getting out of a taxi at a hotel in Chicago. and via a Bluetooth-downloaded email on the share list, a completely different channel for information, apparently huge fires in San Diego as well. more information on that will come when DT supposedly will get the internet installed on Thursday here at the house. we'll see. unstable infrastructures. compared to stable ones? or simply ones that are more or less unstable. shaking foundations.

back to Frau Pries, yes, juggling the needs of six children under two years old. funny to watch the Brownian motion of a roomful of them. well, partially Brownian, partially magnetic attractors and repellers, part complex harmonic motion, part chaos. the emergent aspect being a social system of chance, whatever that is...

midday stroll to the local butcher's shop. hot lunch with brats & taters for the Polish guys, Peter, Jan, and Andre, who are doing all the heavy finishing work on the new house. this along with a case of beer every other day, and a bottle of whiskey on Saturdays.

uff, just when displacement seemed banished from thinking and imagination, here in Kiel to help strip all things from one apartment and install them in a house down the street. all in about 24 hours. not counting the packing up process which I missed while in Bremen. the actual move from the fourth-floor walk-up to the 1920's mansion down the street in the affluent Düsternbrook neighborhood takes four hours. a crew of seven or eight college students and their boss, Leander (a multi-talented guy!), making the transition relatively painless.




for Steffi & Zorak, maybe a different story. beautiful new house, but much finishing work to be done, a flat on the second floor to be vacated in mid-November, a kitchen to be installed at the beginning of the next month, a cellar undergoing major repairs. and boxes. and boxes. and boxes. not to mention a sumptuous garden-intensive yard, garden house, garage, and all the acoutrements that a house brings. Fritz is the first to settle in. when all the world is new at one-year-old, a new house is merely another new-ness in days full of impressive living at the fore-front of be-ing.



lunch of goulash at Thomas' place across the street. the street lined with early 20th century mansions. it has the vibe of the Glen Ridge neighborhood where Stefan and Ellen live. strange to get this similarity across this wide geo-social distance. although the BauMarkt and the Home Depot are also identical. the latter the same-ness of gobalization. the former, the same-ness of local community.

running across this term via Paul on the iDC list. as he does a PhD on the subject. another name for how to organize life among humans. never an easy task, everybody leaves it to those who want the feeling of power that it brings.

Panarchy, a term devised to describe evolving hierarchical systems with multiple interrelated elements, offers an important new framework for understanding and resolving this dilemma. Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal. -- C. S. Holling

and then, first looking down, then looking back. Bremen finished, passing away on the train, now the work of helping Christian and Steffi with this big move. tough situation. when energy expressions rely on stability and known situations, up comes more-or-less chaos. how to optimize assistance?

on an ICE train, always a wonder how a country manages to field such functional chunks of technology. how great it would be in the US with such a system. what would it really cost? given that there was such an infrastructure at one time, that the right-of-ways are at least partially in place still. but the will of people to invest in de-privatized impulses is weak at best. not understanding that privatization brings a chaos of fragmented infrastructures which, driven by a profit/shareholder motive, rarely invest in long-term improvements (to benefit the people who they 'serve'). so the US has an infrastructure which crumbles -- especially now with the constant drain of power from this stupid war. which no-one except the psychologically unbalanced and stupid president and his clueless followers want. the result is a morally and fiscally impoverished nation.

okay, how does this guy in Bremen manage to sell these things so cheap? Martin says that the wursts are made locally, too. as we make a short tour of downtown on share-bremen night. Jürgen is sick. but we see some interesting art work.

The truth is that there is not enough of the right kind of freedom, the fundamental freedom to choose to be free or not to be free, according to one's preference .... Thus I demand, for each and every member of human society, freedom of association according to inclination and of activity according to aptitude. In other words, the absolute right to choose the political surroundings in which to live, and to ask for nothing else. -- Paul Emile de Puydt

I recall this sign from each visit to the University in Bremen.

Bitte das Spülen nicht vergessen, Danke! -- Please don't forget to flush, thanks!

and there is another sign:



instead of saying, in that annoying Big Brother voice:

From Knowledge comes Economy

it says:

From Knowledge comes Resistance Against the Logic of Exploitation

Jan has this installation and documentation Black Cloud -- with a nice remix of Lebanese radio that he gathered during a recent visit there -- Love is in the Air.

Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren! -- Paul Watzlawick

in the midst of Frieder's piles of books and papers to-be-dealt-with (meticulously organized, to be sure), is a copy of Mark's new book on MIT Press, meta/data. a remix auto-biography of his last 15 years or so.

comparing/contrasting to my own traces is a strange flux of feelings. where practice is sampled (how, what, and into what form) and translated (re-mediated) into another form. it is only the form of the mediation that determines the relative fed-back social efficacy of the individual (or social sustainability of the individual's praxis). the books points to, alludes to, hints at, expands upon, posits, and invents a praxis, part of which is the reflexive recreation of a praxis. but is it really evidence of an engaged and authentic praxis that is not about pragmatism, social role-playing, and success?

it is clear that the propagation channels selected for expression is the determinant of how the Self is or is not rewarded by the larger social system. direct expression via presence is different than that means, that pathway (the book, and the particular style, form of language constructed, and the accumulated use of language itself!) which is socially mandated for certain paradigms of success.

how to select those forms? Mark's book and documented practice seems optimized, pragmatic, and formal (that is, formed to optimally integrate into an existing social reward system). the question of form returns again and again. along with the embedded-ness within a social system that has strictly limited pathways for reward and punishment.

I understand the principle, but choose to engage in the praxis which supersedes the documentation of the praxis. although I continue to write, make images, sound and video works, and so on -- none of which garner any attention whatsoever.

the presence of the personal network of a handful of deep supporters is the only plus to the path of the praxis. otherwise, might as well be living on the streets. or simply finished off with the whole thing.

so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on...

questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:

Why are you looking for a unified theory?

What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it's not just an accessory)?

How can the energy affect the technical model -- for example, social networks in the internet?

Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?

How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously -- wouldn't there be a problem with time?

How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?

What if everyone shared John's world-view, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?

If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?

Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?

Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger -- without giving it back -- in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?

Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?

Since we try to create a balance between "flow" and "block" in order to reach a good level, could we integrate "chaos" in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?

class begins. another configuration. not so comfortable in my teaching skin after all this time away. but so far, seems to be a workable group. the vocal along with the silent. the brave and the timid. the left-brain and the right. time is the chief enemy, only five days for this one.

fog horns are blaring all morning until the fjord-breath burns off into a beautiful sunny day.

perambulate with snoozing Fritz through the Düsternbrooke Schutzgebiet nearby while Christian & Steffi get ready to go to Zurich for the weekend. acorns (tall oaks from tiny acorns grow!) and chestnuts crunch and pop underfoot. wander past a moldy granite marker with the word Königsbuche (Royal Beech Tree) engraved on it. often when in Germany in larger towns, and in the parks on those towns, I look for the inevitable craters that are sprinkled through the underbrush and between trees. sometimes when the forest floor is clear of brush, it is possible to see rows of craters. filled with water and rotting branches. other places, hills in city parks are merely the wooded remains of debris piles made from clearing destroyed buildings from city streets.

whump whump whump. high-explosives falling in sandy soil. splintering trees into smoking piles of largish toothpicks, sending plumes of shattered glass, brick, ornamental plaster work, and wooden beams in to the air and down on the neighbors.

past the tennis club, girls with dogs smiling brightly at me. is it the pram that throws them off? or the combination of my black leather jacket and bright red hoodie sticking out. black and red is not a forgettable color constellation in this country.

this is how the day started, he was awake and hanging out, then migrated into my arms, and suddenly he was snoring upside down. so, he ends up on the floor in the living room, snoozing until Papa klingles the door bell after a long search for breakfast Brüchen on this Unification Day holiday. so, a Unification baby -- good planning! the afternoon is filled with visitors, babies, cakes, champagne, gifts, and song.