head down to have dinner with Udo and some of his neighbors last night, there is a heavy police preesence all along Petersburger Strasse, Mercedes van after Mercedes van line the street each with a contingent of traditional green, or the new dark blue, or the black-clad Polizei (colors in order of the increasing necessity to avoid confrontation with, I believe.) Straßensperre durch die Polizei. dinner is wonderful in his space, though I feel a little guilty that English is donned on my account. I learn more about May Day in Berlin, though, where there are usually confrontations with little historical relevance, mostly just fun between cops and kids rioting. also learned about a small town where on May day eve, boys in the town would bring birch trees to lean against the windows of the girls that they fancied.

Experiments, that they become always more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge; for, at the commencement, it is better to make use only of what is spontaneously presented to our senses. -- Descartes

in response to this question posed by Annick Bureaud on the [new media curating] list (in a discussion about access to digital information:

The question might be : how much do you (really) pay to get access to a document, how much the people who have worked to provide the access to this document are paid, who (ultimately) pays for this service?

sotto voce: The cost you pay is directly correlated to the depth of your embeddedness, your degree of participation in the techno-social system. For example, to simply 'own' a laptop, I calculated over the past 15 years I spend around USD 120 / month. This does not include cost of upgrades and peripherals, telecom, electrical, or other costs. This is only having the machine sitting on my lap. Of course, to participate in the techno-social system that 'allows' me to make a posting to this list, or to receive incoming postings, requires much more than that single expense. There are ways of minimizing or reducing the relative level of participation, but in a developed country, there are absolute minimums which, if I slide under, I remove myself from any ability to participate. Things like a fixed address, a bank account, a national ID number, a passport -- each of which demands a certain set of other fixity/stability in regard to the system (which demands this to support its continued viability). I 'pay' for the privilege primarily by spending some of my life-time in the service of propping up that techno-social system. Spending life-time in participating in system-sanctioned interaction with others who are also seeking legitimacy within the system. When I spend that life-time, it's gone, I don't get it back. I convert some of that resource, life-time, life-energy into an abstracted currency which allows me the 'freedom' to convert my life-energy into other sanctioned expressions of the techno-social system for my perusal and consumption. Through participating I lend my life-energy as a signature of legitimacy of the entire techno-social system that I am helping to prop up as a participant. What a system 'sanctions' is not always clear, but in the long-term, it is anything that promotes my participation in the system in such a way that the system profits in using my submitted energies in expressions that it deems necessary to its survival (not mine!)... The ultimate payee in any social system are the individuals who participate in the system, at whatever level -- through the spending of life-time (think, for example, 'paying attention') into that system. There are relative 'winners' and 'losers' depending on how you judge the relative punishments and rewards meted out by the system as it seeks your optimal participation. I think that refusing participation at the degree of whether or not to publish based on an ideological detail within the system is a very small incremental shift in paying slightly attention to the 'dominant' system and slightly more to a subset of that dominant system. I use the word subset because the dominant system includes the entire globalized techno-social infrastructure of telecommunications and digital devices upon which in both cases we are totally dependent. In order to participate in this forum here (as one possible niche, taz, where we can play for a time, before going back to paying attention to the dominant system ...) or to write about these subjects or to circulate at all, we are dependent. I can understand the refusal as a statement against the hegemonic power of that system, and BRAVO for that. But what about a refusal to use tele-communications and instead only transmit orally the ideas to one person at a time. (Yeah, why not -- what is it about numbers and spatial reach that so seduces us to believe in our own 'influence' on others..?) Imagine that, if everyone on every mailing list in the world would instead take the same amount of time they spend in eye-lid-locked paralysed point-of-view gazing at the screen and instead engaged with those humans which were immediately around them... some musings...

finding the wall. on a stroll with Jim and MH for a splendid afternoon, cloudless sky, 20C in the shade. not bad, well, to be honest, pretty damn nice weather after all the cold crap in the preceding weeks. find the wall, The Wall, wandering through Friedhof der Sophiengemeinde, and there it is, a preserved section, along with a pile of grave markers, and a row of stacked pieces of The Wall, crumbling away slowly, rebar showing. head home after dinner. tired in the relative heat.

Dialogic relations have a specific nature: they can be reduced neither to the purely logical (even if dialectical) nor to the purely linguistic (compositional - syntactic). They are possible only between complete utterances of various speaking subjects ... Where there is no word and no language, there can be no dialogic relations; they cannot exist among objects or logical quantities (concepts, judgments, and so forth). Dialogic relations presuppose a language, but they do not reside within the system of language. They are impossible among elements of a language. -- Mikhail Bakhtin

yes, spring does arrive. the chestnut tree outside the back windows rather suddenly bursts into a leafy presence that only the chestnut can express. added advantage is that it blocks the view into and out of the windows, replacing too-near humanity with ... green.

We do not need to invent sustainable human communities. We can learn from societies that have lived sustainably for centuries. We can also model communities after nature's ecosystems, which are sustainable communities of plants, animals, and microorganisms. Since the outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is its inherent ability to sustain life, a sustainable human community must be designed in such a manner that its technologies and social institutions honor, support, and cooperate with nature's inherent ability to sustain life. -- Fritjof Capra

when describing what I observe in the world, I can choose which pre-existing configurations (of an existing language) to use. this will determine the audience. pictures on a wall. objects in a room. speeches, houses, meals. presence. and absence.

movement, nomadism. the restless need for an alternate point-of-view. could this have erupted in that caged feeling of family? being the hamster in the cage and being poked with sticks through the bars. looking for a safe corner somewhere in the bar-delimited space. but never finding it. never safe from those tortuous energies raging around the enclosed space of relation. no escape. with the ultimate result being to curl up in a ball, fetal, and accept the brutality that life brought along. insecurity, fear, and above all, a deep lack of trust in those Others.

now, to trust? how to trust when the early lessons were all about how never to trust. sad eff-ing state of affairs. broken trust. that was the chief operating principle in the meta-structure of family. a self-fulfilling distortion of human relation. breaking the cycle by re-discovering what it is to trust. recalling the trust expressed by friends through their open welcomes and open doors.

pondering the best way of delivery of the Regime text. possibly a podcast.

always the question: how to express?

is it mere ego-centricity that places a priori limits on the reception of Self-expression? or an internal complicity in guaranteeing obscurity? density of expression is an interesting concept. what are the conditions where density is counteracted? isn't that where levity is found, or expressed. (it does go back to Light and Gravity again). where the gravity is that-which-coalesces, that-which-brings-together, which tends to stasis(?). and Light is the dispersive element which tends to activity. working with Light (photography), to counter the dark gravitas of Family, the density of matter that is the Self. finding expressions of Light, versus the dense expressions of language, for example. how this all works. creating Light in language, levity. that's something I have talked to Nick and Deb about, no, not really talked about, but actually practiced. the practice of levity. (I finally saw that the trauma of Family had gradually driven levity out of my be-ing -- levity I once held and expressed).

what factors contribute to the levity of a text? (certainly oral delivery allows this Lightness, ahah, a revealing of principle!) how to decrease the density? by inserting Life into it. orality. skipping the printed Regime.

I style the orality of a culture totally untouched by any knowledge of writing or print, primary orality. It is primary by contrast with the secondary orality of present-day high technology culture, in which a new orality is sustained by telephone, radio, television and other electronic devices that depend for their existence and functioning on writing and print. Today primary culture in the strict sense hardly exists, since every culture knows of writing and has some experience of its effects. Still, to varying degrees many cultures and sub-cultures, even in a high-technology ambiance, preserve much of the mind-set of primary orality. -- Walter Ong

on Sunday last, Mika and Mari held an informal presentation on mikropaliskunta, followed by a public talk that Mari did at The Field Gallery on Wednesday. very nice work indeed, and nice to hang with some of those crazy Finns! (see 04/17 and I'm working hard on some audio from it all...)

a performance evening at tmp.lab that Marie-Hélène and Jim set up. I do some ambient sound work, but otherwise focus on the remote situation, monitoring the stream and partners in Chile and Canada. the functionality of the ustream.tv platform (Flash- and browser-based) is quite good with controls on stream quality, multi-point collaboration, a built-in chat channel, archiving, and so on. it would have been a dream for past projects! (all this with the caveat that the stream image has the branded logo of ustream.tv on it, and the company is clearly an eventually-for-profit enterprise. that and while the archival and sharing possibilities are very well-developed, so far I have not determined if it is possible to download stand-alone flash media files from the archive. to play, one needs access to the database -- all data including the chat texts reside in their server.

Derek comes by. hinting that the Regime text scared off one of the panel for the Sonic Architectures conference in July, so, I won't be involved in that event. (thanks for trying, Derek!) and on a reciprocal note, Rasa definitely wants to include it in Spectropia. albeit with references (huh? it's a speculative essay, but they are seeking peer-review status) and at approximately half the finished length (oh, this is really an impossible challenge to cope with). so, not sure if I want to go through the work on major revisions instead of continuing on with the other chapters. it's a book chapter, I don't want to re-write it. but having it published in Spectropia would be nice. they always do really beautiful and innovative design work. so...

John von Seggern (on empyre wireless sustainability): I agree with you, however we shouldn't confuse the Internet/digital networks in general with the larger techno-social system within which they exist. In point of fact, digital networks perform many tasks much more energy-efficiently than we could do without them (telecommuting vs. actual jet travel for example), so I would expect them to continue to thrive in an energy-constrained future even if many other facets of our society are radically reconfigured.

sotto voce: But in the end, that's a little like saying how much money I will save by buying a pair of pants at 50% off the regular price. I don't save anything, I spend money buying the pants. The Internet as an infrastructure cannot (except theoretically) be excised from the techno-social system that it is embedded within. Energy consumption of that system rises, is rising. Web 2.0 sites brought online huge numbers of energy-consuming server farms which never existed when users did not store social networking data, for example. And the energy usage stats can't be limited to nation-states, because it's a global boat we are (apparently) floating in. It's like saying the US uses far less energy making steel now than it did 50 years ago. What about how much it consumes? And where was the other steel made? The same argument was also used with digital creating "paperless" offices -- track paper usage.

http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0213/p04s01-usgn.html

sotto voce: Of course, in the process of the engineered evolution of any particular device there will be optimization -- that is the goal of engineering. If that wasn't the case, our system would have never been marginally sustainable from the beginning. Extracting stats on theoretically isolated elements is not valid except for more back-slapping "we've done it, we've found a way to have and eat our cake" -- and it represents no real solution. It is exactly this localized isolation of elements which allows this mentality to persist. Just as with many previous industrial advances where a resource was abundant, any negative affects of the use of that resource was able to be overlooked by the end user who was somehow isolated (usually geographically) from them. That geographic isolation is no longer possible when the effects are global. Think, on a globe there are no isolated corners to sit in anymore. This is exactly the point that I am making -- that unless people realize radical shifts in our relationship with the deep and broad techno-social infrastructure, we are not making real reductions in the overall footprint, and it is the size of the cumulative footprint that will spell the difference between sustainability or the alternative which is only dimly making itself known through the fog of naivety. (and believe me, I don't place myself above the fray, but energy consumption and the reliance on the largely invisible functioning of that globe-spanning infrastructure is a seriously addictive way to go).

begin this morning sketching out the chapter Dialogue and the Other :: Protocols of Intimacy (that's a provisional title, I came up with the protocols of intimacy phrase a few days ago, and liked it). it has a chapter-title-resonance like the Regime of Amplification :: A Primer.

this is the chapter where the core teachings lie. or where many foundational assumptions that hold up the broader teachings will be framed. it is the easiest and most difficult chapter. simple and complex. powerful and simple.

and a question pops into mind -- when thinking about how I need to provide as many examples of situations to students to re-inforce the efficacy of the world-view -- how is it that the teaching of ones own world-view is so different than teaching the world-views of others. how is it that so much education is simply the mass inculcation of a canon of Others by individuals who are somehow lesser than those represented by the canon and to a grouping of individuals who have no value to the social system until they are fully inculcated. was it such that only those in the canon were truly great Teachers, and all who come after them merely lesser disciples? Or does the social system have the tendency to self-reify at the price of eliminating successors of equal or greater inspiring power? isn't it such that any individual has some lesson to teach any Other? where is this lesson taught? it should be enshrined in a bill of human obligations (versus human rights), that any human may learn something from any other human.

Mari has her opening here in Berlin and in Helsinki simultaneously -- the Field Gallery here and at Maa-tila in Helsinki. it's about mysterious mega...

Mega is a loophole in the system of political, cultural, functional, social and historical locations. It is a non-place that questions land-owning and borders - and the whole global economical system related to them. -- Mari Keski-Korsu

old networker-friend, Paul Rutkovsky (of floridada) and I have some nodes in common in Lithuania of all places. he was just there and here in Berlin as well. he sends this invitation from a recent show of drawings on paper that he had in Vilnius.

suspended ambronesia, the whole week gets screwed up. and what do I have to show for it? nada. started off good at the Institute meeting on Monday, giving a short presentation to students on the block seminar that I'll be doing in early June Sustainable Creative Presence :: Distributed Be-ing. have a few conversations afterwards with some interested students. then a brief faculty meeting that is conducted mostly in English to my astonishment (for my sake).

Technology arises from human systems, but what is the nature of that genesis? Is technological advance increasing the possibilities of or increasing the limitations on creative activities?

As techno-social systems continue to evolve and become more pervasive, their effects begin to dominate all aspects of the social and cultural landscape. These evolving forms radically alter the possibilities of human presence as well as the range of social controls on that presence. It is human presence -- and especially human presence in collaborative and vital relation -- that is the basis of creative action. A deep understanding of this continuum of relation brings exceptional power to a sustainable creative process.

This seminar will ask many questions about where we are in this moment -- a willingness to engage with others in open and honest discussion is most important. With open dialogue among the participants, the answers will be relevant and life-changing.

The approach will be decidedly interdisciplinary: students from different backgrounds are welcome.

the opening of Strictly Berlin 008. head cold still. head home early. miss Mari ja Mika. damnation. transportation and opening ambience trickles onwards in time. Mari calls, but I am too slow to answer the phone. can't hear. but the microphone does.

it is finally the cold rain on the last lap home after a day of being in the cold wind of late winter Berlin, the cold rain gets my head cold, giving me a head cold. damn. waiting to get into the Reichstag to see the heart of the German government. for what it's worth.

meanwhile workers are quickly replacing all the monumental (and mostly broken) Light posts that line Karl Marx Allee with new ones, though of the same form. at first I thought, oh, construction, been like this for years, but soon realized that things actually proceed at a good clip in this continual renewal of the city. who's paying for it?

if only, with the greyness of possibly imminent spring times, sweeping through a head full of cold. unable to concentrate. unable to do that at all; with nothing to think about, and nothing to think about from lack of attention to the moment. out of it. and dreaming of the Golden Elixir that Taoism offers, though finding will not be in dreams, but in full be-ing.

Human beings receive this Golden Elixir from Heaven . . . . Golden Elixir is another name for one's fundamental nature, formed out of primeval inchoateness. There is no other Golden Elixir outside one's fundamental nature. Every human being has this Golden Elixir complete in himself: it is entirely realized in everybody. It is neither more in a sage, nor less in an ordinary person. It is the seed of Immortals and Buddhas, and the root of worthies and sages. -- Liu Yiming

migrating realities, day two. people going WAY over time, people reading papers. understandable a bit when they are second language speakers, but I thought at one point, why not have a native speaker reading it for them? (it would be more understandable and wouldn't require their presence). my hand goes up, I'll do it! annoying aspect of, again, the meta-structures of the encounter. as do dominate all social encounters. but tend to restrict and form the formal.

situation in Lithuania. empty spots, people leaving. an empty landscape (compared to Central Europe), poor standard of living, life expectancy, wages, employment. not good. but the emptiness is a nice thing. the politics of emigration.

Johannes Deutsch: WDR cultural spectacle, Mahler's Second Symphony, gala concert ... (Ars Electronica, Linz, big-ass spectacle). with live manipulation.

(and with that, I quit taking notes) <>

the last evening was nice. the conference panel in Savannah, which I managed to do from Hubertus' flat, across the street from GdK, was not so good. my intervention was in poor comparison with the power-point presentations some of the other's did. but I just couldn't bring myself to engage with that hyper-limited platform. it is so ubiquitous in the pathway it prescribes on a presentation. clearly, though, Adobe Connect, the collaborative platform, is also so limited and restricted to particular forms of hyper-socialized human encounter. although limits can stimulate creativity if there is a resonance between the two people who are connecting via that pathway. it doesn't resonate with my be-ing. I don't use it again. f-2-f resonates. minimizing encounters mediated by cultural spectacle. focus as close to f-2-f as possible.



the performance, as with most performances is fringe, a good concentrated group, but small, the young folks wander off when the Vilnius student crew leaves. some people had come after reading on the site of my connection to Stan Brakhage. interesting conversations afterwards. and a nice denouement, wandering back down to Potsdamerplatz and so on home. running on adrenaline.



today ends with a longish wander from Gdk to Pariser Platz in the reception center for the Akademie der Künste, thanks to Hubertus. wow!

migrating realities, day one. get there early, as it's important to put a hand in to help organizing. Mindaugas is working like crazy, so. apparently last evening, the electricity in the entire building went out (somebody stuck a screwdriver into a 440 volt line that was exposed. fortunately no injuries, but one burnt screwdriver! so, everything is behind.

finally able to take an evening to catch up with Udo. hoping to get some audio work up onto his brilliant google hack -- http://aporee.org/maps/. otherwise back at the desk or occasionally wandering around with MH.

April enters warmly. with loss. I lose one of my Saranac cross-training half-gloves. I use them all the time for cycling. although I'm not doing any weight-lifting in the moment, I'll have to find a replacement.

meet Peter for a beer at Hackischer Markt, we wander over to Alexanderplatz where it's warm enough to sit outside. he tells stories of his father who dies an alcoholic after fighting in the army on several fronts in the war.

hope to get to Mechernich later to see the rest of the crew later in June or so, though any travel will be contingent on whether or not I can find someone to sublet the flat for June and/or July. can't afford to travel and rent at the same time.