Re: <eyebeam><blast> localization

[blast-agent <agent@blast.org>]

5 localizations were received, from Eve Andree Laramee, Carlos Basualdo,
Alan Sondheim, Steven Ball, and Stephen Linhart


Eve Andree Laramee <wander@earthlink.net> writes:

HOME (NON-LOCAL)
Home is a place where I lived for six years during which I never stopped
moving. A place where the ocean floor uplifted to reveal a desert
riddled with holes underneath its burnt surface of the frozen flow of
volcanoes who belched their last gasp of noxious fumes long long ago,
leaving behind the rippled surface of black rock dotted with tiny, tough
plants.  Home is a place I know so well from above ground and
underground.  Being the littlest in my group of cavers, I was the one to
crawl into the smallest passageway to see if it went anywhere. "Hey Eve,
there's a possible lead, why don't you see if it goes anywhere." So with
my pack tied onto my foot I would crawl on my belly through some of the
most amazing places I've ever been. Deep inside the earth, the realm of
the possible is endless. A cellular phone would never work there, too
far down under.


LOCALIZATION
I live on the edge of the river that separates Brooklyn from Manhattan
Island. Sometimes, when the weather is warm,  I sit at the end of India
Street and look at the rusting cars in the East River...pushed off the
edge of the dock. Silt and sludge carried by the currents out to sea,
grain by grain, slowly fill every crevice. Millions of years from now,
after the river changes its course and the concrete crust of the city
has dissolved into powder, a palisade of sedimentary rock is exposed.
Molecule by molecule, steel into stone, a perfectly fossilized strata of
machines.


TIME, PRACTICE/PROCESS

"The whole history of this invention (the Difference Engine) has been a
struggle against time."   -Charles Babbage, 1837

"How time gets represented in regard to (the location and positioning of
art) is important to consider." (Ellen Fernandez Sacco)

"Cultures don't live in the same time" (Brian Holmes)

Often micro-cultures within macro-cultures have different frames of
reference regarding time. One thing about net culture which is a little
strange for me is differences in response times. It takes me days or
even weeks to mull a message over, to process it. Which reminds me, in
the discussion about artistic *practice*, I was thinking of this in
relation to artistic *process* on the internet. Practice implies the
repetition of work to become proficient, whereas I associate process to
gradual changes that may or may not lead to a particular result.
Personally, I am more interested in the way that net culture collides
with artistic process and the unexpected articulations that result. I
also find compelling "how the Internet as a "machine" brings forth a new
notion, and a new questioning of art"  (Andreas Broeckmann). In addition
to "a vehicle for conventional art forms, and ...art produced with the
network as medium" (Olu Oguibe), artists use the internet as a research
tool; an information gathering and disseminating device; a vehicle to
exchange ideas; a venue for a catalogue or texts or projects unable to
be funded or published by an institution; a forum for discourse and
brainstorming; a way to keep in touch across large expanses of space.

QUICKSAND
"At 11:40 am, November 12, 1955, a section of the town of Nicolet,
Quebec, as big as four football fields and thirty feet thick suddenly
started to slump downhill and in less than seven minutes had flowed into
a river, carrying with it many buildings and crushing or drowning
several people."

Quicksand (Jouke Kleerebezem) is an interesting metaphor. The truly
weird and abstract semi-liquid body of quicksand, which is a
super-organism made up of millions (perhaps at least 101 million?)
grains of sand, each emersed in water (not unlike pearls in the folds of
an oyster)  which coats and separates them to the degree that they are
kept in suspension. One time someone told me if you run across quicksand
fast enough you won't sink, but if you just stand there you will. Never
tried it myself. (Perhaps this has something to do with differing
response times.) But somehow this seems an interesting way to think
about the internet with all its mercurial indeterminacies, uncertainties
and unpredictabilities. I was talking the other evening with a
geographer friend about the thought processes of artists and scientists,
and we got on a so-called "value-neutral" trajectory beginning with 1:
Description (mapping, observation, pattern recognition....basically
separating signal from noise) and on to 2: Explanation (things to look
for, theories, etc) then to 3: Prediction (and how so-called good
theories are able to predict things) to 4: Control (technology,
engineering). If we look at these four processes hierarchically, we
ultimately end up "frustrating ourselves by pointing out that the answer
to the Big Question has Not Really been found" (Andreas). At the moment,
I have decided to discard prediction and control to focus more on
description and explanation. Artists works on the internet inevitably
develop a complex and intimate interaction with their social and
cultural contexts, reflecting particular values. I don't believe there
can never be a Big Answer to The Big Question resulting in a unified
account of artistic practices and expressions. Any sort of stable trend
or conceptual structuring of art on the net is subject to occilation or
rupture. I am interested in discovering how the internet changes with
the incorporation of art and artists' interventions. I presume there
will be no quick answers to this inquiry, and that we might just end up
momentarily stuck in the quicksand, mucking about (unless we choose to
lightly skim the surface).


FILTERS
You start with a big slurry of intuitions, guesses, personal politics,
ideas, styles, rumors, innuendoes, brain-works and other human stuff and
it funnels down into distilled ideas that become hypotheses which are
tested as theories. Things either move through or are left behind and
thrown out. But there are particles that get stuck in the filter,
clinging to the network of the fibers of the filter with a voracious
tenacity. Questions that won't go away.


LOCALIZATION (2)
Location is a fluid situation and not a fixed place, it is an
approximate proximity, an architexture, an affiliation, a turbulence, a
pause in the Brownian motion. I have momentarily paused in Brooklyn
behind the window of this computer in a room replete with deeply folded
strata of books, papers, slides and photos, half-drunk cups of coffee,
zip disks and floppies, tons of yellow sticky tags, newspaper clippings,
video tapes, several calendars, some current, others not, an
entanglement of cords and wires, manila folders which are an attempt to
contain some of the chaos, a snake-skin briefcase bought in a thrift
store near Lake Elsinore, California, a Felix Gonzales-Torres endless
multiple reading, "Nowhere better than this place" (the one reading
"Somewhere better than this place" is tucked away in a file drawer in my
studio - in case I need it later), a Lorna Simpson glass wishbone,
several Day-of-the-Dead figurines and a big fossilized ammonite. There
is a window to my right through which I look out over urban gardens with
laundry lines blowing in the breeze. I can hear the sound of birds and
the gentle tapping of my fingers at the keyboard.

"My axes are not so geographically logical" (Greg Ulmer)
Locations are assemblages of indicators, sites of multiplicities,
comprised of confluences of flows: semiotic, material, social, poetical,
political, artistic. Differences in directions and speeds converge
momentarily into braided streams, a temporary collocation. Suspended in
the turbulence we find millions of particles. Some colliding, others
softly slipping past one another...slipping through holes in the system.
Other particles are on parallel trajectories. The locus being the
weaving together of the field of representation (writing, art), the
field of reality (the world) and the field of subjectivity (self).
Location is always forever transient and wandering. This fluctuation
influences "How aesthetic fields are positioned, even as they mutate,
stratify or implode (Jordan Crandall)

Ever onward,
Eve Andree Laramee


----------------------------------------------


Carlos Basualdo <Cbasualdo@aol.com> writes:

Et tout le reste est literature.

The question of localization is quite puzzling to me. I understand -or
maybe I should say, I believe I understand- its intentions, but I can
not help thinking that it relies entirely on a act of faith. I am
-somebody is- asking you to believe that I am here, that I have a
history and that I can describe the place were this history is currently
unraveling. In the net we are very close. Maybe closer than ever, in the
intimacy of the act of writing, sketching, almost without anything in
between. At the same time -and this is purely common sense, whatever
that may mean- we are probably very far away from each other, from each
of the others with whom we are close. I am very interested in the
proximity of that distance and with the strange relation with faith that
it seems to impose. Bracha mentioned death in her posting. I cannot help
but finding a relation between that notion of death that she seems to be
referring to and that "faith" that I am trying to describe here. And
even if it is a very far reached question, I cannot help but wonder
about the political and aesthetical implications of that distant
proximity with that death and this faith that we all share in the net.
That constitute our "common ground.

Besides that faith, when asked about myself, I feel tempted to make
fictions. To deceive with truth. I am somewhere in New York, in front of
a jumping figurine of a seated Donald Duck, which sits on my white desk
a few inches in front of a 4 Sailor Jupiter Japanese doll. By my side,
on a board, pictures of the statue of Ludovica Albertoni by Bernini -his
last piece, for what I've heard. I've always thought that it's an
ecstasy, but in the cappella where I saw it in Rome, already a couple of
years ago, I was told that she's agonizing.

Carlos Basualdo


--------------------------------------------


Alan Myouka Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com> writes:

Re introductions - I'm Alan Sondheim, and I moderate two email lists on
the Net, Cybermind and Fop-l. I also edited a Lusitania book, Being on
Line, and have been involved for years in Net activities. I write a
great deal on virtual subjectivity, community, language, body, and
sexuality, exploring what someone has called a "dirty conceptualism" as
a way of approaching the virtual in general.

I've been interested in issues of Net exhaustion, "defuge," and things
like list aura - how lists themselves are dirty, with backchanneling,
conferencing, newspapers and magazines, etc., all forming part of the
surrounding environment. And I've tried to work through psychoanalytical
processes, which I think are critical for understanding the power of Net
community, sexuality, and exchange. Finally, I've written on the
development of the Net in terms of language dispersion theories, looking
back at Sumeria and Babylonia - and the spread of Akkadian/Sumerian,
etc. – and thinking through this process in relation to ActiveX, Java,
Perl, Html, etc. - seeing the Net in terms of languages, fluxes,
"hand-shaking."

I have been interminably working on both graphics and an Internet Text,
which is some 2500 pp. in length, and advailable in separate files with
an index at

URL:     http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/internet_txt.html

MIRROR with other pages at:   http://www.anu.edu.au/english/internet_txt

IMAGES: http://www.cs.unca.edu/~davidson/pix/

Finally, I hope to see some deep concern here with _audience_ and
darknet (text-based applications of the older Net) culture - watching
the fading of the MOOs, etc. - or at least the changing demographics -
in relation to the newer corporate audio-visual culture emerging through
the Web – with all its attendant mystifications and productions of the
Net consumer.

Alan


-----------------------------------------------

Steven Ball <sball@starnet.com.au> writes:

Them habitants of du villageois inte'rieur of has him THE ONE of fogos
of d'en them of same d'ellos d'ellos of of transformati au loin of
scarcity of the delta, dark of nights of d'eso of l'estacio'n of the DES
e'chelles of cet ignited lumineux are d'adentro. Strong him they would
press d'orage of loaded of The one of fogos of ravaged l'afliccio'n of
d'en It of chargement of The one of with of riavviamenti, of l'eso EC I
in tant that certain protection of of the DES caractères of d'orage of
was confus even.

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script injuste of, bateaux of the DES habitants of those of gepluendert
you would very d'eran of villageois of tel Wracke dans him frequency and
of with d'introdujo joint To the one of temps moins of mauvais d'a6no of
of watches over that je me joins.

Gepluenderten that messages had to them of d'arreglado of goodses of
profollowed commande culturelle of had of, that one e'te' insulating
d'Al of solidite'


----------------------------------------------


Stephen Linhart <Stephen123@aol.com> writes:

I suppose my location is near the intersection of digital-artist and
hippie- intellectual.  I tend to be dismayed by wordy arguments and
rhetoric.  I think of art as fundamentally an esthetic enterprise and
the idea of challenging art as a 'mere' style.  On the other hand I
think it is possible that where there is no death there can be no art.
I like Van Gogh because he can make me gasp with appreciation.  I like
Mondrian for the same reason.

The commercial world seems to think it's driving the growth of the
Web/Internet and that Push or commerce or Java or whatever is a critical
next step.  I think it's ease of publishing that is driving the growth.
It's easy to make a page and make it available to millions of people.
So people make pages.  So there's content.  So people use the Web.

In any case, the result is a medium in which artists need to create (or
at least choose) what used to be imposed by relatively static local
socio- cultural context.  My view is that the sculpting of context is
the core of much of the most exciting Web art.

- Stephen Linhart
www.stephen.com/mondrimat



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