after describing izzzzi to a friend as "barely an idea" i recognized my longstanding disposition towards what might be called the hyperbolic undersell.
from the very beginning almost two decades ago the unrehearsed hot sentence from an early monome interview was something like "it doesn't do anything by itself. isn't that wonderful?"
this is likely just schizmogenesis in its natural habitat, defining oneself in opposition to that which one opposes. in this case the overselling of promises. particularly in technology, where nothing is new, and we are sold worse versions of old things which actively undermine our happiness and humanity.
maybe it's just the idea of selling in general.
maybe you just need barely an idea which leads to radical transformation, where you then see everything differently.
in november i made a lot of drawings. i feel them leaading to something else, but for now you can see some of them here. they'll likely vanish at some point, however.
i finally wrote something about a weird project we've been enjoying with friends for the last six months. it's now open invitation.
"it's become a sort of collaborative daily newspaper written by friends. on the surface the parameters feel antithetical: it's ephemeral, it only changes daily, hardly anyone sees it. this is precisely what makes it interesting."
we've been running now for half a year, some observations:
technically, izzzzi challenged some of my grumpy opinions about computers. given the simplicity of the project, i figured it should just be files glued together with shell scripts, maybe something people just log into a server with a terminal to use. but of course any normal person just wants (reasonably!) to use a web browser. and after a somewhat silly journey into "low level" cgi with python, we (it's a collaboration) ended up just using flask (a "lightweight" framework). i like to say this project is "500 lines of code with 10k lines of dependencies." it's really a black box, yet i found myself constantly discovering "idiosyncracies" which required taking apart the black box to figure out why the dumb legos didn't fit together right. but, this was my first web-based project despite having programmed computers for three decades. i've been guilty of redesigning systems at ever lower levels in pursuit of a specific goal. the original goal almost gets lost as the system itself takes so much focus, spending all energy on perfect tools. the takeaway is perhaps that while there is no elegance to be seen, the possibilities of creating alternative social infrastructure is remarkably within reach.
maybe there are different ways.
karen gwyer - pikku-kokki (2013)
tangerine dream - love on a real train (1983)
underworld - pearl's girl (1996)
[mp3] - 17:49
"All of this public funding and community involvement has had an enormously beneficial albeit unacknowledged and uncosted effect on the development of Silicon Valley and other hi tech industries. Capitalist entrepreneurs often have an inflated sense of their own resourcefulness in developing new ideas and give little recognition to the contributions made by either the state, their own labour force or the wider community. All technological progress is cumulative it depends on the results of a collective historical process and must be counted, at least in part, as a collective achievement."
1ST GENT. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
2ND GENT. Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
That brings the iron.
birch overheard us talking about ginkos
now birch is showing off
look look look
desert iii, ocean iv (2024)
part of Fortune Teller, a group show on view September 20 through October 20, 2024 at Luck Dragon, Delhi, NY.
daniel o'sullivan - the oscillating love (instrumental) (2024)
teebs - prayer i (2019)
jessika kenney and eyvind kang - no sound (2024)
[mp3] - 17:40
the season where a disproportionate number of photos taken feature things-in-bowls
(seen here, nigella in k ceramics)
panoram - limbo (2024)
purelink - maintain the bliss (2021)
carlota - cool in the pool (2020)
[mp3] - 13:50
a word for a feeling of anticipation equal parts enthusiasm and anxiety ahead of the near certainty of an avalanche harvest, the moment we dreamt when planting an orchard so long ago and the energy required in attempt to respect that original vision and figure out what to do with it all
"The ubiquity of algorithmic recommendation and prediction systems may also make it easier to recognize one’s own variability: When confronted with what past behavior suggests we should want, we may just as often balk and disavow it as let it frictionlessly proceed. In that situation, one is surprised only by one’s own refusal to comply — negation rather than discovery becomes the principle of self-realization."
oftentimes construction is literally a practice of figuring out how to live with past mistakes and assumptions
the walk from the house to the barn is just long enough to begin daydreaming, upon arrival invariably i will ask myself: why am i here
"To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire-builders. Solitude, the one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as valuable only by ornithologists and cranes.
Thus always does history, whether of marsh or marketplace, end in paradox. The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate. But all conservation of wildness is self-defeating, for to cherish we must see and fondle, and when enough have seen and fondled, there is no wilderness left to cherish."
mondo grosso - labyrinth (2017)
olof dreijer - hazel (2024)
billie eilish - everything i wanted (2019)
[mp3] - 18:42
in celebration of big round numbers, cleanly quantifying time which actually feels infinitely far away through a haze of recollections. twenty years ago i finished this short record and recently i agonized over pretending to be one of those important bands that reissue their twenty year old record, all remastered and include extra bits that somehow accumulated significance while hiding somewhere for so long. i present to you, none of that. these are the original mp3 files encoded however people did things in 2004. perhaps, the burning hills imparted some spark or sparkle, difficult to recreate, time and place never the same.
aphex twin - sekonda e,+2 (1995)
broadcast - follow the light (2006)
ro - senescence (2009)
[mp3] - 15:23
the phone battery was swollen
so we removed it
like bad lunch meat on a sandwich
and then proceeded to eat the
circuit board and screen and case as
the bad battery juice didn't touch those parts
so they were still good
satoshi and makoto - crepuscule leger (1991)
germaine tailleferre - nocturne (~1927)
the drums - searching for heaven (2011)
[mp3] - 12:40
on a shared computer that we all log into at once, maybe we don't need complex chat applications. how about two one-liners?
tehn@kaatsk:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/say
echo -e $(date +'%m/%d %H:%M') - $(whoami) - $@ >> /home/kaatsk/said
tehn@kaatsk:~$ cat /usr/local/bin/what
tail -n 10 /home/kaatsk/said
say adds a line. what shows the last ten entries.
since kaatsk is our shared folder (where we all can also edit the website) the said file is just a log of our chatter. when logging into the system we are shown recent messages.
it ends up looking something like:
02/29/2024 19:35 - tehn - new things
02/29/2024 19:35 - gavin - toosick
02/29/2024 19:35 - palomakop - hi this is a test
02/29/2024 19:36 - davek - yowhat
02/29/2024 19:37 - graham - i have not read the book
02/29/2024 20:05:14 - burnheart - last
03/01/2024 10:05:02 - darwin - it was a really fun meeting last night!
03/02 19:50 - tehn - i removed the second, and the year. we are losing control.
blonde redhead - in particular (2000)
kali malone - moving forward (2024)
ellen arkbro and johan graden - love you, bye (2022)
[mp3] - 17:10
hesitation
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co