seneca was born in the year 4 BC, some time before the invention of the Internet.

mp3↘ - 17:51

mp3↘ - 18:25

mp3↘ - 13:22

added scores to hypervisibility

selections from last year now live at drawings

hypervisibility is a new collection of music.

George Bernard Shaw (maybe↗)

mp3↘ - 14:13

time passed. three months ago we finished a new revision of the arc. it's a one hundred percent redesign, but the new aspects are not overt. so instead of trying to hype and spotlight the new, we made art.

four slowly phasing arpeggios, playing an old beloved synthesizer into analog tape feedback. the projection started as ring juggling captured by jay gilligan, which i then projected onto the winter snowscape at night and recaptured, which was then projected onto the wall while the arc stepped through time.

mp3↘ - 14:03

• tom jennings, [wabi tek sabi], 2011

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward -- reversing cause and effect. I call these the “wet streets cause rain” stories. Paper’s full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

• Michael Crichton, Why Speculate? (via Alexander Yan's excellent [mailing list])

mp3↘ - 9:47

Humpty Dumpty smiled contemptuously. “Of course you don’t — till I tell you. I meant ‘there’s a nice knock-down argument for you!’”

“But ‘glory’ doesn’t mean ‘a nice knock-down argument’,” Alice objected.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

• Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)

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mp3↘ - 13:04

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.

"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."

[izzzzi]

we've been running now for half a year, some observations:

• writing is easier and less restrained compared to the agonizing process of drafting a public blog post.
• i've been taking more photos. snapshots.
• sharing is not a chore. it's not feeding the void or public identity formation. even a small effort is a gift to friends. what we're up to. but the minor pressure is also helpful to just for a moment consider what happened during the day or what was thought about.
• side conversations are frequently sparked by something shared. in person or phone or text or email.
• we live in an age where it is very difficult to imagine joining yet another thing. and it is really difficult to explain how something might be fundamentally different.

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.

mp3↘ - 17:49

• Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology (1995) [web]

• george eliot, middlemarch (1871)

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.

mp3↘ - 17:40

the season where a disproportionate number of photos taken feature things-in-bowls

(seen here, nigella in k ceramics)

mp3↘ - 13:50

• rob horning, ordinary unhappiness [web]

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."

• aldo leopold, sand county almanac (1949)

mp3↘ - 18:42

[tomorrowperhaps]

mp3↘ - 15:23

mp3↘ - 12:40

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.

mp3↘ - 17:10

mp3↘ - 18:30

1. surrender
2. negotiate
3. avoid
4. control
5. destroy

farthest skies is a new collection of music.

The initiative for making music has been shifted to the production side and so did the perception of the process. The colour of the composition, musical inspiration and decisions, all these aspects have been shrunken a little bit perceptional in favour of the production."

• rashad becker, interviewed by robert hencke (2008) [web]

we experienced this recently while attempting to retrieve video footage from a MiniDV tape. we have the same DV camera which works fine, but it uses firewire, a port standard which quietly went away over the decades. i assumed there'd be a cheap firewire to usb C or whatever dongle but for some reason it's either more complicated than that or search engines have gotten so terrible that i am no longer adept at using the internet.

as a result, the computer from the same era as the camera (almost two decades old) became suddenly invaluable: it was the only way for us to retrieve the footage. of course, this old computer can longer meaningfully connect to the internet (due to apple abandoning the OS amidst ever-accelerating web standards) so we transfer files the old fashioned way with thumb drives.

surely this happens constantly with all sorts of physical media, but also file formats. i can't imagine going through the complexity of assembling a virtual machine emulating my early 2000's music studio setup and expect abandoned DAW sessions to function.

the celebration of each innovation obfuscates the coincident impediment to preserving what came before. it's only after some time has elapsed that we suddenly realize that our previous tools and collections of work are no longer accessible: we'd already moved on to shinier tools and continued to generate more work, both of which will surely meet the same fate as those who came before.

these machines that we stopped using, kept for perhaps sentimental reasons or simply because our barn accepts everyone and all, these machines are alive again as portals to past work. these are not new ideas, but my curiosity lies in the timeframes: identifying the vanishing and reemergence of relevance.

• gilles deleuze, negotiations (1990)

the great thing about following a score is you don't need to improvise

• byung-chul han, psychopolitics (2017)

mp3↘ - 12:17

hickory has dropped. sleep well.

• ursula le guin, bryn mawr commencement address (1986) (included in the collection, space crone by silver press)

• rob horning, epic forgetting (2023) [web]

mp3↘ - 17:49

• italo calvino, if on a winter's night a traveler (1979)

mp3↘ - 17:01

new materials, awaiting new designs

drawing, design, print two color silkscreen collaboration with kelli cain, 2011.

mlr inspired landscape cutup.

"the history of the internet."

"again?"

mp3↘ - 19:34

sculpture of home of creature later becomes actual home of creature

the most important post-collapse skill is friendship

1. bound. forty foot ladder. you think you need to, but once getting that high you question why. it's impossible to move around. borrowed from a friend who says oh you hold onto it, because they don't want to move it either. a cursed object. somebody probably wants it, for some reason, but it's also too hard to find that person. so it just takes up space. luckily this one doesn't deteriorate. but others in their same situation do. many you didn't even ask for, but were bestowed into your perpetual care. in a way these objects might be a metaphor, but in this case you actually are really stuck with a ladder.

2. seen. things you stored, for historical value and anti-obsolesense, too much forgotten technology. a black cable appears to have some grey something on it. on closer inspection it is actually a grey cable covered in black. this object was stored for over a decade without humidity control and assuredly dusted multiple times with bird shit. for some reason it was brought into a previously clean part of the barn, which now has what the victorians would have called "bad air." every object and surface is now suspicious.

3. unseen. after a protracted vinegar-fueled reclamation of space from advancing mold, you eye a pile of forlorn rugs and army blankets which have moved rarely over the years. their smell is known before approaching. bagging begins, fully masked and gloved, but a different adversary emerges. a burning in your arm, explosive buzzing, instinctively you perform the timeless way of fleeing from the invisible. the hornet bites cause your hand and arm to swell to unrecognizability, everyone finds this hilarious.

universal question diagram. recreated drawing from the age of alchemy. possibilities and interconnectedness. screen from 2015.

I want us to be a part of the ocean, not the boat."

• everest pipkin, interviewed by hyperallergic [web]

[video]

so we made a new thing
but really an old thing
from over a decade ago
and so there was this impulse that we had to
somehow make the new thing actually new
with a fancy new application or something
but i guess we decided not to do that
this light pattern is an experiment we made a few months ago
with a demoscene-era plasma technique
the important stuff all happens in one line of code
which we wanted to mention simply to spread the concept of
permacomputing and also
despite the grid fundamentally being interactive
sometimes a visual or sound can powerfully stand on its own
like when nine inch nails had this same new thing on stage
just visualizing and hell they are still cooler than us
but really the point is
the grid hasn't meaningfully changed for two decades
still doing nothing yet
containing endless horizons to explore new instrument design
a vehicle for new skills and
perhaps making new friends
but we guess everyone knows that by now
so it's new and it's the same
and that's mostly why there's not really a new killer app
lesser reasons include
us opening an art store and
still tending a farm and finding time to make music
such as this forthcoming softbits cut you're hearing now
but we are glad to be building these again
and look forward to seeing what comes next

mp3↘ - 18:16

didn't really take this seriously despite him being a doctor, the delivery made it sound like a joke

this remains one of the more profound truths i missed at first pass

• Permacomputing Aesthetics: Potential and Limits of Constraints in Computational Art, Design and Culture [pdf]

apocalypse glow, borrowed studio
preparing sounds and ways of being
to share with those who might listen

seeing different light, with friends

however, the spruce seem to think everything is fine

smoke travels two thousand miles, coloring moonlight
no rain, fire warnings, freeze alerts, all together
interspecies anxiety, dawn breaks again

• Anna Tsing, A look inside The Mushroom at the End of the World [web]

(attempting to revive forgotten pathways as i've lost my notes)

mp3↘ - 14:48

• Ted Chiang, Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? [web]

mp3↘ - 13:30

enlisted an older drawing for our friend's music project tshirt. [web]

zero-based numbering [web] is a certain way of thinking about arrays (tables of numbers): the first element is zero, not one. this makes sense for various reasons we will not explore.

every morning i grind coffee for what i imagined to be thirty seconds. granted the tempo slides all over the place and i usually lose count and estimate but i absolutely positively always START at 1 and triumphantly END at 30. if i actually believed thirty seconds elapsed, with perfect timing, i'd still be wrong.

it'd only be 29, because i'm starting at one, not zero. i'm counting the intervals between announcing each boundary, and as such come up one short if one is the start.

granted, counting is often not about precise time, but maybe if we knew to start at zero we'd be less angry on reaching 10, or our friends might find better hiding places.

mp3↘ - 13:51

"Social media offered sociality for a society without solidarity."

• Rob Horning, Identitätszwang [web]

imagine, rather than accepting the doubling of processing speed, we celebrated the halving of power consumption as progress.

that we understood "fast enough" and took great pride in optimized code.

where we knew what came before and remembered and carefully considered new propositions.

and we worked together.

mp3↘ - 17:38

how to bind a book:

• start a synth company, move to a farm
• house an intern to help figure out extremely random ambitions, make a friend
• wait at least ten years
• start an art store that hosts classes
• invite even-more-accomplished friend back to teach book binding
• take the class yourself

thanks burgess! [web]

maybe this is why every few years (remember, thirteenth redesign of the grid) i panic after not being confident that the LEDs are on the right way and cannot for the life of me remember which side is anode or cathode and how that relates to the schematic diagram. it's like forgetting basic geometry (which i also do).

so, here, enshrined:

ANODE (+) -|>|- CATHODE (-)

go forth into the light, may you also employ millions of LEDs with great certainty

we're assuming this hilarious accusation was simply due to the (rather modern) monospaced font and stylistic lack of capitalization. we've since instituted Georgia and Capitalization at luckdragon.

perhaps media illiteracy will lead to deep suspicion of poetry typed on mechanical typewriters. i mean, it must be fake by the communication standards we've all lovingly embraced, standards imposed through corporate homogenization and the numbing education of professional creatives.

mp3↘ - 10:56

• pluralistic.net, Cory Doctorow [web]

"We mostly only close materials loops when it’s ‘economically viable’ to do so. By and large, what that means is that it takes less energy to recycle the material than it does to create it in the first place, which is true for aluminum, steel, and glass, but not for materials like plastics or concrete. But the promise of access to renewable energy is that it changes this equation, putting processes that are intrinsically energy-intensive, like recovering the carbon from plastics for reuse or desalinating seawater to make it potable, on the table. It doesn't matter how much energy a process needs if it is inexpensive, doesn’t limit the energy available to others for their use, and is non-polluting. There's a virtuous circle here too: the faster that renewable energy systems are up and running, and the closer we can get to achieving this potential, the more that we can apply that clean energy to repurposing the materials of our current technological systems to build out the physical infrastructures of our new ones. Not beating swords into plowshares, but recycling cars into electric trams. We live on a sun-drenched blue marble hanging in space, and for all that we persist in believing it's the other way around, that means we have access to finite resources of matter but unlimited energy. We can learn to act accordingly."

Resilience, Abundance, Decentralization, Deb Chachra (2022) [web]

...

i'm skeptical about recycling (this [book] is a good summary) but i realize part of "it's impossible" is based on the current/prevailing economic definition of "impossible." Deb's vision is not technoutopianism--- it's not the same as sociopathic fuckwit billionaires doing geoengineering for profit in the name of saving us all from their own past transgressions. i read this as the best version of solarpunk--- a combination of resourcefulness and cooperation.

know your woodchips: beginner woodcarver, expert carver, pole lathe, power lathe, dull chainsaw, sharp chainsaw, table saw, router, wood chipper, felling axe, beaver, squirrel, porcupine-- they are all different.

these here are from a spoon blank, cut rapidly by an expert, with an axe forged by another expert, friend of the first expert.

(i am none of the experts above).

(not new but new to me)

mp3↘ - 14:07

snow melt underwater meadow

enya's carribean blue (1991) [wikipedia], the first few intro bars, looped for ten minutes.

if you find yourself disappointed upon arriving it's conclusion, i highly recommend downloading the file and using mplayer [1]. run from the command line you can use the left bracket key to slow it down. 0.83x really lands. but you'll still likely be sad when it ends.

[1] [wikipedia]. you can also use mpv with the --audio-pitch-correction=no option. or maybe i should just upload the slow version. [2]
[2] update: [ok here] via sox input.mp3 output.mp3 speed 0.83

mp3↘ - 18:36

again visiting the church in the video game looking for clues. repetitive seven eight SQ-80 organ through BBD (thanks ezra!)

about a decade ago, visiting alpine lakes in the high sierras. eight thousand foot elevation, snow melt runoff, still the coldest body of water i swam. and a profound encounter with mosquitos. when overwhelmed, running as fast as possible hoping they could not catch up. but they do eventually.

mp3↘ - 14:16

• Edward Abbey

mp3↘ - 16:00

• assembly language
• icelandic sheep
• circuit trace widths
• thatched roofs

"What is this weekend about?"

"It's to remember the people who were killed in the war, isn't it?"

"Which war?"

"Any war. People who have..."

(interrupting) "I hope it's not to celebrate the War of Independence, come on!"

"All the wars."

• Depeche Mode: 101 [web]

"There were fights that would break out in food co-ops—they were called the “Twinkie wars.” People wanted the food co-op to carry the highly processed, no-doubt-bad-for-you foods that they could get in the supermarket, and the more PMC types did not want that."

• On the Origins of the Professional-Managerial Class: An Interview with Barbara Ehrenreich - Dissent Magazine [web]

saturday march 4 1pm EST on NTS 2 [web]

an assemblage of sounds, old and new and forgotten together.

thank you to beau beaumont for the invitation. NTS is a gem.

(archive and elaboration forthcoming)

mp3↘ - 19:28

"i needed more hands, i made very specialized virtual hands. i did not make a virtual hand training facility or virtual hand factory or virtual hand playground."

[web]

(brilliantly improvised not by me at band practice this evening)

mp3↘ - 18:36

unfamiliar territory: i've written a piano composition that i cannot play.

it's a strange reversal in that i'm used to writing code that effortlessly executes the humanly impossible. but physically playing this piece is what brings it to life, so now i'm into month two of dexterity training.

mp3↘ - 12:06

now to transport those tapes from that place to this place.

• meticulously design a specific solution
• repurpose an existing thing which sufficiently addresses the issue
• identify that the problem actually does not exist

trying to stay awake and not fight various alluring nonexistent battles

The objective should not be to extract economic value from objects and materials we consider to be waste, but to reimagine what we consider waste to be."

• An Ontology Of Electronic Waste [web]

mp3↘ - 16:20

"The basic principle was that the client depended on his patron for protection and assistance, financial and otherwise, in return for a variety of services rendered, including votes in elections. Later Roman writing is full of rather high-flown rhetoric from the patron class on the virtues of the relationship, and miserable complaints from the side of the client about the humiliations they have to go through, all for a second-rate meal. In the Twelve Tables, the rule simply states: 'If a patron has done harm to his client, he is to be cursed'-- whatever that meant."

• Mary Beard, SPQR

mp3↘ - 10:41

• Geert Lovink, Extinction Internet [web]

despite numerous conversations and scribblings i hadn't spend much time investigating the potential origins of my, uhm, quest (and its accompanying obsessions and ideologies.) a fellow traveller writes perceptively:

"From time to time, certain small groups of tech-savvy people happen to grow up in the same place and at the same time as certain powerful new technologies. Because of this unique background, these people - and these people alone - are able to very clearly perceive visions of the future which are both glorious and 100% technically feasible, the technical feasibility being something that they feel in their bones by virtue of direct experience, or at least direct observation. Those people therefore mistake these visions for being not just compelling but actually being inevitable, for being the obviously, undeniably natural and pre-destined state of the world, for being exactly what everybody else would want too, if only they understood things properly! But these futures aren't inevitable, they're actually mostly wishful thinking and they simply don't come to pass."

• solderpunk, Orphans of Netscape [web]

this reckoning can also be liberatory? in that disappointment is real but perhaps the secret knowledge was actually just circumstantial.

i think this was what i needed to understand in order to move forward.

mp3↘ - 13:46

(thanks to k for the discoveries)

"high on metaphysics"
"normal life file structure"
"performative kindness in the age of the global village"

mp3↘ - 17:58

"The past is the enemy in their eyes— a stubborn foe, always resisting the future."

• mark w. brown, the headless vase

years ago a hawk ate most of a mouse on the dock, and a skeleton rested there for more years, and now there there is a beautiful multicolored patch of moss. a sort of reincarnation.

a few days ago we took the next step. lines is now community funded, and belongs to the community itself. despite the de-branding from the start, monome's heavy presence was foundational given how many discussions revolved around our open-source instruments. over time this became less central yet we continued to feel compelled to cover server costs. the monthly fees were not insignificant, yet this move to signify ownership and shift to direct support has been profound.

in two days the community raised enough funds to operate the server for three years. this is an order of magnitude more than we were aiming for.

the early days of a new project are always a joy. as the years wore on, moderating the community remained a net positive despite more frequent stressful episodes. in recent years, however, the scales tipped and we (my friends who volunteer to moderate) have been wavering. there were many moments when i wanted desperately to burn it all down.

do not underestimate the power of giving things away. what is this weird lightness? seeing a project refocus and reenergize. it will live on. it is free.

the snow departed and a new year arrived.

cleaning out digital closets by cramming everything in a single much larger closet.

found this photo of the workspace from august 2017. there is energy.

• gunther anders, excerpted from recent aeon essay [web]

the third way, i suppose, is to cease believing in the idea of progress altogether

fifty degree drop in an afternoon, blowing wind, rain to ice, water down the mountains, seemingly unfreezable, mist rising above the waves of the brook

• Erik Davis, The Burning Shore [web]

early attempts at cataloging the language of shiitake

• William James, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life, excerpted by Ursula Le Guin in the introduction to The Ones who Walk Away from Omelas

ideals as "probable cause for future experience" feels like a pretty good reason to have a few ideals! how do we talk about ideals?

schizmogenesis is the creation of division. graeber and wengrow cite it frequently in groups primarily defining themselves in opposition to one another. to say, it's been happening basically for eternity.

seeing how our present moment inclines one to be more or less against everything, the challenge becomes speaking about ideals on their own. not simply in reaction to garbage.

• Ursula Le Guin, The Day Before the Revolution (1974)

here at monome we are versed in a wide range of technologies.

when we teach soldering workshops i like to repeat something conveyed to us when we worked for a cinematic robotics company: hot glue was originally developed for the electronics industry, but co-opted by the craft world. in some sort of futile missionary work to elevate the reputation of this very useful material, we show how it strengthens and insulates wire connections.

i have no idea if this story is even true. and we also employ hot glue like any unsuspecting scrapbook enthusiast.

listen to music
outside
in the daylight
under a tree

which is a radical departure considering my currently favorite-named thing, isms: technically correct in a meandering poetic-philosophical way yet also completely obfuscating and i dare say, stupid.

weird is relative

we saw the way but then got distracted

• Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

• (allegedly) Alan Kay (allegedly quoting Robert Heinlein)

fifty years on, contemplating how far into the future they thought they were inventing. how many different futures there may have been. the potential recklessness of precipitating the truly unpredictable.

accelerated season willow fluff lands on pond outer space

in celebration of unseasonably hot weather, a capture from end-of-winter peculiar ice formations during melt-flood.

• dawn of everything, graeber and wengrow

hello again.

it's been just over a year. numbers don't capture the spirit, yet allow a different sort of processing. i was going to write an analysis, but my first reflection (since deleted) was writing is hard. (the second, what matters.)

solstice tomorrow.

change.

black/black

it's easier to imagine ________ than it is to imagine the end of the world.

the conscious universe [web]

video [mp4] for the serpent by jay gillian.

from gnostics.

meteorological mp3↘

navigating changing waters, time flows, where did november disappear to?

last month i transformed myself into a turkey tail mushroom.

welcoming the approaching darkness

current research:

• picohydropower
• portable pump organ construction
• japanese

listening:

• topic of cancer [youtube]
• chronotrigger [web]
• digital capitalism to acid communism [web]

senescence mp3↘

wind carried
soft
explosions

in july we visited the sea.

when is next time.

these grey oyster mushrooms emerged on the exact same day last year.

mycelial consciousness, revolution of celestial spheres.

"I ascribe space a certain significance with regard to death. It’s as if I’ve buried loved ones there. I can’t touch these stars but can they now? And somehow I understand that everyone is always ever together, because I don’t feel the distance that their deaths would imply. They are in me, and we are all ever in space. I am not the only person to experience the night sky in this way. We’ve all looked up and felt that sense of awe."

• angela guyton, the awe of space (2021) [web]

ecstatic to be the caretaker of one of these drawings, which i responded to viscerally on first sight. reading the later-released text illuminates an uncanny resonance, a previously hidden message landing perfectly.

soundtrack: roberto donnini, tunedless (1980) [youtube]

(adapted from m. beth dempster's thesis on environmental studies (1998) via haraway)

• Biography of John Luther Adams

grey sky, diffused light, hidden sun, time unknowable

please stay

yesterday in the orchard
i was greeted by a snake
who stood up in the grass
so that we might see
one another
more clearly
while their toad friend
fled

new spell acquired:

go slow

saturday i will play for seven hours in the atrium, while visitors see art and architecture and plants. (so far i've practiced for about twenty minutes... a pretty astonishing preparation/performance ratio.)

we have created space for more stories to unfold: half hidden. [web]

both the monotheistic promise of heaven and techno-utopianist solutionism.

which are in so many ways the same.

(staying with the trouble is about reframing our relationship to the world by weaving new patterns and staying radically present.)

related:

"for most people optimism and hope become part of the toolkit through which they give themselves momentum. actually if you get those tools out of your kit, all of these other tools fall into place and become useful. all these things that those tools tell you you can't use. it's like if you have some universal screwdriver and it sortof works with most screws and when it doesn't you still kinda get it and use it anyway even though it isn't the right size. if you fucking throw away that universal screwdriver... positivity... and then look at what other tools you actually have and start using the right tools... you don't fucking need hope, you don't need promises of utopia, you don't need promises of heaven, you don't need promises of a next life... it's all fucking bullshit. if we're always running away from unhappiness with those promises of utopia and promises of heaven... that's just one more way of creating a kind of cultural paralysis and distance from personal engagement with your own material conditions. getting rid of dreams and hope is really freeing."

• transcribed from terre thaemlitz: give up on hopes and dreams [youtube]

• staying with the trouble, donna haraway (2016)

ten beings
reach for the sky
as one

attempted a no-trim technique for our winter survival bunker (less tends to be harder than more)

local white pine, gapped tongue and groove, from local mill

approaching completion, feels warm already

considering the state of humankind. even though we may think we've identified a (or the) big whatever, we're perpetually overwhelmed by the small whatevers which on an individual scale appear quite large. and the big whatever is so huge it blocks out the sky: it's just the entire backdrop, so in a sense it becomes invisible.

.... .. . . ... .
. . ..... .. . . . ...
.. . . . . . ... . . ... .
meaning is not intrinsic
... . .. . ... .. . . .. . .
it is created

goth sunflower faces away from the sun

is there a spell or
plant medicine or
bit of code
to banish
automobiles and
cell phones
from my dreams

humans aren't going to survive without shifting away from competition, towards collaboration. and re-acknowledge our being a part of nature.

saw three eagles today. it's not uncommon these days. that is nice.

the virtually-unknown study demonstrated that when the cage is enriched with interaction and play with other rats along with exposure to nature, the same rats will ignore the drugs and never become addicted.

(source: michael pollan discussing your mind on plants in some interview)

rats and humans do not always get to choose their cage.

"Both our present science and our present technology are so tinctured with orthodox Christian arrogance toward nature that no solution for our ecologic crisis can be expected from them alone. Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not. We must rethink and refeel our nature and destiny."

• the historical roots of our ecological crisis, lynn white (1967) [pdf]

ed and shelly sit in a bar. ed begins.

"actually i was thinking about me and all the bad things i've done in my life."
"like what?"
"well, like when we used to go down to mosquito lake and drop boat anchors on frogs."
"why?"
"it was fun."
"yuck. do indians believe in sin?"
"what do you mean?"
"you know. original, venial, mortal. see, if you were catholic you could say a bunch of hail marys and our fathers and the slate would be wiped totally clean"
"oh right?"
"uh huh"
"and then you don't get punished or anything?"
"uh uh"
"oh wow... (pause)... what about the frogs?"
"what about them?"
"well... they're still dead"
"well that's true, but, if they were good little frogs, they'd gone to heaven"
"oh"

• northern exposure, season four (1992)

knots and ridgelines

pine needles
moss
quartz
sea water
sunshine

cloud not from today
but highly illustrates today's energy

last week i played a virtual show with about a dozen other programmer-musicians for the second edition of flashcrash[1]. the event focuses on livecoding, which has the premise of building music from code and showing the screen as it happens. my set was captured for asynchronous viewing[2].

the community that created the performance series also materialized a meta-micro-genre: mapcore, which has its own university[3].

[1] flashcrash.net [web]
[2] tehn, from flashcrash 2 [youtube]
[3] mapcorps.net [web]

• masanobu fukuoka, one straw revolution (1975)

shade map [web]

when we were looking to move rural we understood the importance of sunshine, but the best we could do was go by the often-repeated advice (for the northern hemisphere): find something with southwestern exposure. that formula is ridiculously oversimplified if you live somewhere with steep winding valleys.

i imagined the thing linked above: basically a map with date ranges showing sun exposure.

my reaction today upon discovery was a curious mix: initial enthusiasm given this is a nice use of computers processing data into physical reality usefully, but immediately boredom given a decade's familiarity with the valley's shadow-shapes, and lastly a irksome trepidation that this is the sort of data that fuels land prospecting in a time of scarcity.

which made me recall my pre-move excitement for a herd of whatever where i might fit them all with radio-frequency-id tags and have my computer display a map of their whereabouts, you know, because data is interesting... or more precisely, perhaps i didn't know where to apply my skills? now i cringe upon hearing "internet of things."

i am interested in technology yet it has become a tsunami of dread. the ship promises the shipwreck. technological solutionism is absurd, and it is the new optimism.

but standing in the presence of a tree in the wind, sun or shade, there is respite in now and being.

(this feels like a draft and i'm going to publish it anyway.)

non-metaphorical wild blueberries

sometimes you must simply close
your eyes and
open them

the american sycamore shades the chaparral ravines where i grew up. they grow well near water, even if that water is seasonal. on the opposite coast this tree is also found but not in our particular valley. we planted dozens and they seem to be at home.

phrase first used by john keats [wikipedia]

twice yearly ritual: quitting coffee
the exact dates are difficult to anticipate
go by feel

field of grass
field of pattern
field of algorithm

more machine drawings, a reminder

gnostics - aeon

we travel
the path
until
we find
ourselves
back at
the beginning
and then
we continue

skyclad iv

it's been six months since i started this project. i'd never intended to make an entry per day, but having just crossed the threshold of a full week without posting, it feels like it's time to review.

a convergence of conditions. as usual.

several months ago while listening to bill bryson i experienced deep existential dread. he was expounding upon the history of taxonomy (for his book, a short history of nearly everything, which perhaps would be better titled isn't everything just amazing and also fucked). basically, naming things and categorizing them is an area where humans can't agree much, even today.

this "log" was an experiment as a sort of linear catch-all broadcast of various projects, discoveries, interests, sudden convictions, etc. of course this is totally fine, but as the bits accumulate certain patterns emerge but overall it resembles a meticulously over-curated scrapbook without an index.

in many ways it makes more sense to just build a memex. projects go into categories, and so those projects actually become projects, instead of some underdocumented stuff in a stream of tenuously related stuff.

yet not everything is a project. for example, i considered (earlier this week) highlighting a discovery: the composer rip hayman [bandcamp], who made this incredible layered flute composition in 1977, just re-released.

or i nearly posted some thoughts related to this excellent essay, the user condition: computer agency and bevahior [web].

and i also considered deleting some previous posts which were just a little boring, or perhaps were created during some extreme mood. certain things weren't meant to last forever. digital permanence gives me anxiety on several levels.

so is it a journal? i do think this has helped me sustain momentum. to not lose the plot. (i admit, i did still manage to drift a few times).

and there's more that i haven't fully processed. public vs private. behavioral shifts, performative publishing, identity construction. feedback and conversation. optimal update frequency. technical accesibility, platform context contamination. meaning, now and tomorrow.

in closing.

i may pause this. to restructure and transform energy. it'll change, but it'll be the same.

our wok continues to transcribe stories
most fading slowly until erased through interweaving
despite retellings

is it ok to have a favorite?

the softest (japanese larch)
the most astonishing (curved-trunk apple)
the beloved species (american sycamore)
the mysterious (hollow-trunk cherry)
the best climb (mountainside ladder-branched sugar maple)
the revered (three grandmothers)

but this shagbark hickory we planted eleven years ago is a magnetic spirit.

the correlate to the rarely spoken mantra
nobody is special
is the pervasive, misread, and drippy
everyone is special

which, in the right light, can be let through

(but there still might be a favorite)

this round number 15 (which is actually 20 including the pre-production years) felt like it merited some level of acknowledgement. i started writing a "history of the grid" which quickly sprawled a dozen pages even before i reached 2006: it became a sort of memoir.

and so the art (self) business (corp) dichotomy debate quietly reemerged. trying to detangle what and why to share certain things. to sort meaning from deafening noise and false conviction. to share moments and thank sincerely without overexposure or inevitable misinterpretation.

there is a story. but perhaps a new grid is enough.

there are also apple blossoms in which to immerse ourselves.

foraged violet, ceramic by kelli cain, worn table made from the salvaged hemlock joists of our two hundred year old house.

so we re-opened the wall to unlock the door. sadly this story did not end with the discovery of long forgotten treasure.

we lived in a city, dreaming of life amidst heavy-laden fruit trees.

twelve years on, this plum's blossoms suggest that just maybe, we are here.

addition to the obscure specialized tool collection: okuda shiitake innoculation stick.

this year is snow cap shiitake in sugar maple. eighteen new logs.

horse chestnut arriving with new colors to share.

"You are strangling your life-force with words. Do not live your life searching around for answers in your word-hoard. You will find only words to rationalize your experience. Allow yourself to open up to wyrd and it will cleanse, renew, change, and develop your casket of reason. Your word-hoard should serve your experience, not the reverse."

brian bates - the way of wyrd (1983)

still reflecting on nan shepherd's the living mountain.

her writing is keenly perceptive, exhuberant, deeply appreciative: wholly celebrating the natural world. a resonating analogue of psilocybin-unveiled all-one-ness. eyes open. all senses open. mind open.

i wonder how my earlier self would've responded to theories of consensus reality and intersubjectivity.

• sarah perry, weaponized sacredness [web]

landcress. growing near watercress. both are edible and everywhere here.

(currently reading post capitalist desire by mark fisher, edited by matt colquhoun. encountered and looked up the first word, then located the second. now all i can think about is d&d.)

this morning the sky
burned bright white hiding
the mountains and hiding
the future

lichens cover about seven percent of the earth's surface. [web]

unintentional brutalist shrine/memorial for our 2011 bee colony which didn't survive the hard winter. capturing the swarm involved a willow over a bridge, partial nudity, and lots of running away.

currently reading Lo-TEK, design by radical indigenism by julia watson. tek is traditional ecological knowledge. the book surveys practices which sustained various cultures for thousands of years.

• susan sontag, interview with rolling stone (1979)

from social media content removal fail [web] by terre thaemlitz. this qoute resonates deeply with my current aversion to the internet. there's a similar exploration in the interview i linked a couple days ago, describing how mark fisher's concept of accelerationism was quickly mangled and found its way into the manifesto of the christchurch shooter.

“The romantics were prompted to seek exotic subjects and to travel to far off places. They failed to realize that, though the transcendental must involve the strange and unfamiliar, not everything strange or unfamiliar is transcendental.”

• mark rothko

(from an excellent interview with matt calquhoun about mark fisher by holly herndon and mat dryhurst [web])

the link above will probably not work in your web browser, so first here are some words about gemini [web]

gemini is a different protocol (whereas the web uses http.) gemini is a very small specification: text, links, and that's about it. images and audio and other media can be displayed by following links, but not inline. in many ways it's more like reading a book.

gemini respects privacy by design (whereas the economy of the modern web is based on surveillance.) the tiny specification makes it possible for an experienced programmer to make a gemini server or client with relative ease, whereas creating a new modern web browser is literally an insurmountable task. since files are so small and clients so simple, browsing is incredibly fast and works perfectly well on old computers.

this project is still in its early stages.

fagradalsfjall is erupting.

ceramics by kelli cain, needlework by ivar heckscher. morning light reflected by window and mirror.

slowly chasing diamonds of sunshine

new algorithm. 12" x 8" (ish), black 0.32mm pen.

where are we?

we are nowhere.

what are we doing here?

we are looking at nothing.

twelve years ago we planted over a hundred trees. tiny sticks, heeled into the earth. now this white pine is twelve feet tall and made pine cones for the first time.

does this mean we are grandparents?

• paul virilio, politics of the very worst (1999)

visiting friends

oceans become mountains. 6" x 4".

currently reading nan shepherd's the living mountain.

• everest pipkin - here is the article you can send to people when they say “but the environmental issues with cryptoart will be solved soon, right?” [web]

oceans. 12" x 8", black 0.5mm pen.

• dan fox, pretentiousness: why it matters (2016)

we've been snowed in before, but for the first time we recently experienced the diabolical slushed in

6" x 4" two color.

• erik davis, the burning shore (2021)

• david graeber

this leads the introduction of can't get you out of my head, adam curtis (2021)

sometimes i think my favorite color is black, yet i keep painting these crystalline rainbows

behold, the great northern winter tomato

• speed of darkness, muriel rukeyser (1968)

everything is fine

current research:

• decentralized communication platforms
• ham radio
• sauna/greenhouse/pool

"Our perceptions work in large part by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch."

• entangled life - merlin sheldrake (2020)

how many times can you say
this is the final time

in search of

isometric: having equal measure
isotropic: identical in all directions
isomorphic: similar appearance, different ancestry
isochromatic: same color
isochronal: having the same duration

(the image above started as an isometric projection of filtered noise.)

noise, filters, meaning.

starting merlin sheldrake's entangled life (2020) and dreaming about spring. above, dried golden oyster from last fall.

a dirge, for the death of the internet. this is the second movement of an unfinished collection.

eternal september ii mp3↘

study in layered ranges of equilateral triangles.

• callanish - gerald ponting (2000)

or perhaps all channels of transmission are like old leaky wires full of static.

partial source code for wide awake from gnostics

robert macfarlane tells us there are lost words to describe such peculiarities--- cultures with a hundred words for different snow. this word-hoard sharpens attention. ways of seeing emerge.

it's a new day, lol

recently thinking too much about digital hoarding: decades of invisible life reaching a threshold where it enters consciousness unexpectedly. photos, music collections, partially finished projects, decades of useless email.

perhaps given the modern ease of creation (including the amount of creation that happens unconsciously or against our will), erasure can be a more powerful action. to sharpen, clarify.

snow falls. machine drawn one dimensional cellular atomata. one of thirty-something. 6" x 4"

post-process, erasure of machine-drawn graphite guidelines.

years and years pass, still probably true.

• stonehenge - robin heath (2018)

new process. post plot hot water wash full immersion scrub. objectness emerges after attempted erasure.

we found this slab of old growth hemlock in the rafters of the building, forgotten in 1865. it is 22 inches wide, thrown down as simply something to walk on across the joists during construction: a portrait of past abundance and human shortsightedness. it is now a table, with renewed respect.

see source.

The more finished goods become commodities, the fewer opportunities an individual has to generate new creation. The ability to mass-produce removes the opportunity for the great many to learn to produce at all. From such a thought, a future full of consumption-only hobbies might come as no surprise.

If you commoditize toys, you remove the toymaker. If you remove the toymaker, the toy is only an object of consumption. It ceases to be an object of wonder."

• that which is unique, breaks - simon sarris (2020) web

related: julian cope's modern antiquarian BBC documentary (2000).

for example, the site generator sorts using the file's modification date instead of adding tag metadata. but then doing an after-edit requires a manual change to the date which is very easy to do, but specialized. even the idea of a "file" is starting to feel like uncommon knowledge given smartphones and cloud services. so (depending on who's looking) this is both too-technical and too-dumb.

it is wonderful.

• the carrier bag theory of fiction, ursula k. le guin (1988)

processing, plotter, white pen, arches paper, 10"x10"

this is what the search engine used to say. tehn has been around since the mid-nineties. the word has no meaning.

somehow "hello world" is no longer sufficient for self-actualization and this tiny assemblage of technical text has been played with for too long. months. computers, formatting, site generation: the former thing. so what is the latter thing?

journaling with pen and paper has been helpful over the years for maintaining momentum. it makes it easier not to "lose the plot" as erik davis would say, though i certainly acknowledge there have been moments where i've been searching in a daze.

choose a direction, go.