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05.07.08

Kart, 2008: An installation at 7 World Trade Center, 52nd Floor, as part of a fundraiser for the LMCC.

05.06.08

And yet...a possibility slumbers under our weary fingers at the end of the day, as we look distractedly out the window at the traffic backed up under a metropolitan sky. The possibility of discovering that we're all just ordinary singularities, equally lovable and equally appalling, prisoners of the authority mesh, waiting for the uprising that will empower us to change ourselves. The fact that we love communism means that we believe that our lives, impoverished by commerce and information, are ready to rise up like a wave and take back the means of producing the present. -Claire Fontaine

04.24.08

LMCC OPEN STUDIOS ARE THIS WEEKEND!

04.06.08

I was just asked to answer some of these questions: In what ways does your work reflect a concern with environmental changes? From what sources do you gather information pertinent to your art? If you feel artists have a sense of social responsibility, how does your work reflect this? How does the prevailing point of view in your work connect to the way you choose to live? Artists have the ability to grasp momentous changes, so how can the arts have an influence over public consciousness? How can art institutions—such as museums—make a crucial difference to the future? If you feel that environmental activism is a movement that will define a generation, or help to define the beginning of the millennium, what would you say is key? In what way is your choice of medium influenced by the statement you want to make? How is your career fed / fueled by politics?  (sense of idealism, despair, distress, activism) How do you think art – or a painting—can solve or help to solve global problems?  What can an artist and art really do to change the world a little? How interested are you in art’s influence over the public consciousness? Since your work reflects the state of the environment, how does your work promote or convey your critique and commitment to change/activism? I thought they were very interesting...

04.05.08

I just received this email in my inbox. Really nice! :

Collaboration available for 85¢
Whitney Museum of American Art Bookstore
April 2, 2008

The art collective M80 announces Collaboration a limited edition piece in the form of a postcard. It is not a reproduction of art, but is, through the process of interacting with the public and museum, the art itself. Created to compliment the Whitney Biennial 2008, the piece becomes fully realized when purchased, as the purchaser becomes a collaborator in the project. To receive a certificate of authenticity and edition number (out of 250), collaborators can emailM80collab@gmail.com. All proceeds go to the Whitney Museum of American Art.

M80 is a New York-based team of visual artists who use benevolent guerrilla tactics to promote awareness of, and solutions to, issues facing the art world. Begun as a think-tank in 2007, M80 seeks to identify systems and behaviors in the art world that can lead to conformity, detached commodification, gender and race exclusion, elitism, and passivity. After a process of problem identification M80 then creates projects that, via example, offer hopeful solutions.

04.01.08

A good friend of mine, Derek Hunter, (http://www.derekhunter.net/)has just constructed a truly unusual "camera" for his exploration of Islamic Mysticism, specifically the Sufi dance called whirling of which his wife (and my collaborator on the Waterpod), Mira Hunter, studies. The results of this machine brings the ideas of the "virtual camera" into the realm of the physical world, by capturing "bullet time", a surround view of an object in motion that (until now) only a virtual camera could capture.

03.23.08

31 Under 31: Panel Discussion on Photography

Last night, I spoke on a panel about women photographers that was held at 3RD WARD by Humble Arts, and moderated by Amy Stein. The rest of the panel consisted of Tema Stauffer, Dina Kantor, Cara Phillips, and Sarah Small. It was interesting to hear peoples' perspectives on the photography market, experiences with mentors, with jobs, galleries, magazines, working with models, and struggles with living in New York.

As the panel progressed, we were asked basic yet important questions that need to be asked and re-asked because they are questions that our answers constantly change for: How does your sense of gender identity inform your work? Everyone's experience is going to be different, but to contextualize each experience under the umbrella of females doing photography is important. My gender identity is a part of me that I am proud of, but I really think that to feel one's gender is essentially to feel one's humanity. We try to not let any one label define us of our work, but it is important to realize what the label means, how it is contextualized and how it changes meaning. I also think that it is important for artists to understand and know their influences if they want their own work to progress, and that mentoring is a two-way-street; if it stops with us than it is not real mentoring. We need to give and to get from all of our relationships. I am greatly inspired by Francis Alÿs because of his overall compassion that comes through in his work, his critique over systems of control that is also always present, and his participatory actions. I am also inspired by Sophie Calle for her experimentalism, Rebecca Horn, Werner Herzog, Andrei Tarkovsky, Constant Nieuwenhuis, Don Delillo, and Ray Kurzweil to name a few.

I think the consensus on living in New York was that we are all glad to live here, because of the exponential energy and opportunities available. Then we went on to discuss living expenses in New York. This standard-of-living debate is something discussed in all circles of New York life, but probably the most in the art world. I found people to be surprised to hear that I spent as much time working on art as I do, and after the panel, as I reflected on this surprise, I concluded that these are simply the choices that we make. I chose to not attend graduate school at this point in my life, so that I wouldn’t be fighting with debt for the next ten years over things that I believe can be provided by a rigorous community of art cohorts, and I choose not to pay an expensive rent, and in general live sparsely because I want to have that time to focus on artwork.

We were asked to give advice to emerging photographers, and I would answer: Be disciplined, structured with your time, put pressure on yourself to move past your own ideas. Your friends are also very important. A circle of people that you respect who you will allow to critique your in-process work has definitely been a very important part of my practice, and finally, be even-keeled about peoples' responses to your work. I get excited about art when I am making it, but rarely do I let myself be emotional about others' responses to my work. Overall, I hope it was informative and keeps these discussions moving forward.

03.16.08

At the LMCC studio building the Waterpod Beta

03.08.08

Carving the Foam

03.03.08

02.28.08

On March 1, 2008, in honor of Women’s History Month, Humble Arts Foundation, in collaboration with Ladies Lotto, will present “31 Under 31: Young Women in Art Photography,” a month-long exhibition celebrating 31 of the most innovative young women in emerging art photography under the age of 31. The Exhibition is co-curated by Lumi Tan, Director of Zach Feuer Gallery in NYC, and Jon Feinstein, Curatorial Director of Humble Arts Foundation. It opens Saturday, March 1, at 3RD WARD, 7pm. www.flakphoto.com

02.20.08

Albert Pinkham Ryder lived on thirteen cents a day, slept in a carpet roll, wandered bridges, ferries, and waterfronts of NY “Soaking up moonlight and watching shadows of sailboats upon water.” The artist must “live to paint and not paint to live. He should not sacrifice his ideals to a landlord and costly studio. A raintight roof, frugal living, a box of colors and God’s sunlight through clear windows keep the soul attuned and the body vigorous for one’s daily work”. - Quote from "Has Modernism Died?"
Robert Barry in 1968 – "The world is full of objects more or less interesting; I do not wish to add more". In Holland I visited the studios of many artists. The spaces were so large in comparison to most of the studios I have been to in New York, and many were stocked with years and years of artwork. I remember thinking how transformative our cities would be and how creative our streets would be if all of the art was displayed on the outside and the blandifying color-coded buildings were not the norm. Why the aesthetic zoning laws? Am I missing something?

01.26.08

More than half of the nearly 7 billion humans on this planet now live in cities, in ecosystems that are disconnected from the resources and places and plants and animals that we depend on for food, water and energy. To that extent, cities are 'artificial' environments -- they are not sustainable without resources that come entirely from outside them, 'mysteriously' (because the people in the city have no direct personal experience or knowledge of how their food, water and power gets to them). Children in cities can be excused for thinking food 'comes' from the grocery store, that water comes magically from the tap, and that electricity comes from the switch.
We cannot expect people to care about factory farmed animals' misery, because to them it is invisible. It is no more 'real' than what they read about in story books. We cannot expect people to care about the end of oil or the end of water or the end of electricity or the end of telecommunication because they don't see or know where these things come from, and their scarcity is a mere abstraction. I have spoken to people who lived through the Great Depression, and deliberately read first-hand accounts of the incredible suffering and deprivation that those people lived through, and their astonishment that things they had 'taken for granted' could disappear so quickly. But this is lost knowledge, and we cannot expect people to care about it now. - Dave Pollard

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well -- for we will not fight to save what we do not love. - Stephen J. Gould

01.12.08

plastic foam is changing my life

01.11.08

Chris Eastland and John Snyder visited the studio today.

01.11.08

The scar after my operation

The horse that grows in the kitchen | Scoreboard on Marguerite's fridge (she put that up there for me)

01.09.08

Scouting at Fort Tilden with John Snyder for a film.

01.05.08

Picture Theory W.J.T. Mitchell

01.04.08

Waterpod

12.30.07

Pictures from Animal Kingdom

12.18.07

Sick in the hospital:

Before Miami, I drove to Key West to scout for filming. A deserted beach...

The Shoot.

Miami. Containers. Versace Mansion. Martin Margolis Collection

12.13.07

The Way We Dress.
For the people who wonder why I don't sport a Wearable Home more often in New York, let me explain. Usually, I test them out in rural locations, in places with fewer resources, to see if their adaptation methods fail or succeed. Part of the appeal of the Wearable Home to me is the aspect of uniformity, given time, within choice. I believe that in the not so far off future, our choices could be limited for a number of reasons, and we may not even realize or notice this change in our perspective on choice. It is for the future what our uniforms are today. The Wearable Home is as much about survival as it is about being the uniform for the future. It camouflages you with everyone else just like Tommy Hilfiger, Banana Republic, Dockers, Abercrombie & Fitch, American Apparel, Benetton, Armani, Gap, Guess, Lacoste, H&M, Walt Disney, Diesel, Ralph Lauren, Polo, Dior, Hermès, Gucci, Ecko, Chanel, Calvin Klein... do today. In this case, I believe that the way to affect change is to slowly seep an idea into the fabric of society. There are Wearable Home items that I make and wear singularly - to bridge the gap between one set of uniforms to the next.

In preparation for the launch of the Waterpod, I have recently started wearing anything that references nautical culture. I can't tell you how much I am looking forward to being on the water.

12.10.07

12.09.07

Imagining the Future

The typical image of the future might be one of Tokyo: advanced gadgetry, pollutants, and space issues derived from overpopulation. It is of course a common misconception that the future is going to be slick, one propagated by movies and sci-fi stories for a ubiquitous future frequented by “replicants”, clones, and avatars. This view is quite unfeasible aside from the elements that will exist in outcrops (i.e.: forgiving any disasters in these areas, it is most likely that cities like Tokyo, Shanghai, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Delhi, New York will grow in numbers and could, perhaps, look like a scene from “Blade Runner” in the future, but their future is probably better described in the movie “Brazil”).

With economic globalization comes a backlash against it, a re-tribalization, and a fight for ones “community” and oneself. I don’t doubt that tribes (by tribes I mean any group of people, usually banned together by viewpoints and person/group identity or birth) will continue to have wars about this.

With overpopulation and the overproduction of goods will come a lack of resources (as we already are seeing), and a necessary reusing of products (think of tee-shirts made in the USA in the 60’s that have just reached India through the and can be seen on kids in Bangalore). Simultaneously, we see corporate power at a high and a global move to “Do It Yourself” – the Internet is a big propagator of this. DIY sites are all over the web, and “First World” missions to infiltrate and “help” “Third World” states, through NGO’s, companies, and grassroots movements are all based on this methodology, if successful. So again, we have an action and a reaction, a balance. As we make strides in biology and technology, we tread backwards environmentally, for example. As Vietnamese strike at a Nike factory in Hanoi, a GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) closed its manufacturing facility in Ansan, South Korea, and Zamil Steel, based in Dammam, is to build a new factory in Thailand.

As I assume that Robert Bigelow will continue to send billionaires into space more and more frequently in the future, the disparity between rich and poor will continue to grow, the need to be mobile will continue to increase (with the instability of borders, the environment, and with the ease of mobility as a social goal), and the need to reuse our finite resources will be a new economy. People will still want and be able to obtain power: monopolies, mergers, and oligopolies, “One-World Governments,” will continue to strive to be a new communism – expanding and expounding their products on masses of mobile populations. Imagining the future requires a broader scope.

11.20.07

11.17.07

We cannot win this battle to save species and environments without forging an emotional bond between ourselves and nature as well -- for we will not fight to save what we do not love. -Stephen J. Gould

11.05.07

In "The Life of Reason", the philosopher Santayana said, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." Mark Twain said, "The past does not repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes."
NYPL - Time Is Falling Asleep

10.28.07

Published on 4 Dec 2006 by Energy Bulletin. Archived on 4 Dec 2006.
Closing the 'Collapse Gap': the USSR was better prepared for collapse than the US
by Dmitry Orlov

On China "The glaciers that ripple off the peaks of Anyemaqen, a mountain range in the western China province of Qinghai, are shrinking rapidly, endangering hundreds of millions of people who depend on the waters flowing eastward through the Yellow River. 0801 02
With the rest of the country punished by record heat waves, floods and droughts this summer, it’s no wonder that Beijing, which has long viewed global warming as a problem that rich nations should solve, is waking up to the fact that China may be especially at risk.
Qinghai, a poor, Texas-size stretch of the northern Tibetan plateau where yaks outnumber humans, became the unusual focus of attention when U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson visited there Monday at the start of a four-day trip to China.
Rather than climbing the peaks, he visited Qinghai Lake, a saltwater body about 200 miles away, to demonstrate U.S. concern for the effects of global warming.
“What’s happening in terms of climate change globally is impacting the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau, and what’s happening here also impacts the global environment,” Paulson said, according to news reports.
Deaths from floods, lightning and landslides across China in recent weeks have reached nearly 700, state media reported this week, and officials warned that global warming is likely to cause even more violent weather." -San Francisco Chronicle

To read more: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/08/01/2911/ (links found on: How To Save The World)

10.27.07

FRONTIER - GALERIE ADLER

10.17.07

10.15.07

"Frontier" at Galerie Adler opens next Thursday

10.14.07
Our Blog: http://constructedmoment.blogspot.com

10.09.07

Speedvoyage Alaska 07
With the severity of price cuts and decline of reliable airline service, I am at once surprised and largely unburdened by getting to Anchorage 8 hours later. The first night was spent at the Chelsea Inn Hotel on Spenard. This hotel reminded me of all of the live-in hotels Gabriel used to take up residence in over in Oregon. The smell, the insects, the shower mold, the leaky faucet. Upon entering through the side door, a guest walks up the steps and into a fascinating lobby where deer, elk, and moose heads reside; adorning the forest-green walls, landscape paintings of the Alaskan frontier, a mini-cooler for ice, and a coffee pot. I checked out at 8am, and headed for Seward. Every moment was a view, and every 200th view was a photograph. It's day one and half of my film supply is used. At Seward I took a boat equipped with binoculars, two video cameras and two still cameras. I sat underneath the vessel to begin writing this, protected, watery scene-after-scene framed in the 2' long windows and I'm thoroughly thanking God for glass and sealed structures. After today I know that I only have 3.5 days to get as far as I can by car.

09.23.07

This is a picture of my current key chain. There are keys to three apartments in NYC, the LMCC studios,
a card for a grocery store and a gym, a compass, a light, and a tag. Being a nomad in New York is virtually impossible without friends.

09.10.07

What in water did Bloom, waterlover, drawer of water, watercarrier returning to the range, admire?

Its universality: its democratic equality and constancy to its nature in seeking its own level: its vastness in the ocean of Mercator's projection: its umplumbed profundity in the Sundam trench of the Pacific exceeding 8,000 fathoms: the restlessness of its waves and surface particles visiting in turn all points of its seaboard: the independence of its units: the variability of states of sea: its hydrostatic quiescence in calm: its hydrokinetic turgidity in neap and spring tides: its subsidence after devastation: its sterility in the circumpolar icecaps, arctic and antarctic: its climatic and commercial significance: its preponderance of 3 to 1 over the dry land of the globe: its indisputable hegemony extending in square leagues over all the region below the subequatorial tropic of Capricorn: the multisecular stability of its primeval basin: its luteofulvous bed: Its capacity to dissolve and hold in solution all soluble substances including billions of tons of the most precious metals: its slow erosions of peninsulas and downwardtending promontories: its alluvial deposits: its weight and volume and density: its imperturbability in lagoons and highland tarns: its gradation of colours in the torrid and temperate and frigid zones: its vehicular ramifications in continental lakecontained streams and confluent oceanflowing rivers with their tributaries and transoceanic currents: gulfstream, north and south equatorial courses: its violence in seaquakes, waterspouts, artesian wells, eruptions, torrents, eddies, freshets, spates, groundswells, watersheds, waterpartings, geysers, cataracts, whirlpools, maelstroms, inundations, deluges, cloudbursts: its vast circumterrestrial ahorizontal curve: its secrecy in springs, and latent humidity, revealed by rhabdomantic or hygrometric instruments and exemplified by the hole in the wall at Ashtown gate, saturation of air, distillation of dew: the simplicity of its composition, two constituent parts of hydrogen with one constituent part of oxygen: its healing virtues: its buoyancy in the waters of the Dead Sea: its persevering penetrativeness in runnels, gullies, inadequate dams, leaks on shipboard: its properties for cleansing, quenching thirst and fire, nourishing vegetation: its infallibility as paradigm and paragon: its metamorphoses as vapour, mist, cloud, rain, sleet, snow, hail: its strength in rigid hydrants: its variety of forms in loughs and bays and gulfs and bights and guts and lagoons and atolls and archipelagos and sounds and fjords and minches and tidal estuaries and arms of sea: its solidity in glaciers, icebergs, icefloes: its docility in working hydraulic millwheels, turbines, dynamos, electric power stations, bleachworks, tanneries, scutchmills: its utility in canals, rivers, if navigable, floating and graving docks: its potentiality derivable from harnessed tides or watercourses falling from level to level: its submarine fauna and flora (anacoustic, photophobe) numerically, if not literally, the inhabitants of the globe: its ubiquity as constituting 90% of the human body: the noxiousness of its effluvia in lacustrine marshes, pestilential fens, faded flowerwater, stagnant pools in the waning moon. - James Joyce (Sent by Mira's friend Raphael who is currently writing her thesis on Joyce with a Foucauldian approach.)

09.08.07

Some thoughts on Adorno in Aesthetic Theory, with more to come: Mediated by exchange value, forms are never perfect. Yet, however compromised, artworks may by the structure of their forms, the coherence of their references, and their very exalted status as fetishes "strive to escape the confines of universal practice" and function as "anticipation of a nobler condition." It's my birthday. After driving back from Valdez, through the breathtaking Thompson Pass, Bridalveil Falls, Copper town, I found an amazing Bed and Breakfast in Palmer, Alaska, and wow. It's the second night on the trip that I haven't slept in the rental car out of sheer exhaustion from travel. I will post pictures when I return to New York. The place itself couldn't have made me happier.

09.05.07

On Being Blue
It’s still amazing to me, the way that we let ourselves be completely controlled by others, or our heartstrings. These five days in Alaska are about being, alone. Not an artist colony in England, not a primordial festival in a desert with 50,000 people, but it is myself on my own, and on my birthday, which has a very sad tinge about it to me, but I did it for that reason. I want it to be a time to let myself be sad or happy or to just to see how I was feeling, to experience nature and this side of reality, to think about what my relationships mean – uninfluenced, to be minimal, to let myself be alone like we all are.

On Burning Man
The real-time five-act opera in the desert. This was the first year that I stayed through the burning of the man and the temple, however I arrived after the first time that the man burned. It burned twice. The drama was unprecedented. The feeling was conspiracy, the irony was "green", the camps were spirited and maybe the best thing to redeem the tragicomic conceptual representation of whatever this figment becomes or has become.

History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird. - J. Conrad

08.29.07
Madame, do you know what your house weighs?

Waterpod is a malleable space. It is built on a co-acting model made up of multiple collaborations. It codifies the language of mobility in contemporary architecture and simultaneously historicizes the notion of the permanent structure. It is a composition, a transport, an island, and a residence. Residing on watered bodies, the Waterpod is able to dock temporarily or travel to international waters, where it can acquire the status of a contained micronation.
As with all art forms, architecture is largely about stories: stories of its inhabitants, its community, its makers and their reflections on the past or expectations of the future. The Waterpod is heavily networked with communications technology, exemplifying a trend towards immateriality, an objectless but continuously recorded space. The Waterpod acts as a singular unit with the possibility to expand into ever-volving water communities that mutate with the tides. It connects river to visitor, global to local, nature to city, and historic to futuristic ecologies. The Waterpod is an extension of body, of home, and of community, the only permanence being change, flow, and multiplicity.

* The Westerly Wind asserting his sway from the south-west quarter is often like a monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild imprecations the most faithful of his courtiers to shipwreck, disaster, and death. - J. Conrad

08.18.07

Braziers castle, Yason Banal on a bench made by Andrea Heller, and one image of the magnificent detailing throughout.

Braziers, Oxfordshire, England, has been my home along with 15 permanent residents, 25 artists-in-residence and seven artists-as-coordinators for the past two weeks. Tomorrow is the opening, when we will display our projects on 50 acres of land.

Images of work by Rose Eken, Dennis Glaser, and Zeeshan Muhammud

A sample of Veronica Flores, Juan Pablo Echeverri, and Marianne Engel's work.

“The Celestial Telegraph"
An exploration of extra sensory perception
35 people (from 16 countries) on the Chiltern Moors have discovered a new group state of mind. Activities such as presentation of individual philosophies, myths, folklore, perceptions and dreams have enabled them to develop a hidden language. Group dancing played a large part in the creation of this altered state, fostered by group rolling – whereby rapid rotation on the ground was alternated with slow peddling of large rolls.
An altered group state ensued involving all members and even some astonished spectators. All experienced a new clarity of inner vision, which allowed a group perspective that could be applied by each person to making work seemingly effortlessly at extraordinary speed. All were documented in detail; they form the historical basis for the phenomenon. Participants look back in awe. - A summary of the experience by Dennis Glaser.

Barn on Thames is a study of a small shed in a remote locale, and its effect on its inhabitants’ personality. The space is composed of the character traits of past residents of the shed, pop icons infamously associated with sheds, conspiracy theorists, and the current denizen of the shed. B.T. represents a state of paranoia about the present and future, about technology, communications, the reality of being continuously watched and in turn becoming a watcher. It exhibits personal boundaries and their natural extension into geopolitical borders. It foretells the future in the form of a seed-bank collection, bunker-like provisions, and architectural plans preparing B.T. to be fit for its natural exposure to the periodic flow and rise of the River Thames, until a river runs through it. Floruit Tamesis, floreat Tamesis.

08.16.07

Tale of Three Cities. Being in England again (for the second time), I am, well, reminded of the first time. Yes, hitchhiking and backpacking through England with Larry at nineteen. The goal of living in every city is to keep moving, some sort of a necessary continuous movement to grow with the place, and to live with the place, is a generous requirement. In every city I have resided in, I have attempted to move to at least three different neighborhoods within that city, although usually I can't help but to move more than that.
Boston: Brighton, Allston, Jamacia Plain, (Everette)
Portland: NE, SW, SE, NW
New York: Bed-Stuy, BK, Crown Heights, BK, East Village, Upper East Side, and LIC coming soon...

08.14.07

Quote from Freeman Dyson that I read today:
We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when species other than our own will no longer exist, and the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented.

He also wrote about the idea that new tree species could be engineered to convert carbon dioxide and sunlight into liquid fuels instead of cellulos, and predicts that open source sharing will be extended from exchange of software to exchange of genes.

Exerpts from Industrial Society and its Future:
40. In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one's physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence, and most of all, simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always pure surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings, militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of scientists will probably agree that the "fulfillment" they get from their work is more important than the money and prestige they earn.
41. For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals (that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the "mundane" business of satisfying their biological needs, but that it is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. We suggest that the so-called "identity crisis" is actually a search for a sense of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness of modern life.
74. We suggest that modern man's obsession with longevity, and with maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a symptom of unfulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power process. The "mid-life crisis" also is such a symptom. So is the lack of interest in having children that is fairly common in modern society but almost unheard-of in primitive societies.

08.02/07

Without an element of curelty at the root of every spectacle, the theater is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds." Antonin Artaud, Theater and its Double
The White Box show, Theater of Cruelty, was one of the strongest shows I have seen in a long time.

07.22.07
Droughts and floods.

BBC: July 18th: Water find 'may end Darfur war'. A huge underground lake has been found in Sudan's Darfur region, scientists say, which they believe could help end the conflict in the arid region. Some 1,000 wells will be drilled in the region, with the agreement of Sudan's government, the Boston University researchers say.

Another water link from the BBC: A team of divers who set out to solve the mystery of the drowned village of Bowood in Wiltshire has found the remains of buildings under a lake. These are both sides of the future of humans' relationship with water.

07.08.07

Since June 3rd, I have been nomadic. Stephanie, Clinton and I will have officially given up our Brooklyn apartment as of August 1, and although Clinton is touring Buffysings this summer, he is technically the only one still living there. Stephanie went to Jason and Miranda's Bushwick space for a short period of time, and now she is staying between her studio and her friend Chris's apartment. In August she will go to LA. On June 1st, Mira arrived to begin planning the Waterpod. By June 3rd, we had moved to Juan Puntes's place in the East Village while he toured the European art fairs, the Venice Biennale, and Documenta. The space was the perfect work environment: a large studio loft with an immense amount of reading material, a great coffee percolator, and wireless Internet.
I stayed there until July 2nd, when Patti Morse's place, this time on the Upper East Side, became available. She is currently in San Francisco and isn't exactly sure when she will be back to New York. Meanwhile, in August I head off to Oxfordshire for almost the entire month, and return to New York to head directly to Nevada, and then Alaska. On September 12th, I return to New York, and am looking forward to perhaps a month in Williamsburg. It is possible that I might be a nomad in New York until the Waterpod is ready to be lived upon, a situation that would be more than fine.

06.20.07

Advanced Forestry: to represent the prosthetic collision of nature and technology. These trees are a cross between cell phone towers and natural trees. Webs of copper wire and other braided or latticed semiconductors surround these hybrids, with satellites made from maps and with variety of metal antennas.
As we know, a recent connection has been made between cell phone towers and the harming of nature, specifically, the bee population. Scientists are stating that a 25% loss in bee population in eleven countries may be due to their homing sensors conflicting with the amount of cell phone radio waves running through the air. Maps from every country suspected of bee loss due to cell phone rays were used to make satellites and bee hives on Advanced Forestry.

06.17.07

J. Lehan took these stunning images of Art Omi

05.28.07

Top 15 Books that have shaped and influenced me, in no particular order:

America: Jean Baudrillard, Silence: John Cage, In the Absence of the Sacred: Jerry Mander, The Revolution of Everyday Life: Raoul Vaneigem, Valparaiso: Don DeLillo, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art; A sourcebook of Artists' Writings, Phenomenology of the Spirit: Hegel, Irrational Man: William Barrett, The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemmingway, Eroticism, Death and Sensuality: Georges Bataille, Pale Fire: Valdimar Nabakov, On Being Blue: William Gass, The Lover's Discourse: Roland Barthes, The Ten Trusts: Jane Godall, and The Fall of Public Man: Richard Sennett. These are all books I still fully recommend.

05.26.07

Mach 2: A brief history: For years, patents for Mach 2 were pursued but suffocated by the oligopolistic reaction of the travel industry. The danger in Mach 2's ranged from their DIY nature (they can be homemade from common materials and custom fit to the user) to their renewable source of energy (they are charged with Hydrogen Peroxide). Run through the patent M2 filter, the most polluted of waters would sufficiently complete a Mach 2 engine. Upon closure of the digital divide, D.I.Y. Internet sites circulated the plans globally until they were commonplace. In 2009 the airline industry began to embrace different forms of the Mach 2 because the common man finally demanded personal flights. Flying a person out to a private destination had become the norm. Airline industries regulated a brand of Mach 2’s that exist alongside the unregulated called "N-wave": the car for the modern man, the extended environment, the bubble, the appendage, the prosthetic. Click Here for More on Mach 2 at Art Omi 2007/2008

05.20.07

Advanced Forestry includes the study of prosthetics, fakery, the common machine,and
Honey Bees
Aside from the United States, other countries reporting bee disappearances are: Canada, Spain, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Switzerland, Italy, Portugal, Germany, and England

An interesting article on the remapping of history and Iraq/Iran borders by Wilson Quarterly

Helpful Cellular News Link

A cell phone tree "nursery" at Preserved Treescapes International in Oceanside, California.

05.02.07

Mach number is the number of times the speed of sound an object or a duct, or the fluid medium itself, move relative to each other. It is named after Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach. I have spent the last three days on 88th and CPW at the Snyder/Lawrence residence using John's wonderfully complete shop to construct Mach 2 (successfully surpassing the speed of sound).

04.27.07

Day 2 of 3 of the C6 conference in Chicago has concluded. Tonight at 9pm, Lynn Hershman Leeson's film "Strange Culture" will be screened at the Art Institute, but I decided to use that time to digest, discern and reinterpret the conference so far. I arrived late on Thursday due to increased cancellations and overbookments of flights to Chicago from New York. I heard the tail end of a truly riveting, moving, open, and affecting keynote given by Peter Sellars about the somber and explosive "Isenheim Altarpiece" made by over 112 women in Hamburg, South Africa. For the part I was fortunate enough to hear, Sellars spoke of everything from Monsanto

(“Monsanto would like nothing more than to be the sole source for staple crop seeds in this country and around the world," said Joseph Mendelson, CFS legal director. "And it will aggressively overturn centuries-old farming practices and drive its own clients out of business through lawsuits to achieve this goal.") - Center for Food Safety

to nature to death to evil (evil equals the straight line because the straight line can never be equated with equality) to the cultural weight of African cloth and the cultural reality of AIDS deaths yet the plain love that one can see within the community and the family, the support for the weak and the hurt, and the togetherness this results in. He quoted Rumi, "The wound is where the light enters" after stating that in America the weak are constantly under attack (because success is our only standard). His keynote ended with a standing ovation, his passion poured out like water on fire, and his dedication was so earnest in his tears of sorrow and joy that would erupt from his entire body as he spoke to a room full symposium-goers.
I was of course immediately determined not to miss a minute of the conference, and rushed out onto Michigan Ave. to locate my hotel, check in, change clothes, and rush back, just in time to be 15 minutes late for Tiffany Holmes, a very progressive artist, cultural thinker and "new technologies" professor. She explained Second Life, Greasemonkey and Google bombing as forms of public art. She had a terrific perspective but her talk was unfortunately limited to the idea that new technologies, when used by a dissenter, could inspire audiences to take their own voice. I came away not sure whether to applaud the dissenters' efforts that she covered or whether to see them as nothing more than novel distractions, not really doing anything positive or negative, rather as just sort of cool and just sort of there but hidden (greasemonkey) and you are cool if you know about it. Then she touched on some work that was more affecting like polluted air sensors (think of MOMA's SAFE show) and then her art, which is incredibly good. She works with eco-visualization concepts that allow a viewer to translate data into pictures. Of course the history of this is the richest - map making and its evolution is an absolutely amazing study.
Anne Pasternack gave an infinitely interesting rundown on Creative Time and how it came to fruition. She talked about Karen Finley and a project they did together called 1-900-ALL-KAREN, their expansion from New York. Ms. Pasternack was an extremely funny, genuine, and caring speaker. She spoke fast to cover a ton of information in her twenty minutes, and it all enforced what a caring facilitator she is, and what a prominent, powerful, and provocative institution Creative Time is. After her, Ruby Lerner took the microphone and spoke about another great non-profit arts realization group, Creative Capital. She talked about the markets, her interest in microfinance and new ways of thinking about and getting the most from invested money, about their working process with artists and creating a legacy of a piece of artwork. It was so wonderful to hear both of these powerful and strong women talk about their complete dedication to art.
Here were some other interesting explorations from day 1: "the institute for the future of the book"
Industry of the Ordinary
I caught a little of the next panel but left at about 3:45 to head over to Chicago Art, the art fair where Robert Mann Gallery is exhibiting.
Day 2: Today. John Winet was the first speaker and moderator of an interesting panel. He is an artist, activist and heads the Intermedia program at the University of Iowa. He had us watch a You Tube clip that he really loved because of the multicultural aspects, the mass appeal (Houston Rockets jerseys) and the insane amount of passion they had for the Backstreet Boys song "I Want it That Way". He showed another video and talked about citizen journalists and citizen artists, wanting to get both of those things away from their stigmas and their elitist club-like nature. He shared a lovely Gibson quote, "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" and that summed up his message nicely. Francesco Bonami was the second speaker. He curated the 2003 Venice Biennale "Dreams and Conflict. The Dictatorship of the Viewer" and he had great points to make about the shift from a supply market to a demand market in the art world. He later spoke about that shift being a positive in other situations, where an audience could demand a company to be a better company and they might listen to keep their audience, but he is right in the fact that art doesn't have to be there for mass approval, it has to be stretching boundaries of thought, ideas, platforms, interactions, everything. Like companies who have to do better than their last quarter, every quarter, a museum now acts that way. They need to do more blockbuster shows and may or may not feel comfortable doing an edgier show because it probably will not bring in the numbers that Cezanne to Picasso will, for example. I'm convinced that this has a lot to do with peoples' overconsumption, with wasting resources, and almost every unethical business practice. This is the need propelled by shareholders to outdo oneself every quarter and every year, propelled by the media's portrayal of a company's situation. They are under attack from their demanding audience and their motto is to outdo, outsource and over expand.
Susan Harris was the next speaker. She works with Words Without Borders, a truly necessary institution that helps publish translated books, that publishes their own translated books and periodicals, and had an important website with translated texts. She spoke about the insidious way that our government tries to keep these texts, especially from embargoed countries like those included in the "Axis of Evil" (one of the most bigoted catch phrases and media buzz words I can remember) countries, Cuba, Iran, Sudan, North Korea...She points out that this censorship allows the US to promote these countries as backwards and inferior when a country like Iran produces 10,000 scientific papers yearly that are of course banned from translation in this country. This was a truly inspiring talk.
I missed a couple talks in there but was back in time for Rick Lowe, who discussed hybridity: of space, of ways of public interaction, of ideas, his Project Row Houses in Texas, and subsequent projects done in New Orleans. He discussed with us the need for a criticality that exists within the art dialogue for centuries to be transferred onto community art, but now there are too many reservations. He wants to "raise the criticality bar".
Day 2 part 2 began with an inspiring and energetic lecture from Erica Dalya Muhammad. She talked about electrocultures, futurist Diaspora media, and her amazing Mt. Vernon Hip Hop Arts Center project that she has turned into a social entrepreneurial model with the next one opening in Miami. Simone Aaberg Kærn walked the audience through an exciting project that she did called "Sky Sisters", named after a girl raised in Afghanistan who wanted to fly. Simone entered a dangerous mission to reach Afghanistan in a baby plane from Denmark. She described terrifying calls with governments and army patrols that said that they would shoot her plane if she dared enter into some territories. She, of course, went anyway with the fitting motto, "If you are small and persistent, nothing can stop you." After Kærn, Steven Burkes spoke about his design work for groups like Aid to Artisans based in Hartford, CT. right near my hometown. Finally, the keynote speech for the evening was Bruce Ferguson. To sum up his speech, here are some thoughts: Art has gone from supply driven to demand driven. "The word is coming to an end." The Modern Art Popular Culture show that were held at MOMA where "high" art was refreshed by the "low". Now, are we in the third period of art? Post Colonial environment, mediated, post... representations of all standards, cultures, and visions: 1- cinema 2- TV 3- the Emerging Hybrid Screen. The Mausoleum of Imperialism can't be kept any longer. Mass Culture is the dominant form of culture: Oprah, Brokeback Mountain. Crisis and opportunity is the redemptive moment? The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny. Is Globalism just a new form of cultural tourism, of neocolonialization? The net/web condition. The fact/fiction condition. They can't be separated. Atlantic Monthly listed Howard Roark as the most powerful person. Are we living in a global theme park? Weapons of mass distraction? Swag. spam. spin. Libraries without books exist but more paper is being used than ever. The increase in production of information does not equal the increase in production of knowledge. Freedom on the Internet is a delusion. Brazil, Turkey, Iran, etc. 35 countries only have deep web penetration, and most countries have 8.5% access. Can technology ever be a substitute for mourning? Can one grieve in the same way by taking a pilgrimage on the web? Cell phone culture. Swarms. Porn: loyalty, interactivity. Duchamp said that the artist thinks he is a genius, but he has to wait for the approval of the spectator. Referring to something in a work of art is NOT forming an argument. Art is part of the attention economy. We are going in a circle. From the world of literature and language and text BACK to sound and image. A new Esperanto is organically emerging. Recent arguments state that reading and language actually stunt creativity. Language can de-emphasize other sensory knowledge. "Spatial Literacy" was recently coined. A term that allows us to dumb down our culture with some scientific theory that begs us to consider this a good thing. Like doublethink, doublespeak, and double entendres such as "wage management initiative" meaning to fire people from jobs. The shift away from narrative and to common sense, understanding of role and meaning "Complex semantic map" collision of popular and elite. Art can have intervention, discursively, etc. however, responsibility and ethics are ever more important. Everyone may have a voice but these voices matter. He ends with a quote by Godard and Proverbs 23 Verse 18: People perish and there is no vision.

Day 3 - Natalie Jeremijenko,1999 Rockefeller Fellow, starts off with a discussion of structures of participation and how it fits in to sociotechnical change. Natalie created a website called How Stuff Is Made documenting the labor conditions, manufacturing process, and environmental impacts involved in a product. One of my very personal upsets is the section explaining the shrimp process with the shrimp market's destruction of ecosystemic mangrove forests that provide much of the protection needed to protect against storms and to breed healthy ecosystems in estuaries where many shrimp are farmed. Another wonderful project was titled "Zoo Backwards". Natalie created electronic ducks that could interact with real ducks by remote control and camera/sound control. Then there was Bruce Mau. Mau talked about his book Massive Change. His motto for massive change is Global Media=Pessimism and Massive Change = Optimism. He acutely pointed out that optimism is a structural necessity for sustainability. Massive Change needs to be about seduction where "green movement" has come to stand for punishment. He spoke about E. O. Wilson and Ray Kurzweil, and Kurzweil's time and learning curve trajectory. Like art, one of Mau's goals is to liberate design from "the eye". He ended with a quote from Stewart Brand, "If you really think things are getting worse, won't you grab everything you can while you can? If you think that things are getting better, you invest in the future." Jennifer Siegel followed Bruce Mau, and her talk was identical to a talk she gave a year ago, all the way down to the same Paul Virilio quote, so that was less interesting for me even though I really admire her work, and she mentioned the fact that she is now buying up property to sort of start her own sustainable town which is a very admirable feat and really exciting to hear. Lucy Orta was next, and she is sweet and passionate and it really comes across when one hears her talk. She creates wearable protective units to draw attention to homelessness and community, and talked about her new project in Antarctica called Antarctic Village. She covers tents with flags and inhabits Antarctica with other artists and some scientists creating a free community, as Antarctica is owned by all. Then we all had the privilege of hearing a discussion between Lawrence Weschler and David Buckland. They discussed David's Cape Farwell project after we all watched some video clips, saw some of David's video work about time and breeding and posthumans. Ruskin said curiosity is always optimistic and Ian McEwen said "Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but the matter before us is too serious for mere self pleasuring. Are we at the beginning of an unprecedented era of international cooperation, or are we living in an Edwardian Summer of Reckless denial? Is this the beginning or the beginning of the end? We finished the conference with artworks from Amy Balkin who was also working with public space (Antarctica) but with these interesting projects of collecting space for sale or free and taking steps to make it public, or taking steps to protect the atmosphere. The "atmosphere of commons". The "Kyoto gold standard". Her work was humorous and serious and just really brought the problems to light. Daniel Peterman showed us some great projects. My favorite things said were, "I use the art world as a receptacle. A place where things can spend time and gather meaning". That aptly describes some of the more random pieces, like the blown up airplane flight stub that I guess over time gathered the meaning or the questioning, "What is it worth getting on a plane? (What is my carbon footprint?)" Fun.

04.18.07

all ads are inverse ads

"All advertising is aimed at "hacking" our human capacity to ignore ads." by Deconference.com A real sign of the times (what isn't?)

04.15.07

The End Is Near.

Recently, there have been more and more studies that say cell phones don't cause cancer. Over a billion people use cell phones today. In the late 1990's, George Carlo ran the cell phone industry's six-year research project into mobiles' potential for harm. Carlo concluded that they were dangerous, increasing cancer risk and affecting pacemakers. The companies disputed his claim and told him they would no longer be requiring his services. I like to think of this as coincidence. Nevertheless, my suggestion would be this: as text messaging and email phones become more and more common, consider using the keypad more frequently. When you start to notice RSI, head for the closet and plug in the rotary. Here are a few interesting links sent to me by Leslie: SF Gate from January 14th and one on Bee Migration. Finally, find cell towers in your area: http://www.cellreception.com/towers/

04.09.07

View Pangaea Ultima and other artwork at: http://newclimates.com

04.08.07

Lately, as I read statistic after statistic of land-loss, desertification rates, factory farming land-depletion, and so forth, I have felt more and more passionate about the fact that humans are steadily creating (our) own destruction. This week's New York Magazine has a wonderful article on "Skyfarming", the brainchild of Dr. Dickson Despomier. "Skyfarming" is a way for cities to be local producers of their own fruits, vegetables, flowers, etc. These skyscraper greenhouses could allow for replanting and returning of precious forests and wildlife sanctuaries, and let factory farming move indoors. In the design, the building is outfitted with solar and wind power, titanium glass, and is modular and circular for maximum efficiency. At first glance, this would also seem to eliminate the need for GM technologies (many of which have been harmful to animals and sooner or later, people) as insects and animals will not have access to this indoor ecosystem. The planned date of arrival - 15 years. Much too distant. The prospective makers? Dubai, Iceland, and Japan for starters. Perhaps a more affordable version could be adapted, opening up the door to a plethora of cities and countries. With an overabundance of monsoon storms in parts of India such as Uttar Pradesh, only one growing season has been allowed. One ideal place for a "Skyfarm" would be Delhi. If Delhi could build a rendition of "Skyfarm", it would be useful for the people living in the city as well as the people on the rural farmlands, making food a less expensive commodity: smaller transportation cost and a more abundant food supply.

So, yesterday I read Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff's book, The Ten Trusts. They published this book in 2003, and it is a wonderful summary of their work with animals, their environmental work, the state of the world, and what we can do about it, including inspiring stories and the creation of the JGI "Roots and Shoots" program. This was a phenomenal way to prepare for some of the work that Mira and I plan to do on the Waterpod. Waterpod testing begins in June. Mira and I will experiment with new sail designs, new calendars and seaworthy maps, domed organic garden designs, local animal research and outreach, as well as a scholarly program on storytelling.

Economics: Largely, in the current exonomy, the success of a company is determined by its ability to achieveconstant growth and upward mobility. The pressure of shareholders in a public company seems to have reached a highly accelerated rate. Instead of a slower, sustained growth, companies now reach a tipping point much sooner at the expense of ever-decreasing resources and the waste that inevitably accompanies this. I learned recently that after rent, Starbucks's second greatest expense is milk, not coffee. Milk, what a giant, disturbing business (and not the most disturbing, by any means). Growing animals in a factory farm (recent article in NYTimes link) is a major cause of rainforest destruction, desertification, leading to speed up rates of global warming, species extinction, food and water waste, alongside air, land and water pollution. In small steps: Burger King has just announced it will stop getting its pork and eggs from farms that confine animals to cages or crates. Some of the more viable solutions that I have read about salvaging the environment demand that the earth be included in economic trade. For instance, if the carbon trade is done right, it could mean that a company actually paid a tax to its particular government, and that tax money would be used to clean up the damage done to the earth. In the Forbes April 16th issue, Jesse Shapiro wrote an article called "Should Clean Water Have a Price?" raising very poignant questions regarding the respect people give to products that they must purchase over handouts. Studies conducted through Harvard Business School show that when a person has to pay even a small amount for something, he or she is much more likely to get a better use out of the item. Ben Franklin once said, "When the well is dry, we will know the worth of water."

Reiterated from The Ten Trusts is that if we are the more intelligent life forms on earth, then we need to be the stewards of the earth. (Here: Dave Pollard has 10 suggestions for something each of us can consider) A philosophy of the Western world has largely been that of "humans first". That belief has misled us as a capitalist culture, as we assume the right to overuse the land, unnecessarily kill animals even to the point of extinction, dredge swamps and wetlands to build malls, etc. etc. etc. Here is a quick sum up:
• Human beings are adding to their current population of over 6 billion at the rate of 100 million new people a year; by 2050, a world population of 9.2 billion is predicted according to a just-released UN assessment.
• Industries have chopped down half of the world's rainforests and over-fished 70% of the costal areas, lakes and major rivers, causing numerous side effects including destroying essential mangrove forests and leaving nothing for locals.
• In a warming world, glacial ice and permafrost arerapidly melting in the Polar Regions, Greenland, and mountains, destroying animal habitats and creating millions of environmental refugees through rising sea levels and destructive storms as a result of warming weather. Many species will die because of increased heat and disease, including ourselves.
• Human consumption levels currently exceed the planet's regenerative capacity by 25 percent.

03.18.07

The SpeedVoyage began three and a half hours after the sleepy Kansas City Airport. It began when Stephanie Dedes and I picked up our Avis Ford Focus in Los Angeles, and plugged in the borrowed GPS system. We explored the desert-jungle called Los Angeles that night and awoke to a Los Angeles sunrise. Warm, vast, simulated, joyous. We arrived in Joshua Tree midday, where we unpacked our many recording devices and cameras, did some minor rocketry, tree testing, sampled the water, and took specimens of every plant we came across. The desert: a truly extrordinary piece of drama. We met up with two Californians and ate at the Carousel Restaurant, a place on the edge of the park. During dinner, we examined the specimens against a book of native Joshua Tree plants, to see what changes in their makeup had occurred, since the time that the book was written and the recent environmental disasters that have taken place. The Restaurant reminded me that I was in movieland, as I suddenly realized that I had turned off Lost Highway to find this Fellini mansion full of ex-circus workers on their way to try out for Carrie 2. The restaurant was spooky, dramatic (bitches and tears were flying from the eyes and mouths of the waitstaff), topsy-turvy, and spectacular. At 4am, we were heading towards the Salton Sea. The speed of driving continued to clash with the slowness of geology. Sunrises are enormous on flat land, and south of Palm Springs, California, it is quite flat. Amazed, we stopped and mediated this experience in every way possible. We spent the majority of day number two circling the sea, exploring the contents; the fish, the once beckoning and now nearly abandoned towns, the springs and the wildlife surrounding Salton Sea South. We chatted with the neighbors and tried to understand the wasteland before making our way to the Imperial Sand Dunes and the Chocolate Mountains, and finally on a whim, down to Mexico. By the time we crossed the border in Mexicali to get back into the US, it was nearly dark (7:30pm became our necessary bedtime on dark open roads after driving nonstop). We slept overlooking the sand dunes and awoke at sunrise (6am in March) to the slow, subtle appearance of windblown dunes. We collected some sand to use later, and spent day number three exploring middle California: a pastoral land America has deemed "reservation", some groves producing fresh oranges, numerous types of Californian drip coffee, and even a strip mall or two, reaching LA again at 5pm, avoiding the worst of the parking lot California calls I-10. Here the desert has been turned into an inhabitable series of loops and gracious curves, promising flux and mobility, and finally merging with the stillness of the land. We spent the evening in LA attending a lecture at the Skirball Cultural Center, had a fine dinner, camped out at a magnificent hotel, and stayed in LA until 5:30am. We pulled out of the hotel to the glow of another LA sunrise, movie-magic, warm and cool, effervescent and calm, dead and undying. On the last day, we traversed much ground, reaching the mid-point on Death Valley at 4:30pm, through Shoshone to Devil’s Golf Course, at the center of the dry seabed, where the salt loomed 5' thick, tall, hard, static. Death in all of its majesty. We made it out of the valley before nightfall, and managed to get back to Baker, California before the gas stations closed. We took Route 15 until about 11pm, slept under the stars until 2am, and then finished the drive to Hertz, LAX. In four days, the full became the empty, and the silence the screaming life, the invisibility the discovery.

03.03.07

Last night, I attended a wonderful dinner party at John and Jenny Snyder's home. In a room filled to capacity with writers, naturally the conversation about the positive and negative sides of a digifying textual world were brought up. I have been working on a collaborative story, in an accessable choose-your-own-adventure style, that has not made itspresence online yet. However, the website does contain a future space for it. In the meantime, I would love to know peoples' thoughts on an ever-changing medium. If people are so inclined to share thoughts on the present stage of writing, I would like to use that space to publish these thoughts. Recently, I have been studying some of the theories of N. Katherine Hayles. She is one of a handful of theorists who promotes the many facets of digital change in writing, including collaborative writing and other experimental forms of digital texts. I am interested to see if people think that these experiments might be a progressive or regressive step towards something, and to see what people think about collaborative storytelling (is this closer to natural tendencies? Will it create wonderful things or just bad, garbled texts?) Is a proliferation of producers a good thing, as it inspires, stimulates, and adds to our collective experience, or a distracting thing, as it creates more often mediocre or poor results?

02.28.07

last year's model - (if used in moderation) may make u smarter ...
New Studies have found a 10 point drop in IQ Over a Day's Time With the BlackBerry and Similar Partial Attention Devices
In our Always-On World that includes constantly scanning for opportunities within a galaxy of possibilities, BlackBerrying under the table at dinners or meetings has been found to keep people in a stage of ADD-like alertness from 7am-10pm, and finally cause them to seek refuge at a yoga or meditation class at some point before, after, or during a mediated meltdown. Recent studies have shown that the output of good work getting done during these hours is 30% less, and the ability to have a "decent" conversation 15% less. (Paraphrasing Linda Stone, formerly a senior executive at Apple and Microsoft, in an article published in the Harvard Business Review of Feburary 2007)

Then! Leo Villareal's show at Gering & López, up now.

02.25.07

When the public finally took notice, it was 43 years ago. Two billion people worldwide were mobilizing through desertified lands. 1/5 of Amazonia had been destroyed in fifty years' time. That escalated in an astounding unprecedented feedback loop. Nobody had suspected the impending doom. Constant seismic shifting had destabilized our continental understanding, as we veered back towards Pangaea. Pangaea Ultima. What had remained of the forests were only fields of petrified wood, and as technologies proliferated man's existence, the only remainder of forests were cell tower farms, that had been molded to look like trees. In extreme places here, the sewers were overflowing into the land, corroding its edges and seeping into the clean water reservoirs in the lower water table. The sewer pipes had corroded and rusted due to mass excavation of irons and other toxic metals. When the human population reached eight billion, rainforests were turned into deserts. Entire lands were paved and as the permafrost began to melt, it would cause the concrete to wither and melt, buckle and sink into the earth. Where once there were grass and shrubs, now there was a black, bubbling, netherworld. Pangaea Ultima

02.23.07

Pulled from the Stern Review: Climate change is the greatest market failure the world has ever seen, and it interacts with other market imperfections. Three elements of policy are required for an effective global response. The first is the pricing of carbon, implemented through tax, trading, or regulation. The second is policy to support innovation and the deployment of low-carbon technologies. And the third is action to remove barriers to energy efficiency, and to inform, educate, and persuade individuals about what they can do to respond to climate change.

sidereal time link >
making sense of time, earthbound and otherwise >
the latest on 3-D printing is actually on Wikipedia? >

Soon, SpeedVoyage to Southern California's deserts, a trip at warp speed doing experiments at the Salton Sea, Joshua Tree, at plenty of sand dunes, and finally in the depths of Death Valley.

02.13.07

The feedback loop and the notion of reflexivity: that which is used to generate the system is in fact part of the system, and as it relates to the economy. The notion of the self creates the rise of the economy (Mataronos neologism meaning self making: autopoiesis)

difference between cognition and consciousness...is huge. cognition can basically be found in any living or nonliving entity, this places less emphasis on consciousness which usually links with embodiment, making it a small step. whate about distribulted cognition with web programs uniting many people working on the same document

dismanteling our body boundaries

by the body not in the body, and they are all prostythes - the computer even the body, is there an external memory storage option for our bodies?

01.31.07

I think this will be amazing (launching February) WiserEarth: an open source editable relational database of social and environmentally responsible businesses or organizations that need to connect. This is really an enormous movement, but until now, each organization was in relative disconnect from its like-minded brothers and sisters. This will be a great resource and most likely a giant alliance-maker. It has the possibility to give a place to an exponential, placeless movement.

01.25.07

For more graphs, charts, decipherable systems, maps, see Dave Pollard's Blog

01.24.07

Click to virtually visit the Waterpod™ Life in the future. In water, the Waterpods™ are communal resting places, replacing islands because of their own mobility and built-in safety infrastructure.

01.18.07

Recently, I have had a handful of inquiries about my title choice with "Loss-Accountability of Top-Down Ontologies" and "Seven-Firm Oligopoly". so I just wanted to put it out there. Loss-Accountability is about the political struggle of nature versus large corporate agendas, and similarly Seven-Firm is on the globalization struggle and the shrinking seven bodies of land. Currently, I am working on a video where the land begins to head back to Pangea. (NY Times Link) Yes, I''m not the only one who thinks so.

Right now, human activity is producing 300%more carbon dioxide per year than the earth's natural carbon sinks can absorb. (Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Ecosystems and human well-being; synthesis report. Washington DC Island Press 2005). It is fascinating that humans have come to the high-plane on the scale of evolution wherein we know that we are causing our own extinction.

01.17.07

Ramsay Barnes got married! Momi, whom he met via his scooter in Baltimore, is a very talented artist, amongst other things. I flew to Oahu (my first time in Hawaii) on Friday for a SpeedVoyage, and currently I am in the Atlanta, GA airport waiting for my connecting flight back to New York. Wow! What majestic, magisterial, magnetic vistas, views, and voyages over there. The wedding was one of the most heartfelt, lovely, loving and touching weddings I have ever had the pleasure of attending. Ramsay asked me if I wanted to photograph the wedding, and looking back I am thankful I declined. It gave me a better chance to meet and talk with Momi and Ramsay's new friends, listen to the sermon on the hillside, let my thoughts drift off with the sunset...and that’s how the whole week went, drifting off into the sunset. So the wedding was unforgettable, held right next to sacred Polynesian grounds, and right in front of the South Pacific. The next day I was off for the Big Island. I landed in Hilo around 10am, picked up a rental car and headed up rt. 11 towards Volcanic National Park, stopping to check in at the lovely "My Island Bed and Breakfast" run by Gordon Moore, an author and photographer as well as owner of this fine B&B nestled an acre away from Old Volcano Rd. in Volcano Village, in the oozing green mossy paradise sprinkled with flowers and heavily wooded. I headed straight away for the Volcanic National Park and was literally blown away by the first steam vent emitting from the earth that I crossed, and probably spent an hour photographing that one not realizing that an entire park-load was awaiting my next twist around the bend. Aghast, I slowly made my way down Chain of Craters Rd. to the waters edge at the south of the island. There is a 3 m. hike one can do to see the glowing lava at night, but being a woman with a newfound New York attitude, I saw the line of cars, and thought this was going to be some tourist attraction maybe not all its cracked up to be and certainly not worth the wait. In my sporty red car, I could see ten more sights in the time it would take to reach the black glowing rocks.
So after a fantastic breakfast, I make my way to the southern most tip in the US - quite a jungle down there! Really rickety windmills next to their progressive new counterparts, and then the bakery the best on the island. I had some bread, bought a sun hat and headed back up to cloud level - 4000ft. Today it wasn't raining so I cut it as close as possible and re-photographed everything I had photographed the day before, but this time in the sun and light mist, before racing down to Hilo for a helicopter’s view of the volcanic action. WOW! Never have I seen such things! Was this earth I was on? Planet Hell? I managed to film and photograph the place to death while inventing a new pilgrimage story-destination. So then we land. I wind my way around Banyan trees and waterfalls before finding RT 200, which takes me up to the dizzying height of 9000ft above sea level. Enough to make you sick driving. And on the way...the snarled land had been ripped, torn, uprooted, shredded into globular, mangled black messes. Every 100 feet, a petrified tree would stand, tall and ashen. At the top, the air was thin. Cows grazed, the wheat glowed iridescent in the sun, a few shrubs, lava fields, dirt; red red dirt. I wandered until about 6pm when I decided to coast back to Hilo, get some take out and return to the Volcanic National Park, this time sans room, only with car. We camped together in the gloom and creep of the park at night. I warmed up the car 3 times and took it out to the southern rift once. Parked, watched the sky as it was quickly swallowed up by sulfur surrounding and suffocating me like a ghost. I returned red to his parking spot and we slept. At 4:30 I was up for good. My flight leaving the island was at 9, so I decided that if I left then, I would make it down to Pahoa, and then from there could go see the molten lava, but from the opposite side, at Kaimu Beach. It took me all of an hr. to get there and at 530, it was still dark except for my headlights. At 6am I reached a "road closed except to residents" sign and since I could see nothing beyond the sign I decided to obey it. It sounded as if the ocean was right there. Well, it was 6, I had a few more hours. I was a bit nervous to get out of the car. I decided to go to the southeastern most point of Kapoho Bay and take the highway to it, then make a loop back to Hilo to catch the plane. As I embarked down this narrow road, I could feel the water close in. The road was like a covered bridge; giant banata trees expanded a block and covered the sky with their entwined leaves. The monstrous Banyan trees with their hanging vines and roots and doorways made me uneasy in the dark. At the first reflection of a sun on the earth, I could see the waves crashing up almost to the side of the road itself, the sinister water. I continued on this road that drove like a children’s rollercoaster, through jungles, passing a few huts, a couple resort-type destinations, dark roads, a family of gravestones. (This flipped me out and I really tried to turn around at that point. I was rolling deeper into a jungle, supposedly a corner of the island, when I then saw flowers all placed on a bluff, like an offering to the sea. I tried my best not to replay scenes from Caroline B. Cooney's series entitled: The Fog, The Snow, and The Fire.) I manage to make it back to the airport and back to Oahu somehow, though. So there I am, my old rental SUV that I left parked at the airport, and I. We drive under, around, and through these foggy mountains not unlike Scotland's bluffs and reach the sunny side. I stay on the beach, get a coffee, photograph, and decide I have enough time to make it all the way around the island before my flight back to NY, which I do, and which was so heavenly.

01.07.07

FORE CAST - MIDNIGHT MASS

I'm not sure just how many people attended the Midnight Mass performance on Christmas morning, but people came and left and came and recame and people stayed. The midnight mass was 2.5 hrs long, and accompanied by the hymns of my family; the McElheron Family Singers. Armed with blow torches and other implements, Corey Mervis, Jenn Wirtz and I performed the candle-lighting ceremony.

01.05.07

The problem is, to quote John Maynard Keynes, "Practical men are usually the slaves of some defunct economist."
The prisoner's dilemma: China is building a coal-fired power station a week to feed demand, and India's economy is close behind. If either decided to suddenly stop (or even could stop) their carbon-fuelled development to lift their billions of people out of poverty they would face a revolution, yet if they continued, rising CO2 and temperatures would kill off plants and produce famine. (I paraphrased this from Jeremy Lovelock, with whom I consensually agree on this matter)

Are there alternatives to the fiction that is the Market? Here is a sampling of a variety of economic strategies:
Household economies
Gift economies
Barter economies
Gathering economies
Cooperative economies
Community Market economies

We need to create our own "churches", our own societies, our own mutual-aid collectives. We need to create our own viral words for such things, to adopt the connotation of church as community while eschewing its ideological baggage.

For the past year, I have been inspired to keep a dictionary of a new word per day. There are two kept, actually. One is a word that is new to me and the second is in collaboration with David: a newly invented word per day. Here are the top three in the 2006 dictionary of words/phrases/concepts new to me:

Eruv
Scopophilic
The Prisoner's Dilemma

12.10.06

FORE CAST.
AN OPERA by MARY MATTINGLY with live performance by Derek Junck and Mira Burke with THE REDCOATS ARE COMING!
Opening December 19, 2006 at 6pm – December 25, 1am.
WHITE BOX. 525 W. 26th Street. New York, NY. 10001

Fore Cast is a clarion call anticipating the looming environmental urgency. Fore Cast is an interactive Opera, opening at White Box on December 19, 2006, at six o’clock pm. Fore Cast will transform White Box’s space into a waterlogged, apocalyptic swampland, soundscape, and videosurround. The opening night will feature live performances with an original opera score by members of The Redcoats Are Coming! Antonious Block and Apples and Arrows'.
Entering a water-filled and truncated landscape, viewers witness the land’s predicted end-state, a reversion to its primeval condition and a topographical perspective of the new world. The marshy waterscape is the setting for the future of a civilization ensnared in an unceasing loop of WWIV, a war Albert Einstein foreshadowed as being fought with sticks and stones. The installation explains the tragic outcomes of this hypothesized war in the not-so-distant future.
Multiple video projectors arranged in a circle fill the walls of White Box and present a “Fore Cast” that will loop for six days and one hour. (A new week, according to Mary Mattingly’s proprietary uniform time scale, derived from ancient Assyrian and Babylonian astronomical methodology and translated to a system for future use.) The videos play continuously in White Box's waterlogged space. The main screen portrays WWIV, fought by six groups of combatants ---The World Economic Forum, The Council on Foreign Relations, Bechtel, Nestlé, The United Nations, and B.R.I.C.--- colluding to capture and assert political and economic control over a shattered and borderless world. The belligerents’ leaders plot together in corporate conference rooms, ultimately degenerating into intercontinental world-scale conflict fought with the weapons of Cain and Abel, sticks and stones, the war unfolding in aqueous and terrestrial environments everywhere.
Fore Cast will run for six days and one hour, from the morning of December 19, until 1:00 am on Christmas morning. (I will be living in the gallery.)

(My bed at White Box during the show)

(Derek Junck's sculpture "Artists Survival Suitcase" was part of the Fore Cast installation)

Art In the Age of Global Communication, Commodification, Consumption, and Celebration.
Art Basel, 2006. It was a brief trip for me. Since the last time I attended (two years ago), the already abundant fairs had multiplied. At least 12. The art could be seen from the highways, projected onto the sides of buildings, from the beach, oozing out of shipping containers, from the sidewalk, hotels emitting videobox light and the proliferation of flyers leading to a never-ending paper trail of rented space for a small show to an impromptu performance in a parking lot. In a way, I want to equate it to Burning Man although at the essence, one has to do with Fame and Fortune, while the other still prides itself on Community and Collaboration. Of course, there's more: One takes place in a major city and one in the middle of the desert, one you buy a ticket at the gate, and the other you sell your soul for (ha!) - however, they both do like to have an enormous amount of give-aways and spectacles. The DiVA fair in containers at the beach was quite seductive (I stumbled onto it at night, with the spotlights illuminating the sand, water, and comparitively low-lying containers, arranged into a fitting panopticon shape, with the center being "The Village." White Box had a great installation the night I came by. Micaela Giovannotti and Joyce Korotkin, both exceptionally intelligent people who curated a really well-done show that I was part of called "Out of True" (an architectural term for skewed construction) - a show about a varying array of visions discerning our contemporary world and the disparity between reality and dis?reality, was, surprise surprise, one of my favorite exhibitions. Perrogi also had a great show on the Antarctica Ice Block, cut out and saved by Tavares Strachan with the engineering help of MIT. On Friday, Dave Smith and I took a small road trip to the everglades area, stopping on Key Largo, in Florida City and the speedway, Manatee Bay- where we saw a vast array of those monstrous beauties, the mangrove trees. We stopped at tree farms, gas stations, empty lots, and out of all that, but the mangroves were my favorite sights. We probably spent most of that day in traffic talking about the ego and art - a subject not to be ignored at a location such as Miami in December. All in all, every art fair came complete with its own style, and each style was redeemable. Of course it has to be, styles change so fast. You have your classics, your Yves Saint Laurent’s, to your Issey Miyake’s and of course your Imitation’s of Christ.

12.04.06

Tonight. 12.04.06. 10:44pm, and the first time in months I have sat down to write. I have been working diligently on Fore Cast, a water-opera that will open at White Box, a non-profit art space in Chelsea, NY, on December 19th. With tree stumps, sand, salt, steam, sonorous operatics, streaming video, sea-water, and a story about WWIV, Fore Cast is about the future. People wear masks (just like in Victorian England), and really, time is time, time is unexplained, irrelevant, played with and time is completely over explained, in 360 degrees, in the new week, in the fact that I will live at White Box for the entire run of the opera.

On October 4, 2006, The Financial Times Energy Editor wrote "The incidence of moderate drought will double to affect half the world by the end of the century unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed, according to a study backed by the british government. It also suggests a rise in extreme drough from 1 per cent at present to 30 per cent. I saved this article because the study's results are horrifying and political action is necessary. This article in the FT was following a series of articles in the New York Times about the current water crisis in India and the developing world; the rationing, the lack of any clean water, the rancid water pollution, the economic expense, and the death.

Like millions of others, I have become fascinated with Second Life, but not from playing it, but from reading about it. Could this be like Burning Man was for me? I was fascinated from afar by Burning Man. To a great extent, even when I was there, I was fascinated from afar. How much does one really understand something without fully immersing him/herself in it? How can we compare the experience of book knowledge next to the physical experience? Can Second Life ever be the physical experience? Will I really see people buying from American Apparel? Is abstract literally the new realism?

In an article titled "The Cosmic Triangle: Revealing the State of the Universe," which appears in the May 28, 1999 issue of the journal Science, a group of cosmologists and physicists from Princeton University and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory survey the wide range of evidence which, they write, "is forcing us to consider the possibility that some cosmic dark energy exists that opposes the self-attraction of matter and causes the expansion of the universe to accelerate." The simplest explanation for dark energy is that it is simply the "cost of having space": that is, a volume of space has some intrinsic, fundamental energy. This is the cosmological constant, sometimes called Lambda (hence Lambda-CDM model) after the Greek letter ?, the symbol used to mathematically represent this quantity. Since energy and mass are related by E = mc2, Einstein's theory of general relativity predicts that it will have a gravitational effect. Although Einstein later abandoned the cosmological constant, calling it a blunder, it would not go away. It is the one theorized form of dark energy that does not change with time. Adam Riess of the Space Telescope Science Institute said, “We see it doing its thing, starting to fight against ordinary gravity,” about dark energy. Adam is the leader of a team of “dark energy prospectors,” as he calls them, who peered back nine billion years with the Hubble and were able to discern the nascent effects of antigravity. -NY Times and Wikipedia

I was in awe of the beautifully simple title adorning the front page of the NY Times, Science Times, Tuesday, November 14. Ancient Crash, Epic Wave. The article explores something I had never heard of, chevrons in the earth's surface, composed of the ocean floor. They contain deep ocean microfossils and metals formed by COSMIC IMPACTS. This article was about the discovery of four new chevrons near Madagascar, "as deep as the Chrysler Building is high". The explanation is a large asteroid or comet smashed into the Indian Ocean 4,800 years ago, producing a Tsunami at least 600 ft high, 13x larger than the one that engulfed Indonesia almost two years ago.

There was an interesting article in New York Magazine on the 27th of November about weather patterns, hurricanes, and how New York is long overdue for its big storm. The article went on to lay out the devastation the city would face, with the buildings acting as wind tunnels, a "Bernoulli effect" (named after the Dutch/Swiss mathematician/scientist Daniel Bernoulli which states that the sum of all forms of energy in a fluid flowing along an enclosed path [a streamline] is the same at any two points in that path.) Apparently, 5 years ago, Malcolm Bowman, a SUNY professor must have been reading my blog, because he met with the heads of the Port Authority to propose a trio of massive hydraulic gates to protect New York from the huge storm surge in the event of a hurricane. I read that and felt like something good came of those late nights of exhaustive stream-of-consciousness gushing about apostruptures and how NYC needs to build a sea-wall out into the streaming, feeding, connected world.

10.06.06

NY TIMES article: How that slick, a highly toxic cocktail of petrochemical waste and caustic soda, ended up in Mr. Oudrawogol’s backyard in a suburb north of Abidjan is a dark tale of globalization. It came from a Greek-owned tanker flying a Panamanian flag and leased by the London branch of a Swiss trading corporation whose fiscal headquarters are in the Netherlands. Safe disposal in Europe would have cost about $300,000, or perhaps twice that, counting the cost of delays. But because of decisions and actions made not only here but also in Europe, it was dumped on the doorstep of some of the world’s poorest people.
So far eight people have died, dozens have been hospitalized and 85,000 have sought medical attention, paralyzing the fragile health care system in a country divided and impoverished by civil war, and the crisis has forced a government shakeup...

Ivory Coast, September 2006

10.03.06

For the past century, marketing has been geared towards the individual because hey, we can continually sell that way, discovering and marketing a new niche, expanding our audience with more differences within the same, all for unnecessary things, because as we simplified and automated life in the developed world, we still needed a challenge, and the fruits of our challenges are contained in material ends.

Machines Make Life Easier and The Case for Human Dignity.

10.03.06

Last night, Christina and I carried an enormous amount of logs from Tompkins Square Park over to S'mack, a new restaurant that serves over ten types of Macaroni and Cheese. Simultaneously, David and Romny were on their way down to Lafayette and Bond, where I had noticed all sorts of fake plants during the day and the two of them (or I have a feeling David coercing Romny) so kindly volunteered to meet me there to see if they were still there. I arrived at our meeting spot in awe to find an entire forest of potted plants still by the roadside, and not only that, they were all fake and placed near the trashcans at each corner of the intersection. We collected as many as we could and filled Romny's trunk, drove up to the East Village where Christina had picked up our Mac and Cheese order, ate heartily, and (David) managed to stealthily stuff the logs in the trunk of a cab before the driver knew what was happening. With the yellow trunk tied shut with a bungee cord, and the plants stuffed in Romny's trunk, Christina and I were off. Have I mentioned how much I love David's heroic acts and adventurous antics? Today, in the studio, I am working on a powerpoint presentation for the Waterpod, and begin to carve the logs into war weapons. In small victories, I have recently gained the excitement of White Box and 3RD WARD to help with the Waterpod. Now all we need are Mira Burke, and Mayor Bloomberg...

09.25.06

In 1994, Robert Kaplan wrote an essay called "The Coming Anarchy" in the Atlantic Monthly, predicting that environmental scarcities would contribute greatly to insurrection, civil disturbances, and finally the next world war. To speed up the expedition of clearcutting Asia's rainforests deadly violence is taking place in places like Iran Jaya. Israeli-Palestinian conflicts are over water as much as anything else, and in the Ivory Coast and Liberia cocoa, diamonds, and timber are the cause of most civil wars. With the enormous and steady population growth, these situations will only worsen until societies plan with a sustainable infrastructure, until people provision, repair, and replenish. We can be aggregators for our community, and potentially a limitless audience of users.

09.16.06

When Buckminster Fuller was alive, he predicted that housing would one day become a service, similar to the service that he assumed water would be. Something that should be provided to everyone. His idea was a polemical change in the way we are starting to think about housing. As a nomadic lifestyle becomes more and more necessary, the wearable home will become a more sensical, practical option, and the printable wearable home will have the opportunity to be a free service worldwide. Right now I have been spending a lot of time designing the WaterPod, a good alternative to overcrowded, shrinking landmasses and a great place to stop and rest for the nomad.

I have been reading a book on Posthumanism, a collection of essays. Half-way in, an essay by Baudrilliard is particularly interesting. He writes that viruses (biological, network/computer related) and terrorist acts all keep humanity at bay from our ultimate goal and quest of a completely networked posthumanism. In another essay, Paula Rabinowitz states "Eliminating the distinction between action and articulation, deed and word, the posthuman body is still saturated in the stories of humanity that circulate around it; it speaks through a language straddling the borders between health/sickness, male/female, real/imaginary. It tells its stories, however, through those already told." ... So, Richard Sennett wrote this book called "The Fall of Public Man", and one part that has stayed with me to this day (and probably will continue to stay with me) is his deconstruction of eras, particularly the Victorian Era with his description of the masks people learned to wear. It is 12:30 on Tuesday morning and I am in the studio, working on photographs, a drawing, doing some reading and rewriting the opera's script. Yes, all that. Today, I did get out. I went to Laumont and Beth Schiffer, then spent an hour at Le Gamin, a cafe near the studio. I had