EVERYTHING IS EVERYTHING!

well, tomorrow is the last class.  in effect, class has been over since presentations started but whatever.  i must take this time to reflect on what this class has done to me.  it did a number.  talk about a capstone course, it basically was mine.  for the past 5 or 6 years now i have allowed the concepts of the world to sort of infiltrate me and affect change on me.  i have let words be important for a darn long while.  but i havent had an academic kick in the nuts like this since listening to kind of blue when i was 16.  this class made things possible for me.  it gave me the wonderful sensation of having the curtains pulled back.  oh especially us graduating fellows.  we think we know it all, even us crazy people think, look im OPEN TO SUGGESTION OF ANYTHING, pull some tricks.  well, i felt foolish for not knowing this.  the film ‘wargames’ with a very young matthew broderick was on tv yesterday.  early 80s stuff. TALKING ABOUT COMPUTERS, but talking about them the way that we talk about them. computers learning how to learn and them being the wave of the future, this that and the other.  and this seemed fairly mainstream.  why didnt it permeate people.  i know i had to of at least glimpsed some inane movie like that sometime and it didnt make me say, hmm this is possible, but its the same info we talked about in class.  i think that thing that made it click was the context.  mcluhan was right.  if you can see the timeline, if you can just step back, then youll get the big ideas,  as soon as borges’ stories were compared to the internet.  i freaked out because it made sense.  then at that moment history attained a linear progression.  BAM BAM BAM, just like that.  the past made the future make sense.  once again i feel like im five minutes too late, jumpin on this bandwagon or that one or some other one.  I WANT IN AT THE BOTTOM FLOOR< the one that makes me homeless for a year while people catch up.  new media studies made progression even more possible/palpable/necesssary than ever.  the crazy thing is, even though a tremendous amount of people are let into the secret of new media, it still seems like a secret.  i mean good god, things are backwards some places.  in thailand you can only pay your bills in cash but huts have solar panels and the internet, WE CAN DO THINGS HERE PEOPLE.  i want to tell everyone, but that would leave no time for me to learn programming.  i mean i still know so little, i need to learn and there isnt any time, but there is also infinite time.  im gonna get to it, im gonna jump on that train-o-knowledge and start the warpath, start the flaming chariots,  that means i must be off.

ok so a while back dr. c asked me to blog about stamina, well now is the time that shall happen.  so we all know that we only have so much time.  most of that time is spent sleeping or hustlin’.  usually we don’t spend those wee hours of the morn innovating.  after reading some excerpts from gig gigerenzer’s book on simple heuristics ive found that harnessing the human brain aint no easy thing to do.  the easiest way that i can relate is personally especially because this topic of stamina really helped form who i am.  story start:

so i was a junior in high school and a veritable nobody.  a waste of potential which is worse than anything.  i didnt try hard and barely involved myself in the things i did try.  i was so frightened that if i added anything more on my plate id crumble, lord knows i wasn’t doing so superbly but i knew my effort level was staggeringly low.  i dont know what did it but something started to happen around the second semester of junior year.  books finally started to make me sweat.  they made me feel good.  i discovered jazz.  holy shit did that do a number on me.  for some reason those things lit a fire under my worthless ass.  that fire screamed in my ear on a daily basis DO MORE DO MORE.  so i started to listen.  i started doing extremely well in school.  i convinced teachers to give me independent studies. i read like a crazy person. i played more music. i pushed myself to the edge and the edge kept moving back.  then i got to mary wash and woo wee i pushed that mother to the limit.  presidenting as many clubs as possible, dean listing it, overloading credits, studying abroad, and still hustlin’ like the best of em’.  i think i hit a threshold with while overloading on credits and taking three lit courses and trying to read every word of every page assigned (i aint one of those punk ass english majors, i try to read every word) but i mean it got to the point where after reading for 9 hours a day my emotions started to leave me.  i became a zombie and about a year later after the subconscious processing took place i had some nice tokens of knowledge in my system.    but so what i found is that stamina is allowing yourself the possibility of doing as much as you can.  we can all do an amazing amount more then we could ever imagine.  we cant do it in a whole night and when we leave a paper till the day before its due we feel the failure that comes from trying to do everything in one night.  but we cant run miles after sittin on our butts for an extended amount of time.  its funny how long distance running was the only sport i was really good at, i never had true speed but i had endurance and in the end thats what matters.  it matters to be the better editor then the better first draft writer. THE FINAL PRODUCT IS ALL WE HAVE IN THE END AND WE ONLY HAVE THAT BECAUSE OF THE BADASS JOURNEY THAT TOOK US THERE.  that process is important.  the famous graffiti artist Banksy said that “we don’t go to a restaurant to take a shit.”  and i think that works.  but with these things being said.  start training.  start working those brain muscles.  the right and the left side.  the smart and the dumb side.  pile up the amount of experiences until you feel as if your brain will explode.  because your brain is not a closet it is a soup, it absorbs!

my sister was writing a play for a class in her senior year of high school.  one of her main characters (who was basically herself) was extremely frightened that when they went to college they would have to substitute the high school memories for the new college memories because there wasn’t enough room in her brain.  i thought that was some great imagery (especially from someone who never thought of expression as being “cool”).  but it was more than that.  it was the common fear that i have been talking about this whole time.  the fear that we are already doing the best that we can and the fear that our best isnt even that good so how could we try to be better.  i mean there are many a pop song about how we are simple creatures who break under the most commonplace situations.  simple simple simple simple.  if anything we just need to get more dichotomies in our system.  i think that could be a simple way to exercise the brain.   spend time working your brain and spend time working your body and spend time working your soul and spend time working different parts of your brain and different parts of your body and different parts of your soul.  its difficult to plan this out. i mean i try, with the tennis and the yoga and the books and the movies and the music and the art and the computers and the computers and the computers but its still overwhelming especially when this doesnt incorporate anything like food or shelter or kids or SLEEP.  but all i can recommend for real. (basically what i said at the beginning) (but like i said if i stopped at the beginning there would be no journey just a piece of shit) is that you need to push yourself.  and when you think you are at the end of your rope, push yourself harder, and when you see the wall again, go harder.  you can sleep when your dead, but the trick is you wont die when you think you will.

let’s start with the introduction.  in the further reading it lists Google.  like the site.  like the portal to all knowledge which we hope to find on this here box.  i thought that was funny and i thought it went along with the article itself.  this article, while it was jargon filled and technocentric to the max, is very simple.  it clearly explains what the internet is and how it does what it does.  nothing really fancy, i mean it abstained from going over all of html with us but that is certainly not necessary in explaining the mainframe premise of the internet.  but that is the beautiful essence of the internet, SIMPLICITY.  it is a tool, just like how google is a tool for the internet.  both the internet and google can do an astounding amount of things; however, it can do nothing and will remain simple without the interaction of a complex, thinking human.  just like the pen that can write anything and everything, it is simple and remains simple without a body to put it to work.  the computer should just be called ULTIMATE POTENTIAL.

just like all the other articles this one was right on the money with its predictions for the future.  one of the things that it really brought to light was how the direction that the internet was going was the direction of the COMMERCIAL.  perhaps that is why the internet has stayed simple, even simple for the internet.  if everything was on a truly abstract and academic level then it couldnt do well commercially.  just think about books.  how many books, written by that simple but awesome tool the pen (or now the word processor) have to do with truly academic, intellectual, analytically augmenting topics.  certainly not all and perhaps even not most.  everyone isnt a programmer and the computer is not forced upon the public as a tool for programming.  it is forced on us as a tool for communication.  the introduction said that the most used function on the internet is email.  and what is commercialism, oh just the communication of dollars and cents.  just like the pen, most people dont use writing utensils to manufacture great novels, they use them for shopping lists and signing checks and doodling.

luckily.  there is hope.  the computer offers us inspiration on an unprecedented level.  just by using something like second life, or even just hearing about it, we cannot help but ponder its ramifications or its implications.  maybe people spoke the same way in the time of gutenburg.  but by hope i mean that the internet grows, and web 2.0 is happening, and media isnt dying.  in small villages in thailand everyone uses solar panels and you can bet your ass that an internet cafe is near by.  people are getting a chance to use this amazing technology and they are being made aware of the building blocks that  that make it up.   we are the creative ingenious information providers and we ARE A VERY EXCITING FUTURE.

“you can postulate anything, but once the rules of the system have been defined they must be adhered to scurpulously. suuch are the rules for creating ‘rule governed worlds.’”

now let’s talk about this for a second.  i am fascinated by rules.  especially these types of “rules”.  the computer has rules just like everything but these rules can be created so that the rules themselves follow rules.  oh the random number generator.  its a rule but its unpredictable. it sets boundaries but those boundaries shift.  in the piece that i posted recently, Variations II, this same sort of rule dilemma came up.  In Variations II you are given transparent pieces of paper with lines and dots on them and are told to make measurements that will give you readings for all sonic parameters; however, exactly how to measure the lines and dots (other then being told to measure the perpendiculars drawn from the dots to the lines) and what exactly to do with these measurements, is uncertain.  Now these are some rules that i like.  You are still bound to the contexts of reality, and the context of the composer (john cage), and the context of your ability, and your imagination, and the natural properties of sound etc etc. rules exist but these rules allow for the expansion of the mind.  as john cage also said (ill paraphrase) the best way to get ideas is to make whatever you are doing boring.

The lawyer david liked “boring” games because they stimulated him more.  they were the most existentially engaging.  isn’t that the same thing as the most complex games, the games that devour your brain the most by having complex rules and worlds and stories and atmospheric properties?   the same rules exist for us in computers as they do in the real world.  computers are part of the real world and they are only extensions of ourselves, they are the mirrors that turkle was talking about; therefore, these natural boundaries will always exist because we can only go as far as we can go.  what this really means is that all experiences towards technology are relative.  jarish needs to experience technology in his way which is completely different from the way that david needs to experience it.  in the end technology is only so much a tool as our opposable thumb, we use it as it is applicable to our lives.  in my own opinion i think that the complex world is probably better suited for everyone because that is how things actually are.  logic is easily masked as illogic and the harmony of nature seems completely irrational.  can we not see how closely related these are.  the rules and the no rules.  we will find a way to stimulate everything with what it is we have.  then we get exhausted. then we take a break by finding new ways to stimulate what are practically the same thing.  we use this technology as a religion and a vice.  to soothe our aching mind I MEAN HOW COOL IS IT THAT DAVID SWITCHED FROM TRANSCENDENTAL MEDITATION TO VIDEO GAMES HALLELUJAH!!!

well this is sort of like the opposite of stranger in a strange land.  This story has so many levels it is quite amazing.  So the kimonians are basically like computer people which is wonderful.  I was thinking about it.  If a computer was trying to act human it would check email, but otherwise it would never check email because it could find out any information about or said or done by anyone without having to communicate with anyone.  the kimonians arent really evil as they are sort of made to seem.  children will always be children and it rolls both ways.  i like how this story makes us responsible.  basically its the anger that all of us feel when we see someone not study for a test and do better than we did even though we studied a whole bunch.  basically this story was for the people who dont study and do great because it lets them know that theres a lot more studying to be done.  ive always believed we dont flex enough of our brain and dont look at me like im crazy if i think that parapsychic ability is possible if we just  ya know exercised our minds for the next  million years.  we are some lazy people.  especially as a graduating senior this story has a tremendous amount of relatability.  i mean i am ready to get out of school so that i can focus on the studies that i want to study but many are anxious to never have to study anything again.  we sort of judge ourselves on a linear path that has the same sort of beginning and end that our corporeal bodies have but that doesnt make any sense.  just because youre old doesnt mean you know things just because you have children doesnt mean you should just because you this or that blah blah blah.  its funny how the process for getting to kimon sort of sets you up perfectly for getting there.  you spend your whole life learning things and then you find out its all worthless.  but if you didnt have that sort of rug pulled out from under you, you may not be able to have the introspective experience necessary in order to augment your thinking.

its funny how pride is just basically fear.  its the fear of forsaking the society in which we live and i dont know whether or not that is a bad thing.  i mean goodness knows if we didnt associate with anyone neither telepathy or vocal communication would be necessary at all and human development could be our primary goal but it wouldnt do anyone any good if we werent sharing it with anyone.  oh but doesnt it seem contradictory that in the story the realization of further learning for the earthians cant be told the them but they must learn it for themselves and then when they are ready they are sent to school but the whole story is a big didactic ball hand fed to us the readers and if we dont get it by the end then maybe we didnt pass the test for kimon in the first place.

i just finished my final music seminar project and it was on John Cage’s piece Variations II. I played my own realization of the indeterminate piece and got it recorded. i thought you might like to hear: Variations II

well deschooling  is quite the trip.  it basically seems like super communism.  down with the bourgeoisie to the max!  allow everyone everything to learn.  i mean i think its amazing because its  uber-utopia. everyone being able to learn everything.  but things get tricky with him.  i mean there are probably reasons we dont want kids playing around in nuclear power plants testing things out (i mean Chernobyl didnt exactly have kid employees or anything).  he seems to have some ambivalence with how he feels about skilled teachers.  perhaps a videotape could replace them.  however he then fights for their rights saying that it is unfair that skilled people need a certificate to teach what they learned outside of school.  i know that very skilled guitarists in fredericksburg have tried to get teaching jobs here at school however because they lacked “formal” training were not given the job.  I think the most difficult thing about deschooling is that we would all have to live in the same context.  technically if we all live in the society we do now then we technically live in the same context but illyich seems to want that and more.  He wants to push globalization quicker and faster.  he wants to get everyone the equipment they need to know everything perhaps if their civilization isnt even ready for it.  This is where i find it weird.  I mean i agree with him i think that the process we have is flawed and painfully too pragmatic but his program is communism bordering on the line of fascism.   he knows the way and he knows what people want and how they want it.  I don’t think that there is enough choice there; however, i’m sure he’d argue that people dont really have choice now either.  so if they dont have choice in either situation then is one really better than the other or he is creating the inverse in order to find the middle?  whatever the case i agree with the gems  in here.  i agree that rich or poor we should have equal opportunity to education but what i think he should stress is trying to make a community where education is relevant (only if that community wants it).  a big problem with baltimore city schools is that education isnt relevant to its students.  if we are to learn outside of schools then outside of schools we must begin to be encouraged to learn.  if our world encouraged us to learn we would create the opportunity; we would run from these institutions guilt free knowing that we could survive otherwise.  however with technology as powerful as it is we need some verification of peoples skills.  we need something to trust because if we dont have that a tremendous amount of damage could come to our world.  our world could end.  i mean he wrote this after the nuclear bomb.  i am very surprised that he thinks the world is so small and controllable.  that people could exist on this common wavelength.  i mean his ideals would even be ideals for idealists.  and you need everyone to make this work so it is beyond the minority that has these sentiments.  oh how it would feel to walk clear manhattan streets, you really would have to be in a movie or something.  but then it would cease to be manhattan, it might be sandusky OH or something.  Doesn’t our daily struggles for knowledge teach us anything extra?  i mean with the internet we have so much viable information at our fingertips that we lose the enriching battle for knowledge we once needed to have.  true more questions can be asked because there is more time but what is the point.  we arrive at the end of our journey with no satisfaction of sweat blood or tears.  we are barely able to remember the astounding amount of keystrokes we participated in on one day.  If anything i think we need some catch up time.  some time to relearn somethings and some time to have our society workout until we reach our technology because soon it wont matter if everyone has access to all the information because itll all be too esoteric to evaluate before our life is over.

gosh, space is an interesting word.  “the interesting thing about idea spaces and memory systems is that they presuppose the existence of some sort of place, either real or graphic, which has its own structure and architecture.” we’re talking about libraries and brains and universes and gameboys and OH MY!  That got me thinking about my thoughts, oh which i love to do because it opens up new ideas that think about my head as a box that is within a box and all those boxes are of indeterminate and ever changing sizes and shapes and colors.  Viola goes on to speak about how we always parallel spaces with having boundaries but doesn’t that seem foolish.  our brains are more than capable of smooshing together everything that we see so that at any one point in time we really see the beginning and end of everything (perhaps even our own lives) without knowing it.

“the whole poem is there before us, and, starting at the top of the page, we can see the end before we actually get there.” well this made me think about comics. similar indeed.  But then i started thinking about film (also it felt kind quite young when he separated filmmakers and videomakers because i guess in my life time film has always been synonymous with video but of course they really aren’t oh godard would beat the shit out of me) and film is just a bunch of different visual poems smooshed on top of one another.  If we actually were using film we could look at each frame and we could tape them all on top of each other and project them on the wall.  it would be an unintelligible mess but it would be exactly what it was all at the same time without the bothersome necessity of playback.

I feel like I was raised a gamelan musician.  i would always rather do an entire piece over then rehearse certain sections of it.  I know that having that predilection is  different than not physically being able to rehearse a part of a song in the  middle but i think its similar.  i think its also similar that i feel uncomfortable listening to songs out of the context of their albums (dont even get me started on greatest hits records).  just as all knowledge is a dot, there are an infinite amount of dots embedded in that dot.  and i want to examine all of those embedded dots as well as the dot as a whole.  I mean i am used to living in a society that works at things backwards.

i was speaking with a friend of mine the other day about this backwards thinking thing.  it was in the context of journalism.  my friend was saying that journalism, specifically political journalism is faulty because it works backwards. it finds out that some governor was soliciting prostitutes now and then goes back in time, interviewing old aides and looking at emails and phone calls and this and that and whatever.  why wasn’t the media able to puncture this environment.  the environment of the world and talk about the now.  gossip journalists can do it well because they integrate themselves into the world where gossip happens, they become part of it and those that do things that are gossip worthy feel it necessary to contact the established gossip spreader.  i guess in the world of political journalism its more frightening because youre dealing with people that may want to cut  your throat if you integrate yourself into their society with full intent on exposing their hellish existence; however, isnt it the same thing viola is talking about.  isn’t he saying that if we tried to experience all of experience, embody everything in the things we create then we might understand something or at least put ourselves in a context that is true to our universe.  as viola quoted coomaraswamy “the indian, or far eastern icon, carved or painted, is neither a memory image nor an idealization, but a visual symbolism, ideal in the mathematical sense…where european art naturally depicts a moment of time, an arrested action, or an effect of light, oriental art represents a continuous condition.” CONTINUOUS INFINITE ALL ALL ALL ALL.  its funny how comforting it is that at least some people exist in the world that try to bypass the linear, embrace the schizo, just be.

so basically viola got to the thing that made me so freaked out at the beginning of the semester.  he says it straight, “making a program for interactive video disc involves the ordering and structuring of much more information than will actually be seen by an individual when he or she sits down to play the program.”  if you extrapolate this you come to the realization that one day someone will have programmed all of existence into a program.  its just like the universe, we dont experience barely any of it but its all there, its all there so that for the minute chance we want to experience it, it will be there to be experienced.  if all this stuff gets put in a program then we will have met our match because to have that much info in a computer im sure there will be computers available that can experience everything, the computer had to of experienced it because its in the computers memory its in its space! how can we compete with that i mean it cooks it cleans it experienced all of experience. shit.  well i mean the way i got over this inevitable inevitability is by telling myself that it must happen so who cares. nothing matters so everything matters, that sort of thing.  its not tricking yourself when you know that you’re being tricked, its existing somewhere in the middle toeing the line.  people draw lines in the sand because they want you to cross them, usually its not to have you stand on them, but im a man who draws his lines wanting you to stand on them to exist on a plane that is neither yours nor theirs.  then luckily, you remember you can always go back to reality for a second because if you didn’t go back there couldn’t be any non-reality and goodness gracious what a boring life that would be.

well morningstar and farmer took on quite the task. they wanted to create a world in which we interacted like people but completely online. Interestingly enough, it seem that the journey they experienced while trying to perfect Habitat taught them quite a lot about technology and humans and the special places where they intersect. “The availability for pathways for growth is important int he real world, especially if cyberspace is to become a significant communications medium…” what they are talking about is building sustainable technology that can adapt to the ever changing world of the obsolete. Basically, like when they invented interchangeable parts for cars. but if you look deeper you can see something about humanity. we ourselves should create sustainable environments in the real world. if our institutions are created without pathways for growth our societies and governments and laws will become obsolete. we may think that we have the ability to allow for growth but usually that means that we are allowing things to spin out of control. nature inevitably forces change on you if you become obsolete but in the case of computers we are that nature. (in real life i think of things like our dependence on oil and our dependence on democracy and capitalism and things that just seem to need a revamping every once in a while because if not theyll get stale and die while we’re still using them and then we are really screwed). one thing that seemed really frightening is when they began to speak about a “system that exceeds the threshold of complexity above which the human mind loses its ability to maintain a complete and coherent model.”  THE COMPUTER IS TOO META FOR THIS.  if we exceed the threshold of the computer than at times (especially when you are creating worlds like the matrix and habitat and second life and EVERYTHING) it means that we are exceeding the threshold of ourselves, of what we are capable of not as avatars but as humans.  today, simulation is pretty damn close to real life and we only strive to get it closer but one day we will hit the line and i question whether we will be able to handle it or not.  it just seems like in our own lives we need to leave more room for windows automatic updates and new versions of itunes. we dont want to become obsolete technology, like the dinosaurs, maybe that isn’t a good comparison but you know what i mean.

THE FIRST DIMENSION IS THE LINE!

“Ever noticed how the words “short” or “long” refer either to the first dimension or the fourth? In a medium where time and space merge so completely, the distinction often vanishes.”

THE FOURTH DIMENSION IS TIME!

I have been racking my brain trying to think of another medium that has this same quality as a comic.  Mcloud mentioned Duchamp and the futurists and i think cubists also fall into this category.  Perhaps also writing like Burroughs, who in my opinion is just the literary Picasso.  These people trying to push all of time, all of the actions and reactions of time into one stiff moment.  These peoples are crazy.  But if we think about it isnt this sort of the way that our mind works.  If we look at a photograph of someone we experience that sensation of memories and thoughts and indescribable unknowable subconscious synapse bursts that move faster than time. we look at a picture and we get the thousand words its worth almost instantly.  So our brains have a little bit of comic in them too. we should all join geeksquad.

“when the content of a silent panel offers no clues as to its duration it can also produce a sense of timelessness.” now i think the essence of timelessness is a rather interesting one.  I hear that term a lot being in the world of music.  Things shouldnt sound dated they are better if they are timeless.  if it could exist in anytime.  do beatles songs offer no clues towards duration? we have been primarily talking about the visual.  what about the aural.  I want to hear timeless things but not like pop songs.  I want to hear things that have no duration. Things that happen at the same time in the same moment but inhabit the same moment. I’m not even sure what this would entail but it may be something like this.  Recently a friend of wrote a review of a band called ponytail (theyre from baltimore but are actually coming to mary wash next week, they rule check them out www.myspace.com) but back to the story, he created what id like to call a hyper review.  It was posted online and basically as you were reading the review as you scrolled past certain points it would start playing music that the review was referring to and the clip would end when your eyes approximately got to the next description that had audio attached to it.  I thought this was pretty nifty and it might be as close to comic music that we are gonna get but ill keep thinking.