more meanwhile...
Everything competes for my attention. There's people looking at our roof, at the mill's wheel, at our room for rent. There's Willem van Gogh's Casa de la Musica compilation cd I received today which introduces me to the likes of Ruben Blades, Trilok Gurtu, Dexter Johnson and his Afro-Cubans, Candido Dupuy y su Son Diamante, Maria Teresa Vera and Destiny's Child featuring Wyclef Jean...

Then there's topics out there that need serious scrutiny and thinking over their effects/affordances (eg. voteauction). There's a trip to Lyon ahead tomorrow, and more guests coming in upon my return. Rock steady. There's email to be replied. These are only the fun things to attend to. Summer's over. Wait until the great bureaucracies of this world wake up to a new season of victories over Joe Doe. And go after his moulin, his car, his papers—instead of solving some of the world's true problems, like fading morals and other sellable items. Ha ha indeed. The joke's on us. Let's have fun and go underground.

meanwhile...
I had hardly any sleep Sa/Su. Got up 21 hours ago at 3:30am and started to design a small sheet which I will take to Lyon next Wednesday when I'll visit Andrea and Francine at their artists' residency. Hope to stay a couple of days. The lay-out had me back in Quark: how much you get out of touch with a program... it's a completely different trip from HTML authoring and browsing, jeez I forgot. OTOH: during my typography studies I had to space VAANDELDRAGER in capital lead type (I'm not that old, but went to a traditional school, that's why, ok?) Then came Letraset, for neat spacing and less weight (NPI). So I'm still thinking over the nano-corps' 0 growth, n replication strategy. And I picked up re:reading Brian O'Doherty's 'Inside the White Cube'. Smart, originally from 1976, in his 1986 afterword he says: "Most artists become time-bound to the moment of their greatest contribution, and are not allowed out of it. The present rushes by, leaving them curating their investment—sad imperialists of the esthetic self. Nor is any change tolerated; change is considered a moral failure unless its morality can be convincingly demonstrated."

I'm writing the darn Lyon flyer like I'm writing for NQP. Easy. Nonchalantly precise. But even when it is only to be printed out in a couple of copies, still it has this 'print' thing about it. I'll be wasting paper on it... I would not like send out 9 different copies of it, eg. personalized, too the G-pack. No? While I could do this in email, or even in web 'pages'. Where rests the border between publishing and writing someone in person? It's not in the edition number only, rather in the medium. Like I imagine playing a song to tape it to send it around or record it to reproduce it, is different than playing it ad hoc in front of your friends, or object of fondness.

technology we'll be remembered by
My kids will remember me at my computer. Like I remember my grandmother stirring up the stove in the early morning, my grandfather asleep on the couch, my father in his papers or the paper, my mother at the cooker, the piano or the drawing board; me at the screen will be a prime memory for R+r. Of all the things you remember your parents by and for, be it fondly or not, there are some prime images that stand apart, from whatever the qualities of one's relationship to one's parent were. (I remember my uncle Cees Jouwersma, whose visit from Strassbourg with his dear friend Brigitte I deeply enjoyed a few weeks ago, kicking an apparently rotten onion on the Texel (site sez: from 28 August on a faster server) beach, flinging the onion gunge all over our little company, you know, back in the old age when onions were still quietly rotting away on the beaches). Early morning as a kid you always saw the grownups' backs first, when they were doing some adult thing and you sneaked up behind them. Do I want R+r to remember me at my computer, my back turned to the door which they usually pass? How to change that image. I'd always prefer it to them remembering me gluied to a cell phone. Gil they'll probably remember at the other end of a proper tool, in the (vegetable) garden. Which makes good balance to remember this period of our lives, their introduction to memory.

oh mylieu! au milieu
My brand-new Hachette French dictionary, phonétique, étymologique, précis grammatical, bought at a local supermarket during our recent royal trip, gives the etymology for milieu: from mi (middle) and lieu (place). Our milieu is that which we are surrounded by or, that which we are in the middle (not necessary at the center) of. Ecology (Gr. oikos: house, family, and logos: word, treatise) determines us in an active mutual relationship to our milieu, and all its other inhabiting species. Our cultural milieu's ecology is how we interact with the 'stuff that surrounds us', and with its other users and performers who, like ourselves, bring that stuff alive by informing it. We inform our milieu as vitally as it informs us.

Local currency: 'personal environmental activism' is our prime concern. Pair that to Paul's recent link to 'nano-corporations': when 'small is beautiful' meets 'being ruthlessly small'.

(LEFT UNFINISHED)
zero growth, n replication? From critical mass to critical momentum
If replication replaces growth as a 'business' strategy for nano-corporations, what can we expect to see emerge in the corporate milieu? Lots and lots and lots (that's infinite growth... at an explosive rate) of connected interests, forever shifting focus in interaction, and changing value in transaction, changing patterns with restless concentrations of activity, smart trade enhanced by computer supported realtime never-stop communication, all in search of a profitable momentum, when any value (measured in an infinite diversity of information currencies) differentiation's balance drives partners to end negotiations and have the transaction end, only to allow another bidding to start.

Yet the desire for domination drives the need for convergence. 'Those in the grow' will want to invest their power. One of the big questions of the landscape of diversification and fragmentation is whether or not the many will outnumber the few, whether the ruthlessly small will gain momentum over the arrogantly big—there's a chance here, with intricately networked rapidly moving small players, but they need some kind of organisation, a devoir, beyond the goal of survival as small, but strong. Otherwise we're only looking at the relentlessly vulnerable.

Zero Growth for survival? critical mass -> critical momentum

ruthlessly small bears on the road
What pleads against 'ruthlessly small'? First and foremost: the spell of growth, its charming and impressive image, the magic power of big; then: arrogance, elitism, privilege, the creative drives of competition, and other human preoccupations.

gaining space
First thing today, I gained a space around the source's water tank, by trimming and weeding the far west corner of the North Garden. Up to 6ft I cut away all lower branches of an as of yet unknown bush/tree (actually sculpting it from an insignificant shrub into a dramatic tree), thus creating a space under and around it, letting in air and light and freeing a volume that could easily house a table and some chairs, with a view on the mill's pond and the best evening oranges and greens and reds. Then for the fern, ditto. Later in the fall I'll be trimming more, gaining more space for a winter as naked as possible. Joes and Marjolein in our absence had cleaned big areas, so we continue their good work. And we dug some real fine gardens on our trip.

money and wit: call for capital
Over the past week we saw the best art and architecture and genius loci that money and wit could buy over the past centuries: the Loire et al valleys' castles and gardens. Their stories are the stories of ideas, change, wit and taste, money and power, which make Bill Gates' wonderland household the sign of degeneration and a laughing stock. Money and wit used to buy art and move mountains. May those who have it today spend it to that effect. Don't blow it on the media.

toys
The best snail mail in the box when I returned was the fat brown envelope that smiled 'toys' at the customs. It jingled when shaken. It contained the dream stuff one can apparently live without in San Francisco—or indeed potlatch to our family. Treasury. R+r looted most of it up to their room and arranged it around their bed: cowboys and indians, flies, dinosaurs, jumping bugs, a flat glass pebble they use to transmit kisses to the sender (because it is a lot like the pebble Truus gave them when we left Amsterdam, telling them it would send off any kisses they would give it to her). The bird of course I confiscated immediately. The key I found in the dark on the terrace tonight: it is on the move, I think Roemer takes it places to try to fit it. Some of the petite animals joined the library kingdom and stare at the books from the fireplace's mantle. Thank you and bon voyage from the four of us, Judith.

soep en land
I was without web access the first half of the day. Shame on wanadoo. I phoned Paul to be comforted and to hear whatsup. As usual he supplied water to drink. My disconnectedness helped the garden come about. I will be out there a lot with my favorite season fast approaching and my current taste for taming nature going wild. Also my Mavica will return from the doctor, 2 September, so I expect to give lemoulindumerle.com a big swing. Then moerstaal is waiting for more stahoogte, rijksambtenaar, paardentram, tafelschikking, draadeinde, tevens, weleer and gedoe. It's all here. And I'm culturally challenged to the teeth. Even QS Serafijn appeared in my dream yelling 'soep en land!' at me ('soup and land!'), jumping out of a shabby white van... (the white cube?). Joke when she was here showed me his Omission has a website of its own now. I'll sink into that one for you, later. Soep en land to you QS!

Le Moulin du Merle
Tomorrow we'll leave the moulin to Joes, Marjolein and Linde (arriving tonight), and R+r, to go on a fact finding trip—the two of us. Seems like a real long time since we spent longer than 48 hours together, sans R+r. Today we're cleaning and I'm writing the Moulin Manual which still lacked. Simple instructions and sound advice. Where to find the best bread, cheese and wine in the valley. And how to get on or off the grounds, when the main electrical gate refuses to open, due to the heat, or some electrical failure. Things like that.

20000816 links
don't click telesculpture (sure, art... soon emerging on a socle near you) (www.sculpture.org/documents/webspec/digscul/digscul6.htm)
don't click devices connected to the Internet at Yahoo (nothing you would want to telemove) (in.dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Internet/Devices_Connected_to_the_Internet/Robots)

click here
It is the simplest of all, and people love it. Those who would otherwise take no orders, give in, joyfully. It's the true one-order basis of the information age. Repeat click here. What kind of production can we anticipate from the one-click crowd, in the upcoming age, beyond following that one order? Should we be optimistic about the level of democratic creativity: a splendid rising, spreading, thriving of authentic content? Will people have anything to say, beyond: 'I click'? Are they expected to, and what would it be that they will be saying? Is there anyone out there or in here who really cares to prepare the people for some kind of creativity? Something to say? And how to put it? Or who to share it with? What to charge for it, and why? When did you last give some simple instructions, motivate people to use the new media, share some clicks? Well? There's more lag out there than we're willing to think about. And without our help it isn't gonna get any better.

the manual that built Jack
In order to keep pace with informational accessibility, material distribution has to find shortcuts to the household asap. Material distribution has to follow the distribution of information—not the other way around, like it used to (when the manual came in the box with the apparatus, while tomorrow you'll download the manual, which will then fabricate the apparatus for you, in situ. No more boxes). The shortest cut would of course be on site materialization, or manufacturing, in the individual household, instead of heavy duty transport: downloading not information to be browsed on a screen, but instructions to be fed to a production unit at home. Such facilities should be researched with great effort, and probably are. I'm very interested to know of examples of 'goods' produced at home in such a way, and I don't mean rapid prototypes here, but immediately usable goods. Fashion items (the IP knitting machine?) would be the first thing I could think of. What else is prepared out there that can be sent down the wires?

Upon first search it appears that the process is most commonly referred to as telemanufacturing.

simple instructions
Take an x amount of material A, act B on it, voilà the finished product C. Repeat n times for n products. A spinning wheel in every household, to force the British fashion industry on its knees. Remember Ghandi's khadi.

Sunday morning early. We progress by lots of small steps these days. We move around and about a moulin, très datscha, we move back and forth from it. With Joke still here and other friends coming today and tomorrow and Thursday, we move beds and pillows and sheets and thin blankets up and down. The summer heat makes us move in and out of the shadow, in and out of the water. The house remains open all day and night as we cross it, wake it, sleep it. Outside, the vide greniers, 'attics emptied', this summer spectacle of the French countryside, its people's material coming out, makes us move to Tamnay en Bazois, Varzy and Champlemy and other small villages, to browse whatever families rid themselves off from their households these days. It seems hard for them to decide what to throw out, there's no logic. Markets are deeply sentimental. Yesterday's and the day before yesterday's books and goods and out-moded everything, all waste, without having been used. The other day in Corbigny... so I didn't buy, just drifted. At her shop in the former church, Simone gave me Rainer Maria Rilke POÉSIE, which apparently waited for me on her shelves, translated by Maurice Betz and published in 1947 by Éditions Émile-Paul Frères, as a present. At home the book fell apart on pages 176-177, right after 'Portrait du poète par lui-même'. Among the poems he wrote in French (1923-1926) is 'Dans la multiple rencontre':

Dans la multiple rencontre
faisons à tout sa part
afin que l'ordre se montre
parmi les propos du hasard

Tout autour veut qu'on écoute,—
écoutons jusqu'au bout;
car le verger et la route
c'est toujours nous!

These are days of endless propos du hasard, in which multiple orders come and go. Rilke in the long 'Verger' means:

Nom clair qui cache le printemps antique,
tout aussi plein que transparent,
et qui dans ses syllabes symétriques
redouble tout et devient abondant.

The 'verger', the abundant orchard ('vers quel soleil gravitent / tant de désirs pesants?') is too rich for the poor poet, greedy to breathe in all, 'écoutons jusqu'au bout', at the end of his life.

right in front of our eyes
'Everything' which 'doubles in symmetry', in front of our abusive eyes, in a desperate attempt to become invisible in us, administered in our language, multiplies again and again in our experience, and in our experience of language. Experience, the multiplier; not even communication or expression (or 'reflection'), already experience raw, sensations in their prime effects, saturates us. Expression and communication of experience are man's clumsy attempts to throw off experience, in per-formed memories and impressions and insights, preoccupations not at all meant to be shared, to be enjoyed with others or to promote them, as much as first and foremost to get them out of oneself and out of one's lonely nightmares and make them disappear completely—to make way for new and unavoidably confusing ones.

The final form for us, the ultimate form at the end of chaos: an order out of us, ordering intoxicating experience out of us, to protect ourselves from it, allowing to throw off experience and make it disappear from our world, from the deadly monumental, into the immaculate invisible—this is all we do, breathe in and out, without a single effect as far as solving any of the known and unknown problems of life, only aggravating these by dumping our sorrows on it, forever wasting.

increasing returns
All this taking in and this throwing off, propelling different meanings in today's media, today's interests being irremediably unfit to ever fix in a final word (when all remains process and search), might allow us just so to make way to a new breathing of the eternal return of experience, to returning angels, to returning intoxication as to their meaningful consumption and production.

Those who claim today's media cannot ever indulge in the luxury of deeply processing experience (consume, produce, breathe) at all levels of suffering, because of it lacking material shape and tangibility—them miserable downsizers are sadly missing the point. Let them trade their own petty experiences entr'eux, let them be emptied by a culture industry for their sex and drugs and other substitute religious appetites, for ever catered to them under the enslaving laws of industrial customization. With all their wonders, new media are no revolutionary democratic emancipation machines. Theirs are very old rules, the rules of man's many faces, showing vital passion for every good and evil it can lay its hands on, to realize and maintain the ultimate power for man's cause and capital and ego.

New immediacy media, their ubiquitous presence and real time momentum, their 24/24 streaming availability for consumption-production symmetry, their individual publishing control—these first rate technological specifics might as well stimulate a breathing interaction with experiential reality at all levels of representation, multiplied to the abundance. Rather than feeling invited to 'eat as much as you can', we should invite ourselves and others to produce as much fertilizing fragments as we can, to till the land for a new search reality. If these media allow us to throw off our experience in such a way as to provide multiple learning-to-perform opportunities in the interaction, we will have found our Eden orchard in which no fruits ever will rot away in oblivion.

To bring to mind once more Rainer Maria Rilke: the orchard and the road, they are always us!, le verger et la route c'est toujours nous!

Rainer Maria Rilke, POÉSIE
achevé d'imprimer en octobre 1942
pour le compte des éditions émile-paul
par louis bellenand et fils
imprimeurs à fontenay-aux-roses (seine)
no. d'autorisation : 12.588

20000812 link
Online Book Initiative: Grimm (swallow.doc.ic.ac.uk/pub/packages/Online-Book-Initiative/Fairy.Tales/Grimm/)
popcultures.com: Gilles Deleuze (www.popcultures.com/theorists/deleuze.html)
popcultures.com: Walter Benjamin (www.popcultures.com/theorists/benjamin.html)

allegory
- Walter Benjamin (...) showed that allegory was not a failed symbol, or an abstract personification, but a power of figuration entirely different from that of the symbol: the latter combines the eternal and the momentary, nearly at the center of the world, but allegory uncovers nature and history according to the order of time. It produces a history from nature and transforms history into nature in a world that no longer has its center. If we consider the logical relation of a concept to its object, we discover that the linkage can be surpassed in a symbolic and an allegorical way. Sometimes we isolate, purify, or concentrate the object; we cut all its ties with the universe, and thus we raise it up, we put it in contact no longer with a simple concept, but with an Idea that develops this concept morally or esthetically.

Sometimes, on the contrary, the object itself is broadened according to a whole network of natural relations. The object itself overflows its frame in order to enter into a cycle or a series, and now the concept is what is found increasingly compressed, interiorized, wrapped in an instance that can ultimately be called 'personal.'
(from: Gilles Deleuze, 'The Fold; Leibniz and the Baroque')

for R+r

once just-in-time, a fairy tale in search of an author
Long years since the kings understood all their narrative to be fragmentary in nature, it has become common knowledge, shared by the many. How exactly this happened; as a result of which spectacular (some impressionable but under-attentive souls think 'revolutionary') escape from history, will remain unclear—isn't it kinda per-verse, irresponsible indeed of those in (narrative) power (and probably not in their advantage either), to leave the uneducated masses disengaged and dumbing down by the shreds, puzzled at the absence of rule, the absence of warp and weft in the web? Anyway, as the story goes so it happened, while some conditions in the fragmentation fabric are a changing again, for the kings, for their daughters, for the masses, for the geese, for the everyone and everything. BTW Deleuze, on Whitman, wrote some disturbing bits about the fragment 'being' innate American and the 'composition' being innate European, which' discussion can wait, but could hold a lesson for the future of informatic license and competing intelligences at both sides of the Atlantic, ha!. I took R+r to old school France for good reason! It is kings' territory, if ever there was one, never mind the republic it is today, never mind all other republics. We all get the fairy tales we've been soliciting, just-in-time when we deserve'm, that is. Reverse your royal ideals today. Go with the kings, kids.

no fix media
Networked media's searchability promises a new whole at every in-stant, a new golden goose to spring up at whim keystroke, infinite new wholes, constructed with the active participation of those who individually search the entirety of an expanding Literature. Since its expansion is of an accelerated kind, it cannot be stopped and fixed in any way. It's amok fairy tale this time. All maps run immediately out of memory as soon as they take shape. They crash on change. All representations of wholeness are as ideological (as ever)—exciting (who said 'dice-like') coups, with no relation to the Literature as such, as to be able to summarize it, index it, rule it down, either by its content or in any quantifiable way. But didn't we always love our maps exactly for their inaccuracy, which left us the freedom to inform them, instead of the other way around?

Every halt-in-whole expands the map, adding information to the Literature, thus pumping up its volume, ruining any illusion of singularity, somewhat like what the artwork does in Eliot's individual talent tale. Information's individual talent, if you wish, is that every bit is no singular appearance, but bears upon the existing and future Literature, infecting its own identity in its very emergence. (I've mentioned Eliot because of the following quote, not to further a suggestion of quality of what I call the Literature, grosso modo after Ted Nelson cs: the entirety of a unstoppable growing body of connected files, stored and processed and distributed in an open hypermedia network, at any given moment). Despite the capital L, there's no proof nor promise of Quality in this Literature whatsoever. After all, there's no such thing as Free Literature:

- what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art which preceded it. (...) I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical, criticism.

tale of the searching temper
The information age brings the tale of the searching temper. Sense of search is our only promise, the only informing security in the new dynamic Literature. Search will be the ruling mode of information exchange, both for its ('passive') enjoyment, as for its ('active') (re-)production. Moreover, in terms of information exchange, active and passive are invalid qualities. Smelly browsing nostalgia. Information will be guided only by the searching temper, or be reduced to immobilized mapable data, historia. Searching temper, totally aware of the 'everything you search can be searched against you' paradigm, produces the Literature with every consumption of it.

when more is less
There's less weeds in the garden if you are familiar with their qualities, less people in the crowd if you can name them, even if you do not know their names proper. The more information, the less data. Data turn into information, by becoming invisible in it. Even when data growth is absolute with information growth, it is its refined state 'inside' information, which reduces its raw presence. Early this morning when uprooting nettles I added information to my garden, including myself in active participation, and turning this wasteland of a relationship into a learning opportunity, a land-scaping man shaping exchange. Without me this piece of territory would contain only data, and lots of it—with my active presence, information emerged. When I searched the green for roots I manipulated data for information, in order to let more become less, by adding the value of recognition. Not only did I temporary 'clean up' or order a small part of my property, more importantly I learned and taught a lesson to gardening me. If I do not forget, if the weeds do not forget, we moved to a new level together.

More information means less uncertainty (less improbability reducing the chance of information to happen), if only for a short moment and to a limited extent. With the contemporary non-stop production of connected information, without the noblesse of a closed loop, without the certainty of isolation, without the freeze frame, every bit of certainty (in received information) changes the existing information before and after it, infinitely, there is no escape from data searching a searcher to turn into information. There's no escape from uncertainty in information society. At last we're all free!, and don't we love it!, and as long as possible keep producing our own freedom? To keep adding to it, is the best guarantee for our freedom to last. (S)he who takes a pause from searching, is imprisoned in a lasting view, frozen in a perspective, bound in a (hi)story, cursed by a spell.

they lived long and happily, ever after information
All the king's men and all the king's horses and all the king's kingdoms and all the king's daughters will blow up into data dust, if there's no clever miller's sons to search for their information. When some day in the future R+r will leave the Moulin they'll know that old school 'search composition' will help them go after the kings' daughters, their kingdoms, horses and men.

- If you cut down that tree in the centre of the wood, you'll find that all the others will fall down by themselves. Have a look in its roots where there's a gift for you!