nqpaofu.com Notes, Quotes, Provocations And Other Fair Use IX Amsterdam 1999 March 28-29 We're Gone After a splendid house cooling/friendship warming party yesterday, lots of help and goodbyes today and some last tears to shed tomorrow, we'll be off the hook. In 7 hours the movers will arrive. I have a huge problem pulling the plug and leaving my ADSL in Amsterdam. Back in a week or so, meanwhile bear with us. placeholder March 14-28 IOU Lots of good stories over this period: in retrospect I'll let you know from the moulin in a week or some. So Long. March 12-13 Sans hésiter spring is in the air these days. In the Nièvre temperature rises to a 16 Celsius. This Friday/Saturday R+r stayed with friends Hans and Rini. We re:started packing. Next Tuesday I'll leave for San Francisco for 6 days, for the Webby Award Night and Doors party. Great timing. Tomorrow morning Andrea will arrive from NY to prepare her installation at Lumen Travo gallery, which opens Saturday 20. Also Barbara Bloom sent me mail announcing an unexpected visit to Amsterdam 27-31 March: she'll join our farewell drink. When like Saturday this city comes alive in the sun, we know what we'll be missing. The material I come across packing... 20 years of art practice, of which the first 15 are carbon-centered, built up to a giga-schlep. Bonfire at the moulin. My nqp X anniversary I will kick off on April 1, if I'm connected at the time. Until then expect some upload irregularity. Maybe a goodbye around the 28th. Then silence? Snail mail is Moulin du Merle, 58210 St.Germain-du-Bois, France. Just in case. March 11 A very sunny but winterish morning. Spring announces itself very carefully. With Kristi I browsed garden literature and we get excited over our removal. Truly Regretted Lasts I'll have to submit some Truly Regretted Lasts (for a time being) here soon. March 9-10 More dinners took Marjolein Boterenbrood and Joes Keip and us to the Café Restaurant Amsterdam Tuesday, for a sentimental journey (since we arrived in Amsterdam in 1985 and rented their studio for a year and a half, we have more or less accidentally shared pregnancies and babysitting and getting-away-from-it-all schemes and the occasional-house-in-France scheme, etc.). Last night a very dusty Maarten de Reus drove up to our house straight from his building site, to prepare us his delicious saltimbocca di pollo. Maarten's constructing his own new house in the Amsterdam East harbor district. He'll be moving April 1... March 8 Paul and I have had memorable dinners from Vilnius to San Francisco and from Copenhagen to Grenoble—tonight we added Scheveningen (the Canton Chinese restaurant, which was very good), where we enjoyed each other's company and shared spinning minds for some hours, before my meeting with Femke Snelting, Renée Turner and Kees Verschuren, on the public art workshops at the Rotterdam academy this spring. I got home at 1, got kicked out of bed around 3 by Rolf, and woke up at 6 in another bed in another room, clinging to Roemer's pink dinosaur (which has accompanied me as early as 1991 to the Gramercy Park Hotel in NY, where the chamber maid doing the bed left it sitting on top of the cushion, no doubt touched by my attachment to it). a mind is a terrible thing to waste My mind ran amok the past days, as one ('de oplettende lezertjes', as Maarten Toonder would say) could read from some rants. Sudden energies pushed me into communication automatique mode. Combined emotions of melancholy, misanthropy, authentic enthusiasm and positivism and desire bring forth these hybrid utterances. Usually my notes go online at some point of completion, to be edited in the hours, sometimes first days, after upload. Call this launch and learn? I have to read them on-line to edit out the details, which seems peculiar. I need them on-line, I am not satisfied with the browser's local preview. Like if you would print a book in order to edit it ...well in a sense we do since laserwriters. Corrections are done from the finished lay-out: design and editing merge on the desktop. March 7 This morning I welcome Kristi van Riet to the readership, who requests the possibility to comment these notes. Fair enough. We've been dreaming of symmetry for our media since our first experience of the web 6 years ago... For what I see in the Camworld cs. weblog community, there can be an interesting combined use of websites, mailinglists and straight person-to-person (e-mail and `chest-to-chest'—Hakim Bey) conversation (which in turn can be quoted or summarized in the weblogs), to build a continuous dialogue on the lives we live and the projects we entertain. Often I first read Paul's Alamut before checking to see if he sent me mail. The `publishing' format of the weblog is different from a dialogue, like eg. in a Swiki, which in itself is a hybrid between private publishing and public discussion. I love my media particularly for this ambiguity. And I cherish my own hesitation with what to publish and what not. I steal (my own and other's) time and attention. I notice some people's initial embarrassment to read this `diary'. I am aware of it to be a channel accessible to all. On the other hand I think I know who my readers are, and how little the more personal issues will mean to the occasional passer-by. When I published my unedited notes of 1992 in a lightbox for exhibition, typeset in a 3pt. Univers 55, I was aware of the extremely personal content it contained, and theoretically broadcast. Also I realized the small chance of people actually reading the intimate passages, since they are hidden in the dense field of text. To most the piece looked like a luminous picture of some star spangled universe, which upon further inspection appears to be lines of text. In the context of an exhibition it remained a sign. When the piece would be sold it would change its context and probably be studied in detail, which is a privilege sold with the piece. It is still available, so it most probably will be on transport to St.Germain-des-Bois, next March 30. March 6 `Mas Ars Que Dinaros' Excuse my language here, but this quote was overheard by Jürgen Partenheimer some 15 years ago when a Spanish couple saw its first Dutch banknotes at this Change office on the German/Dutch border. `It's art, rather than money'—were they ever so right. My design for the CE note has this art quality about it and far outshines its Euro counterpart. But if art pretends to be dinaros reality the trouble starts. The art note only gains its value as an intervention, if its graphic (ritual of depiction) quality subverts its use (or face) value. Remember Yves Klein's receipts for an x amount of money against the pure gold that he threw in the Seine river in 1962? Their current value must be n-fold the value of the metal standard that was wasted at the time. Reputation attracted attention to the intervention, and the rest is history, re:valuation. Only the opportunistic, use-less gesture gains access to the aesthetic motive of a critique of the everyday grotesque, monetary et al. We're only in it for the articulation. And refinement of the grotesque. Like it or not, social pretence makes for bad art and petty lifestyles. Since all crises are productive you don't worry too much. But don't mistake good intentions for good art. The best intention is to expose irrelevance of consensus motives, politics, technology, boring grand design, the hypes man lives by—by interventive articulation, nudging the enemy's media. Yes, such exposure makes you dependent of an audience, trust, reputation, consideration—a whole complex of societal parameters and ambitions, that might work against you, but on the other hand, might enhance your action radius and improve your expression. We're only in it for a constituency. The rest of us go to consumption hell. Reading Left to Write With Joke Robaard several times I discussed repetition as a productive intervention that folds back the veils of historical misunderstanding and appropriation. Why not re:peat? Alan Kaprow re:builds, re:covers his historical production. Content is history, for any age group. In new media as much as in the old. History re:de:fined. Coherence is a scourge of God to keep the trains run on time. C'est toujours les autres qui sont cohéhérents. 'Je salue les fonctionalistes' (YK), become who you avoid: the trickster habit of shape shifting, a counter-intuitive strategy to overcome coherence. When 20th century vanguard artist Picasso's one studio was filled with a production, he locked it and bought himself a new castle to start over (Alamut publishes messy offices. How about messy studio's). When my removable hard disc is filled to a serious slowing down I load myself a new one. There's never nor will there ever be a shortage of storage space anymore. My hard disc is my castle. But fuelling informationalization we have to become a lot smarter and audacious than we are. And really destructive. Defacing scarcity value. Technologically we're formally ready for abundancy and extreme density. Psychologically we might never be. Abundancy is very creative: we'll all live forever, bit by bit. So unless we burn material at the same rate as we create information, an information economy will never work. Burn the reduce waste habit. Create a niche for a dump site. Collect attention. Force Informatic License. Information sustainability is in authoritative reading left to write. Stay posted, keep me posted. Communication Automatique: stay ahead of the Noise In communication, today's dialogue [which, since e-mail, is 99% written (again)!] is my future archive and has happened before I can say `hey listen'. The sophistication of our media understanding has improved dramatically. We've learned very-well how to read the patterns. If we don't like what we read in the archives, we'll have to re:write, re:arrange, edit, re:publish. The very read/write competence forges informatic license. Only production beats consumption. Linear expression is counter-productive for a new media order. With the competence infarct of new media information abundancy, we are facing an absolute and existential challenge to stay ahead of the noise. (I should re:read Flusser). March 5 It's Gilberthe's birthday today. Soon the four of us will add up to a 100yrs, for two weeks, when Rolf turns 6 on July 17, until my 46th birthday, on August 2. What's for Currency Tonight? Later, much later, after briefly having visited the Paviljoens opening to meet Sabine and Helmut and Paul (who didn't attend) and Joke and see some art, and after having cleaned up (a bit) after Gilberthe's guests (family) and after a few drinks: I start laying out a design for a CE note: the Cincl'Exquise, the moulin's local currency needs a face. I use Brehm Tierleben's etching of the Dipper, which is referred to as the Cinclus cinclus, or Cinclus merula! In comes the Merle and the bird's popular name. March 4 Hello and Goodbye I finished the invitations to our farewell open house on March 27, only two days before we leave. We'll sit on top of boxes and light a candle for the good life. Now that I'm leaving I begin to see more and more the restraints that a house, and other conventions, are. Then I picture myself in the moulin dress code of dark green long woollen knickers and a white indian shirt, bare feet in the wet grass, searching for the Cinclus cinclus' nest ;-)—expect to see the photo's here anytime soon. March 3 placeholder, Cinclus cinclus, aka the White-throated Dipper Le Moulin du Cincle? My search for a 'merle d'eau' on the Internet did not return any hints as to what kind of bird is referred to by M Foloppe, every time we discuss the origins of the moulin's name: the merle d'eau, this bird which this time I saw elegantly skim the Beuvron... nada until I addressed the French ornithological list 'ornithologie@apro.fr'. This 'merle' in reality is the 'Cincle plongeur' ('diving cinclus'), or 'waterspreeuw' in Dutch. Within a few hours I got as many as 9 replies to my request for information, several images, as well as words of welcome to Burgundy and invitations to visit local bird spotting areas... This is only to proof that it is utterly myopic to 'underhype' the Internet. See what happens when you address a community of some reputation, introduce yourself and ask for help, information, some guidance... - le "merle d'eau" n'est autre que le Cincle plongeur (Cinclus cinclus), (= waterspreeuw, en néerlandais) vivant exclusivement aux abords immédiats de torrents, ou de cours d'eau à lit rocheux, au débit rapide et à l'eau limpide. Si le Beuvron n'est pas pollué, vous devriez le trouver assez facilement. Il se nourrit d'insectes, de crustacés, de mollusques aquatiques qu'il capture en plongeant. On le repère souvent sur les rochers, à fleur d'eau, attendant l'occasion d'une "pêche" fructueuse. S'il s'envole, on le verra longer le cours d'eau en un vol rapide et disparaître à l'occasion d'un méandre ou d'un repli de terrain. Détail caractéristique de son adaptation à la plongée : sa paupière protectrice, de couleur claire, que l'on remarque aisément comme un clignotement régulier. Il niche dans un trou, sur les berges, et parfois (comme je l'ai observé à Le Vigan, sud des Cévennes) sous un pont A remarquer qu'il n'est pas du tout apparenté au merle noir, puisqu'il fait partie de la famille des Cinclidae, qui comprend quatre espèces dans le monde. Ce sont les seuls passereaux franchement aquatiques : le cincle est capable de marcher au fond de l'eau ! une belle photographie du Cincle plongeur se trouve à http://www.alpes-net.fr/festival/pnrv/cincle-big.jpg site sur LES OISEAUX DU VERCORS (les illustrations tirées du CD Photo : Oiseaux d'Eau de France avec l'autorisation de Medialog SARL Crédits photos : J.F. Hellio et N. Van Ingen) Another respondent attached an image of the waterspreeuw, and invited me to come to the Doubs valley: - Le merle d'eau dont tu parles est en realite (enfin, je crois) un cincle plongeur. Quelle chance! on l'observe uniquement dans certaines rivières de petites et moyennes montagne. Voici une photo que j'ai récupéré sur un CD d'oiseau, si tu veux, je peux t'envoyer d'autres doc (fichiers sons, photos..) et je regarderais mes sites internet. Si tu as l'occasion de passer dans ma region cet été (en bresse bourguignonne) et si tu aimes les oiseaux, je te conseille de visiter la vallée du doubs: herons, guêpiers, oedicnème criard, faucon hoberau.... environ 180 espèces sont représentées! Tu trouveras des infos sur mon site perso. placeholder, Cinclus cinclus, aka the White-throated Dipper March 1-2 We've gone full-time into preparation mode. But there's always time left (besides, it is found in the process) to retrieve some interesting information out there. eg. I put another link (as before it was http://www.euro.nl) with the 'the end of money as we know it' header's 'broken' image. February 26-28 The Moulin du Merle exquisite enclave is ours finally. One moment late at night a few days ago I listed some eagerly anticipated 'firsts' of my new home. February 25 Gone signing. February 24-25 I contributed 'migraties' to Moniek Toebosch' 'De toekomst die ons toekomt' (the future we deserve), an anniversary presentation, which she is curating for the Fonds voor Beeldende Kunst, Vormgeving en Bouwkunst. February 23 A handwritten letter from the Saint-Germain-des-Bois Mairie (town hall) arrived today, signed by madame le maire Paulette Simon, the mayor, inviting R+r to the school in Cuncy les Varzy, 4,5kms uphill from the moulin. The town hall is open on Tuesdays and Fridays from 8-11am and situated next to the church which is depicted in its letterhead. placeholder To my surprise these contracts are really readable. I even understand what we will sign next Friday... Thursday early we will leave for France. A last minute decision teamed us up with my sister and her 4 kids, adding up to a busload of 9 to descend. The French really love it when the family is involved in such important matters—we adapt quite naturally ;-) February 22 Midnight ramblings Today the sale contract and an SCI contract (SCI being a Société Civile Immobilière, a 'civil real estate society') had arrived from the Notaire Maitre Michel Moreau in St. Sauveur en Puisaye (where writer Colette was born in 1873). The SCI 'Moulin du Merle' buys the house, Gilberthe and myself owing an equal amount of shares valued at 100 Euros each. The SCI construction allows us to legally deal with the shares, allowing third parties to buy in, without having to go though a proper sale—unless of course the SCI decides to sell the property altogether. The proprietary history in the sale contract dates back only until 1950, when the house was sold at 1M ancient francs. We hope to find out about its previous history. Around midnight I scanned and faxed a total of 25 pages of contracts to Hugo Versloot, the Aurore Immobilier broker, who really helps us out on anything beyond the simple acquisition of the place (true to his advertizing credo, as acting 'beyond brokerage'). While scanning I was on the phone with him, as he was at the same time clicking through my various websites, and commenting them. February 21 Tomorrow in 5 weeks the truck will be loaded. February 20 Time Travel Limitations -The limits to human communication, information input, output, and processing are now the fundamental limits to our activities. We are the weak link in the chain of progress. A further debilitating problem beyond our limited ability to access, process, and I/O data is our inability to network. Even the Romans were aware of the problem and organized legions by tens or thereabouts. Modern companies and organizations often rediscover this fundamental limit to the span of human communications and control. In contrast, machines do not suffer from such limitations and can extend our abilities to thousands of people. But for us this means broadcast rather than dialogue. Within the next decade we are going to have to reassess the way we choose to talk to each other and machines. But the first priority is to get something intelligent to answer when we call. (referring to the decreasing chance in modern telecommunications, to talk person-to-person with the one you try to reach at a first call—instead going through all the detours of voice mail and answering machines, and, may I add, dumb human operators, JK) This quote from 'Tips for Time Travelers ' (godawful title) by Peter Cochrane is pretty much in sync with my 12 February despair ('Brain'). Cochrane is the Head of Research at British Telecom Laboratories and quite a brain himself. Amazon yesterday delivered the book, with John Berger's 'And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photo's' and 'Information Architecture for the World Wide Web', from O'Reilly. Yesterday I had a touch of the flue and went to bed with 'debilitating' stomach cramps. February 18 More Mobility In Rotterdam at the CBK, Jeroen van Westen, Hans Venhuizen, Hans van Houwelingen and myself got together with the organizers of the June international 'Challenge of Mobility' symposium at the Erasmus University, with Maarten van Wesemael and Hans Abelman of the CBK Rotterdam Art Center. Apart from my mobility paradox formula 'KIKO': '(infrastructural) Kilometers In, (movement) Kilometers Out' (or: the more infrastructure, the more congestion), I noticed that 'mobility' is seen as a traffic or transport phenomena and challenge, while to me it is part of the informationalization culture and technology. See also Jakob Nielsen's alertbox Micro-Containers: An Example of Strategic Web Thinking. Mobility should be designed as a new product, for a new market, and has little to do with the automotive or transportational culture that we've known since the late 19thC. Just today a copy of Interior View that chief-editor Lisa White sent me of this Li Edelkoort/Anton Beeke publication arrived. In it is a reprint of the interview that we published in Andrea Blum's 'Domestic Arrangements/Public Affairs'. The issue is on mobility... Lisa (whom I've only spoken to on the phone) suggested to write a piece for the Glassex design lab upcoming catalogue. I hope to write more once over there. Lisa's a young American critic/editor who's been living in Paris since ten years, working with Edelkoort. I sent my cv to Andrea to join her with architect Ted Krueger on a team that's she's forming for a commission at the San José Library. February 17 Fuel Informationalization (...burning of a midnight lamp) We still live in a world that to a large extent was hand-made. Look around and verify for yourself: in the realization of all of these commodities at some point in their actual production hand craft was involved. Think about the building that you live in: it was sketched by its architect, and probably technically hand drawn by a craftsperson. Look outside and wonder how much of the cityscape/landscape was carved out of, or sculpted from a material world, a world of and in material. Now imagine how much of the world will be hand craft in 50 years from today. Who will be doing the actual work? Who will have taught those who do the actual work? Who will raise the minds that value hand craft? Who will value the minds that mind the hand? You or me? How much do you value detail, finishing, polishing, vernissage? (We can't all be Des Esseintes) You can't over estimate the value of information. You can't either over estimate the value of hand craft. In 50 years from now we will still have to conquer the world by burning its fuel, by breaking its material codes, by making it obey to our dreams, by forcing it into a form we conceived. We will never live in harmony with our material sources. We will always have to burn them in order to live up to our promise as Homo Faber: he who makes (material) worlds. Burning the world to make it better—to fit it to our increasing intelligence and skill (our perversion) as a Homo Faber—often doesn't meet with all the respect it deserves. Most people just want to go easy about it. Buy and sell. Some do buy and change and sell. Informationalization is hard to sell because it demands radical burning. The world isn't ready for informationalization as long as it ain't ready to burn. Part informationalization, part hand craft (in a proper and prosperous balance) is the way to go. Those in favour of information tend to forget about material, those in favour of material tend to be luddite. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi. Making is about breaking—I have to remind myself too. Making always has a promise of making 'better'. Why make things worse? Gawd. Can't wait to entrench in the moulin, with only one goal on my mind: to make things by burning more material and resources in the process of informationalization. All of us who understand this process should start today to focus on the material world. Make it happen/burn in/for a new economy. This is the only way to prove our advantage. Informationalization per se will happen anyway, anyhow. For it to be successful and prosperous it cries for material expertise. Fire works. Remember it's a craft to build a good fire. February 16 Plenty visitors House for Sale. February 15 Sudden Deep Fatigue February 14 placeholder (no, it's not QS Serafijn and me at some dark age OCI meeting) February 13 Long Shadows On my grand Hello-and-Goodbye-Tour today I revisited the Van Abbemuseum since over 5 years—the first time to see the renovated former Philips corporate shopping center 30's building, meant to be the temporary (2 years max) space for their Entr'acte, when the new museum was going to be built. Some observations. the museum is a person Also for me, it is hard to stay tuned to the museum. Of course the institution is, like the newspaper ('de krant is een mijnheer'), a person. So unless you are personally acquainted with a curator or the director, a museum is just another channel with an agenda, whether you performed through it or not matters little. You can witness this in any artist's attitude to any museum. When Canadian artist Rodney Graham would accidentally visit the Van Abbe in the years after our exhibition (1990) he wouldn't step by and say hello. He would be recognized by a guard, who would then tell the staff that Rodney had once again been spotted hunting the museum. He never got acquainted at the time, nevertheless the very personal style of late Selma Klein Essink, who had invited and hosted us. The museum's artists-acquaintances that I spotted today were Van Abbe usual suspects Niek Kemps and Marijke van Warmerdam and Aernout Mik, and Marie-Puck Broodthaers. Also the participants, some (museum) curators like Leontien Coelewij and Karel Schampers and Saskia Bos, and the local friends of the museum were present. The museum is an audience, a constituency as well. The museum would do really well (like the art school, as I remarked earlier) by actively keeping artists it has shown interested in their policy and program. Beyond the collection are the artists (even their heirs) and their activities—culture alive. the museum is a genre Museum presentation increasingly has become a genre by itself. It is not what is shown in it, as much as that it is shown in/by it. Always, also the museum itself is on show. March 13 coming the old Van Abbe building will re-open for almost as long a year. It programs a succession of exhibitions from the collections that were built by Leering, de Wilde, Fuchs and Debbaut. It would be interesting if somehow from these presentations you would read how much collecting, presenting and re:presenting changed since Leering's days in the late 60s. All four of the directors will be interviewed in a series of publications. For more on the museum genre (and habit and medium), see Collection of the Artist. the museum is a habit The presentation that opened is titled 'Cinéma Cinéma' and consists of wall to wall (never guess again) film and video projections. It surprised me how distanced from life this medium in the museal context is, notwithstanding its suggestion to bring back that certain je ne sais quoi narrative documentary quality in art, to reconnect the world to the museal discourse. In the cinema it can be an engaging experience, hardly in the museum. Whereas networked media to me have been so much part of life (and preferably not too much 'about' it), this luminous art casts long shadows, but no engaging images, in its attempt at bringing back life to the nausoleum. In a museum nothing but its visitors should move, from the one artefact to the other. This is what the museum habit is about and what basically gets the meaning of its displays across. In splendid isolation, indeed and better so. Like with the book; as soon as you animate it, you give up exactly its precious qualities. The turning over of the pages, flipping back and forth is, like the museal pace, back and forth and around the museum, its prime asset. the museum is a medium Again, like the book, the museum will not disappear, because it is perfect at what it does. 'Art makes new media old' Willem Velthoven once quipped. It's about formats. One-time new media, video and film celebrate their merging with the museum medium, only to give up their own medial qualities and to deprive the recipient of an engaging experience, like the one of the cinema, or an original book, or a smart website. The museum medium matured over this century and reached an autonomy that allows it now to have a powerful impact on different museified experiences, from theme parks, to shopping malls, to education and even new media displays—where as we know the rear-view mirror effect hits the hardest. February 12 Tarte Tatin for Desert Tonight I made my first ever Tarte Tatin, after its original recipe. It was invented by Stéphanie Tatin in 1898. Its site also informed me that the name of the Beuvron river (the tarte's home, at Lamotte-Beuvron, is an hour downstream from where we are) is ethymologically derived from the Gallic 'biber', for beaver. Talking 'bout my Generation It's not that I don't trust generations to come. Human generations even more than software generations. The previous (below, remember, we're adding at the top) was written after moments of despair on several fruitless phone inquiries after, you know, informations. Yet the basic question stands: when's the information singularity? We're so slow. We've learned so much. We've even learned not to trust another revolution to happen. I see net signs of fatigue all around me. 5 years of Internet time is a lifetime. My grandparents once in their lives rode their bikes to the Dutch-German border and stared over it. My other grandparents drove their Ford Taunus to Switzerland and France on several occasions. They read the press and literature of their times and in later life watched television. One grandfather built radios, the other was an avid photographer and played the violin. They were both in education. They would have built websites would they be in their twenties or thirties today. Now my dad (at 76) and Gilberthe's parents (at 85 and 89) consider hooking up to the Internet to stay in touch with us once we're in La France Profonde. And R+r need their proper email addresses to exchange wild stories with their kindergarten friends. We're a slow species but we (love to) learn a lot. Interference Sensual and informational input—it's a riot. Brain Can it be that humans have reached a limit to their intellectual capacities when it comes to information processing, even with computational aid? I've never been in favor of theories that propagate 'spiritual machines' etcetera—on the other hand when I see a lot of people just being completely out of their wits with anything informational (using email and the net and the web and informational devices like voice mail, even the phone, off the shelf... eg. have you ever tried to get information you needed badly through the proper authorities like banks and government institutions and commercial enterprises? Did you ever have to talk to any of the humans that run the systems that informs them in order to be able to better inform you?! They're witless, it just never works), it makes me wonder whether we will ever reach an information habit, let alone a delirium? This is a serious question. Paul, are you out there? Or did the Rotterdam Film Festival eat all of you? Have you moved to BC ;-)? Have we 'created a(nother) monster'? And if so, who's gonna play with it? (BTW Paul, you have all the near misses, I was hit by a car one night last week and thrown off the bike. Was I glad none of the boys was in the back seat that flew over my head!) (small technical detail: ISP xs4all suffers a password server problem today, so my mail is in nqp). Renaissance Though we still might understand/be able to use some of the computation we invented, will we ever truly understand information ubiquity and its (oh no, not another) renaissance implications? Space This morning I was all of a sudden struck by a desire for space. I was hyper aware of the spatial limitations of the live I have been living. Could it also have to do with the limited spatial reference of the Box? Though it is often (also by myself) referred to as 'information space', your desktop is a prison of thought, with limited connectivity or communication, deprivation of all the wonderful senses that make life exciting and arouse all sorts of appetite (smell, taste, feeling, immediate sound). My chain of association now brings to mind Paul McCarthy's park-like installation with these two guys: one fucking a tree, the other dipping in the soil. Hilarious and a truly enviable situation! Aren't old media great! Post Human showed it first. February 11 I make a lot of short offline notes these days with an option to publish them here, but I keep losing track of them. As long as they're not digital (in my Palm or on the desktop) they are likely to get lost in the debris. I can really recommend browsing the weblog realm from the links that I published last month (figure it out). I keep coming across interesting personal sites. These are mostly made by professionals in the media like us(?) and contain themselves interesting 'links to links to links'. It is not as random as it sounds like and you really come across some original stuff. And brilliant domain names, like ahref.com! (of Anchor—another name that's been in my book of names—'a community space for web developers'). Look what they spotlight today: Information Architecture for the World Wide Web that amazon.com shipped to me 981231, which hasn't arrived yet. It's a favourable review. How much things connected changed since the days of Ed Krol's The Whole Internet. Where have the alternatives gone? Remember Gopher VR? Where/which are the great new information computation technologies? You tell me. Why is change so slow! February 9 Broker Anna Sprenger today had an informal bid at 700k. The average Amsterdam real estate price went up 19% in 1997/98... This morning a record length of 1000km of traffic jam was recorded on the Netherlands' highways. We fixed the date of our removal at March 29. February 7 URLifespan.com I wish I had a thousand domain names to blossom—I know there's a market out there for clever names (and some). Hmmm. I'm good at that naming thing ('wild talent'), think I should enter the bizz. Anyway, here's your own domain and site with unlimited traffic and cgi and email address hosted all-in for as little as $6.95/month... (Alamut's with'm). February 5-6 Center and Periphery: Portal Blues? Unplugged Supply Chains? KIKO Gridlock. Queues. Waiting time. Flash crowd? Downshifting? The mobility paradox formula = KIKO: (infrastructural) Kilometers In, (vehicle movement) Kilometers Out equals Kongestion. February 4 High Roads and By-Roads: Information Mobility The Mobility Noblesse that gathered in Rotterdam yesterday agrees that their business is ICT driven, but doesn't venture into any speculation as to what kind of future they are planning their mega infrastructures for. They roll out roads and pipes and build nodes and feeds and collectors and traffic guidance and tracking systems and whatever, to race their commodities and consumers around the Netherlands... yet, as with the urban planners and behavioral psychologists, they have no conception of tomorrow's market or recipient, they just want to add new extensions to their practices, ad infinitum. A Moving Target 'When you focus on a customer, you focus on a moving target', Manugistics likes to put it, when they place the customer slam in the middle of your company's universe. Manugistics is one of the world's leading supply chain management innovators. Their site is worth the detour (sic). Another 'Killer Supply Chain' mogul is i2. February 3 Mobility is always late The mobility paradox is that however hard you facilitate, and improve mobility, this will always generate more traffic, and congestion will be your final destination. In no way you get around this true fate of mobility. In the case of car transportation, mobility accommodation is an after-the-fact design problem of automobility. The design of systems for freely moving personal transportation vehicles will never meet the demands, above a certain ratio of cars and kms driven, per road length and network density. So if (like in the Netherlands) the physical systems will never work, or only for a limited stretch of time, you'll have to change the rules of mobility. Eg. you spread traffic over time, you actively (no recreational drives on weekdays from 7-10 and 15-19hrs) or passively (raising the price) privilege certain users over others. But the car obviously wasn't designed to be on a leach, nor will it perform beyond a certain degree of traffic density. February 1 Fresh Today Chapter 9 is fresh in the series, after nearly one year of building. #8 you can access from the index. Be sure to read the 30 January bits. They introduce continuing interests of mobility. Fat Mobility Next wednesday I'll be at the Erasmus University all day discussing the 'mobility challenge', with some artists added to academia, spreading over 4 discussion groups, on the sub issues of 'Logistics', 'Technology', 'Behavior', 'Urban Design'. Us artistes plan to concentrate our discussion in the afternoon, in a separate session. To see what can be de-mobilized physically, but sped up information-wise? feedback up

19990101: the end of money as we know it ATTENTION CURRENCIES NotesQuotesProvocations&OtherFairUse: best bits from correspondencies, attendencies and collected hard copy SINCE 1998 from 31 March 1999 brought to you through Le Moulin du Merle 58210 St. Germain-des-Bois Nièvre, France migraties aan de grenzen van de discipline produktie buiten het atelier distributie buiten de galeries en musea de massale trek naar de publikaties ontginning van de openbare ruimte de promiscuïteit van de massamedia met een andere regelmaat vermommingen, halfprodukten internationalisering van beeld naar taal naar beeld, voorgoed van stromen naar patronen multi-culturaliteit van stijlbreuken naar mengvormen dialogen interactie het vieren van de diversiteit mobilisatie, demobilisatie, recapitulatie projecties: noodzaak en mogelijkheid 24 uur per dag, 7 dagen per week van lineariteit naar complexiteit hergebruik groteske overdrijving van het ene medium in het andere alomaanwezigheid van naijlende voorbeelden toenemende dichtheden de fijnmazigheid van nieuwe talen informatisering: competentie-infarct Zo ontwikkelt zich een nieuwe mediale openbaarheid tot verzamel- en bewaar- en verdeelplaats van onafgebroken produkties. We koesteren de mogelijkheid tot ontelbare herzieningen van ons werk. We komen tot ons recht in alle denkbare communicatieve dichtheden, tussen de uitersten van die van de persoonlijke correspondentie en die van een rumoerige standwerkerswedstrijd. We dragen bij aan een economie van minimale en maximale vergoedingen, in de vorm van een ruilhandel. We geven toe aan ons verlangen naar een grenzeloos uitdijend buitengebied, waar expressie, beschrijving en kritiek elkaar niet veroordelen of bevoordelen. We hopen op herinnering tot in alle eeuwigheid en op de duurzaamheid van kwaliteit. We bevinden ons op nieuw, maar niet geheel onbekend terrein. eagerly anticipated firsts (in its spontaneous order) awaking #1 light fire #1 tailing branches #1 source water #1 summer party lights #1 local row #1 school teacher #1 local food #1 local wine #1 LP vinyl #1 accoustics #1 star falling #1 homesick #1 friend arrival #1 Paris from StGdB #1 G+J+R+r #1 old work #1 July 14 #1 image #1 commission #1 King Fisher #1 herbarium #1 education #1 improved materiality #1 quality of life #1 experiments in living #1 pushing power #1 energy/fantasy #1 rock and roll #1 [soul of things stupid]