what I am here is that I am moved

moved by a vision, moved by a life, moved by the soft lights a home can cast, moved by a cared-for house, moved by the dimming evening beyond the trees, deep navy with soft edges, moved by a spirit, moved by a beauty of a life

what I am here is that I am moved, in witness.

--

for the first time since 2019 I feel my jaw drop, pure awe and wonder flooding my senses. how could this be? how could this emerge? (and also the sheer joy at joy, the awe at my awe, the wonder at wondrousness)

--

struck by a vision I am lightning I am laid asunder I am simply shocked, joyed, full of love, not in love, love with the world, this wild world, this wild sad devastating beautiful heartbreaking vivid joyful alive world, this world at the edge of the end, not in any grand existential way (but perhaps!) but always, always ready.

maybe if we're lucky we're always ready to die, thus always ready to live, ready to live so vivid and joyously and freshly, so present with this. a neighborhood cat that becomes a friend, and adopts itself. j and b, living a certain kind of life, so vivid. a house, well-worn, loved, cared for. projects that seem to touch the sky and the earth at the same time. an evening spent laughing, giggling, in silliness. a joy.

--

am I ready to die, thus ready to live? what are the regrets I would hold if it would end, now, all of this moment? and then, of course, they surface up immediately, I know what needs to be done:

• send a message to a
• send a message to m
• send a message to p
• send a message to c
• send a message to v
• send a message to oef
• send a message to ss

and simply that, and simply that

and keep on going

--

gratitude floods me in this moment. sheer gratitude for the experience of living. for an encounter. for the ability to walk between a train station and friends' house, to take a slow 25 minute walk. for my health. for my family's well-being. for friends, dear friends, in all different shapes and ways of being, seeing their beings grow, differentiate, unfurl and develop in the ways that they have chosen to craft and shape their lives, and the ways that we can all do that, too, in ways of being, ways of living, ways of life

--

I'm getting enough practice, getting practice, growing, moving, shifting, changing, allowing, doing, making, hoping, finding, fearing, listening, drifting, navigating, wondering, being.

I didn't expect to find myself here. now that I am here I am discovering things I never thought I would discover, and did not think were possible. for that I am eternally grateful.

--

there's more within that fingers that begs to leave, that wishes to jump out onto the page, that wants to roll around and explode in excitement, but I contain it within me, not out of any sense of propriety or necessity but because the feeling of doing so is itself special, allowing myself also to process and notice and deeply allow myself to feel something in joy.

thus this is a marker in time-space, saturday, march 11, 8:16am, in northern california, near san jose, in a hotel room that's getting gradually brighter and brighter.

--

good morning!

of course it had to happen again, tonight, of course;

all of a sudden I am in a rush again, in love with space again, with systems, flows, this intent, this movement, of course. young nights, propelling forward. let's think about people, space, finances, money, flows, activists, communities. people on the train yelling. how to change this all? somewhere I am trying to stand at the intersection between the tangible and material and the optimistic and hopeful. let's let's let's let's let's.

how do you manifest? how do you alter? how do you do these things? move forward. send emails, collaborate, get excited, talk to friends. magic emails dropping in your inbox. chance phone calls about possibilities. movement, movement, movement. a new discipline that enters your brain through your eyeballs, changes the world just a little. meetings, negotiations, talks. an endless array of potentials. consulting, talking, doing. the endless excitement of projects, the high of focus, of intent and desire. of wanting to do and doing them.

I think I said something about this a year or so ago, but it is the feeling of pressing against the outermost edge of one's being, like being inside an inflated bubble and pushing outwards, feeling it give; except that unlike the (most likely) plastic, impermable membrane this is the outer boundaries of one's being that is cloudy, hazy, indeterminate. feeling the joy of creation, of positing, of stating one's argument into the world, but most importantly, to one's self, without any external criteria, without any appeal to authority or legitimacy. just the quiet silent critical judgment of: is this what I think it is right?

I remain convinced: In the end there is just that; one's own sincerity and conviction, necessarily coupled with one's own continual desire to modify/rework one's own convictions, which results in a series of determined zig-zags, sharp angular bends, darts, juts. Rather than a brownian-motion random walk it's a series of intentional gestures that search, explore, experiment, relearn.

-

tactics: privilege movement over destination.
strategy: privilege performance over intent.

-

From March 24, 2011. Nearly two years ago, quoted again nearly a year ago:

I step onto campus and this guy whirling around in a blur of confusion is exclaiming, How do I get out of this place??? with what sounds like multiple question marks' worth of urgency and bewilderment. I point him toward the direction of the exit. I think to myself something like, well, soon enough, I will be as well. It is a cold and gorgeous day, bright strong sharp crisp winter sun, and there are people on the steps, photographs being taken, small atomized clumps of friends huddled, drinking coffee, talking. the world sounding a little muddled from the numbness of one's cold ears. colors so sharp that they hurt the eye.

-

should, would, could? lately I have been thinking a lot about strategies and tactics, and the question of operating when, how, vs. a philosophy of clarity and earnestness. at when, what? how to navigate? plunge inward, never the same stream twice, continue, march, march, look backwards, march. wait and strategize? run forwards?

-

an ever-changing palette of occurences. perhaps by definition, any sort of movement indicates a movement away from something, and thus a constant sense of change necessarily accompanies a constant sense of loss, this kind of shearing-of-one's-self-into-two, the wallace and gromit / looney tunes scene of rapidly placing train tracks ahead of one's being, 'tracks' being a productive excuse for direct movement; placing those tracks being the self of self-modification and thus loss that accompanies. to move freely and to lose sadly? to miss terribly and to change with a swift pointedness?

are orbits tethered, or loose? do celestial bodies orbit around each other because they are constantly falling, in endless freefall? or are they loose characters in a long-term dance who whirl around each other with equal parts immediate drama, distant/historical nostalgia, and relentless joyousness at being in this all?

-

will, in thirty years, my email inbox be full of a series of thin tendrils coated with nostaglia and tenderness that makes them resilient, elastic, flexible? does one need the tautness of steel cable to move, or the adaptability and agility of give and take?

-

ideally, co-traveling (and this applies both metaphorically and literally) as a kind of spatial, temporal dance in which two entities drift, come together, merge, separate, co-exist, operate independently, arrive at a junction, walk together, merge again, separate out. co-orbital configurations. here's to an infinite number of these configurations, with friends, lovers, collaborators, colleagues, comrades, co-conspirators.

how, is, it, that, everything, happens, at, once?

spring is here. let's go dance on chairs and swivel in the street and dream about dreams.

thesis for class

==

“Print is dead” is a oft-heard screed that pits the medium print against technology, e-ink readers, e-books, tablets, computer screens, PDFs, and so on. Correspondingly, the usual question of the library is: ‘What is the library in the age of e-ink, after print is dead?’ Missing from this statement, however, are the base underpinnings of the question. The ‘problem’ of the ‘obsolence’ of print is really one of infrastructure -- print is not so much a material medium reaching the end of its life, but rather the base enabler of a series of dynamics, such as portability, fidelity, or durability. An ecology of systems sprouts from these dynamics, including the the school and the library. In the library, books (of which identical copies exist) are evaluated, categorized, organized, borrowed, in a system that relies entirely on the immutability, portability, and durability of text-in-print-form order to operate. Text is used to organize and categorize text -- and what is a library other than a complex system of categorization and circulation that is reified as an institution? In other words, libraries do not organize printed matter; print creates the library.

Or rather, text (in printed form) creates the library. Bruno Latour describes the portability/durability of print as 'optical consistency'; what 'digital technology' then enables is a 'semiotic consistency'. In print, the linguistic signifier is 'saved' on the page by ink-stamping a referent of the signifier. On the computer, the signifier itself is saved; text is not saved as image, but segmented into a sequence of characters, or a sequence of signifiers, encoded as numbers, encoded as a sequence of discrete, segmented bits. This enables a great flexibility -- on the computer, text (or other media) can be copied, pasted, rearranged, modified, all the while preserving this semiotic consistency. And text can still be presented exactly the same way that it was created; a PDF created halfway around the world can be seen exactly as it was created despite distance or time differences. Semiotic consistency thus contains optical consistency, and so text within computing technology is an augmentation and amplification of the dynamics of print.

'Digital content' is a shorthand for a series of underlying technologies and social agreements that become formulated into an infrastructure, the same way that the highway is a combination of asphalt roads and speed limits. This infrastructure enables a superstructural dynamic: the power grid, fiberoptic networks, and computers generate a computer network; protocols creates the Internet, participation creates the World Wide Web, software creates a website, encodings create the text. The semiotic consistency of digital text only arises out of the synthetic and rhizomatic interactions that these infrastructures generate.

The question of the library is then: if a collection of infrastructures provides the base on which the medium of digital text is enabled, and digital text is an amplification of the dynamics of print, and if print created the system of the library, then the library in the age of digital text must be created through infrastructure. In other words, if digital text (enabled by infrastructure) is a modification at the level of the dynamics of text, then the library must also be modified at the level of its dynamics, with the tool of infrastructure. And through the change of this system generated by infrastructure, the architecture of the library itself can change spatially -- not in terms of a physical structure, but change just underneath the level of structure, below-structure, or: change at the level of infra-structure.

everything changed

--

Debord: "The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images." And as such, here's a moving image that drives this spectacle, the movement of the iPad within society, its efficiency, its quality, its effect. What spectacular optimism! Life changes in accordance to technology. Here we are. Devices affect behavior, change movement, make things possible. The qualities the video implies: richness, directness, warmth, connectedness. And I buy this optimism, or at least I'm leaning into it, like the way you sit up and might pull your chair up a little bit closer when you hear an sharp argument that hits home.

Architecture enables shelter, enables light; artificial lighting comes and liberates the structure from a necessary porosity. windows are still desired, but not strictly necessary. Air conditioning and artificial climate regulation systems are invented and liberate the building, enable the construction of a free plan in which anything can happen. The isolating glazing unit, even more so, defers performance to the exterior edges of the building, clears out a central space. And maybe there's a little bit of time in which parametric/'calculus'-oriented geometric architecture steps in and attempts to reify change within architecture, a transposition of the plasticity of form found in physics, and mathematics, onto architecture.

And next? What's next? What do I do when architecture is slow, is heavy, resistant to change? Materials cost money, and the movement of material costs money. But material movement is now more explicitly generated by things that are immaterial, objects dictating our movement, like the reach of a memorized music score onto the musicians of an orchestra, or a dancer's body flexing in accordance to a choreographer's thesis. And more and more believing that the core driver of architectonic interaction -- that is, the human movement that is itself architectural within a structure -- can be generated via these mental images alone, the shaping of the overlays of logic upon which you navigate a city changes the city itself, etc. And these overlays of logic are generated via technology, explicitly computing technology, a radically personalized computer that you sleep next to, wake up to, take to the bathroom.

The next step, which is also the hardest one to express/describe/display, is to argue for an infrastructure that is the base system of an architectonic/circulatory/programmatic usage of a space that is expressed as a superstructure. The protruding buttons of a computer user interface that exist in opposition to the thin, flat, overlapping panes of windows are the molecular, atomic, even subatomic elements of interaction that eventually design GPS units intuitive enough to allow people to get 'lost' within a city. Vast enterprises of dynamics of interaction, such as Facebook, or email, or Google Chat, or Twitter, are at their core founded on the epsilons of movement, the finger twitch and subsequent mouse click that acts as the positive feedback to enable a continuation of activity. (For example, look at Zynga's Farmville. Farmville! For a bit, there was a point at which the number of people logged in and playing daily was more than the entire population of France!)

It seems obvious and even too simple, in retrospect, in 2011, after a decade of Google, half a decade of Gmail, and four years of the iphone. How would it be otherwise; how would these technologies not change the way you navigate a city, structure your journeys, formulate your life? And why wouldn't other infrastructural details shape an architecture? And this needs to be obvious -- that is, the success of this new architectural dynamic comes from a perception of these infrastructures as obvious, not exotic but internalized, part of the ground on which you walk. The Internet is 'nothing new'. Computers are fun, but 'nothing new'. Email is 'nothing new'. Soon, iPhones, iPads, Android devices, other tablets will disappear from the realm of the fun gadget -- The moment that your iPad is tossed on your touch or thrown into your bag to be used later is the moment that it enters into the realm of a valuable, rich, loamy, creative casual negligence. Out of this casual interface with technology comes an interaction that is alchemic, maybe because these operations are perceived not to come from 'technology' but from a process of living itself. Devices become transmutative, silver transforms into gold, usage morphs into structure, movement fills into a volume, habit solidifies into architecture, itself.

and so on and so forth and so on and so forth.

--

Or:

In 2011, a car accident happens on a freeway. A child grows up, and at 18, he inherits one billion us dollars from his deceased parents. At 23, he decides to transform architecture.

He moves to LA to work in the film industry, and at 25, creates a typical television rom-com called "LA Girls". The sitcom is a moderate success, and is otherwise not noteworthy other than the odd fact that all of the characters supposedly live in houses designed by well-known architects. The buildings are not real, of course. After the two-year run of the sitcom, the now-producer stops working, and disappears from public sight. Online film/tv databases list the sitcom as his first and only production.

Three years later, people start to talk about a production company that will fund sitcoms, television shows, movies. Surprisingly, there is no catch, except for the fact that each funded episode has to feature a main character who lives in a work of 'Architecture'. Moreover, sensational shots of architecture are banned. The word spreads. A 2020 remake of 'Rebel Without a Cause' features a shot of a contemporary James-Dean-lookalike casually lounging in a modernist house. Cigarettes are stubbed out in a Zaha Hadid ashtray.

Or:

In 2011, a car accident happens on a freeway. A child grows up, and at 18, he inherits one billion us dollars from his deceased parents. At 23, he decides to transform architecture.

He moves to LA to work in the film industry, and at 25, creates a typical television rom-com called "LA Girls". The sitcom is a moderate success, and is otherwise not noteworthy other than the odd fact that all of the characters supposedly live in houses designed by well-known architects. The buildings are not real, of course. After the two-year run of the sitcom, the now-producer stops working, and disappears from public sight. Online film/tv databases list the sitcom as his first and only production.

Three years later, people start to talk about a production company that will fund sitcoms, television shows, movies. Surprisingly, there is no catch, except for the fact that each funded episode has to feature a main character who lives in a work of 'Architecture'. Moreover, sensational shots of architecture are banned. The word spreads. A 2020 remake of 'Rebel Without a Cause' features a shot of a contemporary James-Dean-lookalike casually lounging in a modernist house. Cigarettes are stubbed out in a Zaha Hadid ashtray.

There is something suddenly nice about that fact that I can look out into the distance from where I sit and can see the far sky above queens, long island, the atlantic. My view is someone else's sky, the clouds they see when they crane their neck upwards, a breeze still-not-quite-balmy, the sun thinking about thinking about setting.

There are small and few reasons to get angry and to be annoyed, maybe, but there are vastly many more reasons to sit and smile and be quietly elated. Sometimes lately I feel the need to remind myself of the necessity of tasting texture, of seeing the textural quality of day-to-day events, not the semantic signifieds of marked things-I-did-today.

What happened today? A slow ebb and flow. A hundred and three breezes came in my window. I tried to think about thinking about nothing on the train. Calm bike ride up broadway. Thoughts arrayed onto a page, the sense of a impending summer, and so on. Movement is only movement in relation to an absent. Everything is soil that accumulates in your geological strata, accumulation that accumulates, moments that solidify and become constituted as a richness.

all I know is that if you get that right taste in the back of your mouth you're doing something right. working towards something.

this running can be fun. I am blessed, blessed, blessed. waiting for results that come in two weeks I am serene because it would be great if things worked out and it would be fine even if things didn't, because I have, projects to undergo, dishes to make, thoughts to think, paragraphs to read, drawings to sketch, ideas to reify, places to bike, rooftops to find, things like that, lives to live. I am twenty-two nearly twenty-three bursting and anything seems available and I know that the epsilon of movement and of desire lies in the miniscule twitch of the finger, small vibrations, assertiveness that starts the world, a remarkable humor for things, I feel like I know what I need which is to want and to want to want and to know what I need to want and so on.

the more I think and the more I perceive the more I know that everything happens in the moment of desire, everything happens when you desire, it's not just that nothing happens when you don't desire but that there is nothing without desire, and duty is the stagnated form of desire coalesced into small little flat lard panels floating on the ice-cold chilled remainders of a cheap filling soup. the desire desire desire I mean is the desire that persists like fuel mostly, matchheads help too, but there's desire that moves, lives. and the more I think I know that this is true: training in desire is also necessary, to flex it like a muscle, to season it like a cast iron pan, to know about it and to care for it and to think about what it entails, and for some: to lend an ear to its quiet words, and for others: to turn the cheek to the wild sputterings coming out of impish impulsive grins. there is control yes and there is duty yes and then there is the drive of desire that should lead you onwards, onwards.

and I am saying this yes again twenty-two nearly twenty-three, and I think this is the time to think such thoughts, if not now when else, if not now when else?

brief idea, partially stolen from ender's game:

MMOs with emergent levels of play.
For example: play levels of: presidents, generals, lieutenants, soldiers. The player of the president would have 5 generals underneath him, the general has 20 lieutenants, and so on. On the soldier level, the game is a first-person shooter; at the level of lieutenants, it's a real-time strategy game, at the general level, it's a turn-based strategy (at the level of Romance of the Three Kingdoms), and at the president level, it's a massively complicated game of Risk. The outcome of each level influences all the other levels.

Preferably, each game player would have a point value that would indicate their ability and experience; the higher the point of the game player, the higher he/she can go on the hierarchy of play levels.

Anything with interestingly defined emergent systems (that is to say, everything) can probably work this way. A virus game: Are you a giant ISP, a virus programmer/cracker, or the virus itself? And so on.

In contrast to Spore, this game would only be horizontally navigatable within each level of emergence..

from last year, march 5th.

read this while listening to broken social scene - swimmers.

Summer is connotated by the quality of light shining from: corner delis -----> the street, light pouring outwards to the warm humid darkness, the outdoors as warm as the body, sheets washed again after a still sweaty sleep with a sky still gray and the television indoors, somewhere, dropping static on a wooden floor. The imagined sound of someone in an apartment, folding thin sheets and hearing the sound of cotton against cotton, whispers of pages turning through fingers.

Outside your building door: the smell of someone's cooking, the aberrant noises of pans against metal, a warm timbre of necessary and matter-of-fact movement, sounding out like small bells tolling in the charm of a requisite domesticity. Cooking, cleaning, washing. Someone's closing doors and cabinets, illustrating movement, humanity, decision. Here, another reminder of someone else autonomous. Chairs scraping against the floor, being pulled up in preparation for a meal. Is the television on? Of course. Some sirens for some house. Out of the corner of your eye, the red changes to green, a box shifts noisily.

The questions tonight are: when are you coming home? Which chapter will you open to? What questions are on your mind tonight? After the evening passes and full-fledged night comes on, you sleep thinking about the book you have just savored and the questions you kept on meaning to think about. Sleep comes on heavily, even though in the middle of the night the air conditioner may suddenly decide to turn itself on, then off, like a short attempt at conversation. While sleeping, you toss the blankets off. The sun will start rising in a few hours. Your eyelids are closed and necessarily precious.

I guess some things don't change.