it's a morning.

it's all about desire, I am learning. about what feels good, not about being better, but what feels good, what makes my body feel alive, what gives me a sense of grounding.

no doubt, with this sense of love and longing, I am pulled, a lover's discourse, formed a new.

morning writing.

==

could anything happen? am I moving with fear, spurts of fear that activate me moving in sudden ways that let me be distracted. what happens if I am present, present, present, present, present?

it's hard for me to be present because I don't know what to accept

if I know, if I just know, then I will accept it

can I accept both outcomes already, no matter what?

will my heart close?

am I closing my heart out of fear of being hurt?

am I mistaking calmness for heart closing?

do I have the courage to just be

do I dare to eat a peach?

==

one thing I dearly, dearly miss about the early internet is the earnestness with which we were all here, all present. I know it's a bit of a nostalgic cliche to talk about it, but hear me out: the sense of raw honesty and openness that I think you could find, and channel, and the expectation of the internet as a place where you could be your truest self, your strangest self, as a place for expression of who-you-were, so that the websites you made were about you, My Personal Website, where the personal, the intimate came to live -- I miss that, dearly.

No doubt this is partially because I was on that internet from when I was in 6th grade to late high school, a golden age for me, a magical time on the internet, and the shimmering sense of newness, of a kind of network that not everyone was part of, of forums and websites that you could make to plunge your fullest self into -- this was part of the magic. this was part of the social contract; if you were here, you knew that this was you and not-you, a constant masked ball, or maybe it was an agreement to take one mask off and put on another. for some it was the inverse; the internet a space to take off our masks and just be whoever you felt like being.

the point of this is not only nostalgia - I feel some serious urgency and tenderness in the loss of this psychic medium, as if a theatrical practice I've had, and many of us have had, has become lost, or less able. no doubt, many other magical and special practices exist in this medium that were not there, in the past. the past isn't always better. but the disappearance of a special practice, a discourse, a nearly sacred practice is something that I think is crucial, important, necessary. what more than to be who we are? how else but to be who we will want to be?

so there are social networks, social media, social research, newsletters, forms like this. you connect to people on these by virtue of followers, connections, friends, subscribers. the same old. you've heard this before. the graph network that connects us all reverberating in interesting and funny ways, memes, virality, etc etc etc.

what I miss is a network without virality, a low R number, localized networks, the strength of strong ties, actually, or the strength of deep ties, the ties that go slow, and honest, where being networked and being deeply honest with ourselves weren't at odds with each other, contexts where to be online doesn't feel like a performance, or rather, when it feels like being online is about capturing an endless and infinite play that's always happening. like turning a camcorder on to capture a birthday that is always going, we dip into an ongoing stream of life with this medium.

is it possible to be honest here? honest with ideas, honest with selves? again, part of that tender magic of the early internet was that yes, yes, yes, it is possible. maybe, many years later, the price to pay is transparency; that we can be honest without being immediately transparent. a rock, a polished stone sphere, a building on the street: these are material presences that lets themselves known. what's inside? who's inside? you'll just have to knock and step inside one day. but in the meantime, we are material presences that let ourselves known, and we have intimacy gradients, foyers, porches, front doors, bathrooms, kitchens, spaces, bedrooms, unprogrammed spaces, spaces full of stuff, spaces full of sentimental objects, spaces full of desks and chairs and books. the interiority of our beings unfolds in ways that are always honest. no stage sets here, no potemkin villages, just the buildings of our selves that exist the way we do, gradually unfolding toward the people in our lives who we care about.

these days, I am learning what it means to be, to just be, to fully be

if someone had asked me what this means a few years ago, I think I would have talked about it as a conceptual construction, some thing about tautology and axioms and self-definition, and part of me still does and can and feels joyous about thinking about it

but, the thing about incompletness theorems, dear gödel, is that when it comes to who we are, we all have bodies, and we were all born at one point or another, and that's an axiomatic grounding that's so nice that we might as well accept it. why do we have bodies? what would it be like if we didn't have bodies? no matter. here we are; we've been living here all this time. it might as well be time to unpack and fully move into this space, ring, domain, body.

or in other words, to fully be who we are. it's quite easy, because i've always been doing it, since i've been alive, and it's quite difficult, as I've never done it before; this is my first time being alive. and to let myself stretch and wind and to let the limbs of my bodily being relax into places that they want to be, is a tremendous process: electrifying, wilding. letting the limbs of my conceptual, brain being flow the way it wants to, like pouring a glass of water on the table. does the water 'want' to go somewhere? or does it just do what it does, because it is what it is?

is the construction of desire about a lack, or is it a series of machinic flows, as d & g would say, or is it just, how we are, impossible to talk about and formulate, something that can only be described like a river, always in the present-past tense, knowing language tries to grasp what smoothly follows and slides away into the past?

language cannot grasp, or rather, I do not want to grasp with language; language can only share where we have been, a portrait of the person as the person that they currently-were-then, a present-past, a past presentness.

there's a dinner table, cups and plates and pens and paper. we spill a glass of water, and watch in joy as the water moves, slides, glides, pools, averts, circumnavigates, seeps in, pours, and eventually settles. the water goes where it goes, does what it does. waters gonna water! we gonna we! me gonna me! you gonna you!

for a moment I wanted to post something about these things I was looking at, thinking about; for example the union of locks, door strikes, iphone apps, the regulation and orientation of bodies in space -- and then got to thinking about this again, this site, blog, etc.

It's been so long - since, say, 2002 - that I've been doing this thing, this posting-of-text online. enough time spent suspending reason or intent in mid-air, leaving it hover. for whom is this for? who reads it? mostly just me, myself, this kind of shared archive of introspective musings.

this is as close of a reason I can muster up: the gel of the internet is this fixative, sealant, epoxy, amber, a kind of encapsulation/hardening agent that solidifies my words into being. it's on the internet; there's no going back. and as such these points are little dots in time, anchored moments that I look back to. which would explain, why, writing this all in a text file somewhere on my computer would have less valence. instead I am inscribing all of these words on the side of a boulder in some remote location hundreds of miles away from civilization. or: this is being engraved on the side of a brick wall on some manhattan rooftop somewhere, technically open and visible but barely looked at.

in general spatial metaphors fail to describe the linked/contorted topology of the internet, the way that access to obscure/hidden items is immediate, so that "obscurity" within the internet really means rumsfield's "unknown unknown", since nothing on the internet is inaccessible other than by ignorance. and so to some extent this website thrives on -- what -- a veiled access? limitedness?

which is to say. only you are reading this, and not many others. at least for right now.

-

and if I should desire to create a 'blog' (which this is not, and isn't not), then what would that be? inner musings catapulted into the exterior world. a shift in modes. do I continue this casualness, these slung around run-on-sentences? this looseness to me is a celebration of language-formed-out-of-usage as well as a kind of mark borne out of the intimacy of ritual, habit: the way pans and knives can shoot across stovetops and cutting boards, sliced onions shot through the air, nonchalant flick of the wrist, a tossed gesture. that was loose loose loose.

but slowly I am starting to appreciate a formedness, a tightness. in the way that a meticulously pre-researched diagram for the trans-mongolian railroad allows the creation of free travel, loose play. imperfect parabolas in the air created by projectile motion arising out of the taut dormant potential energy of a compressed spring, a tight bowstring, dormant gunpowder lying in a chamber, the muscle of the arm coiled against your chest, fingers poised above a keyboard, the tip of a pen just barely not-touching a surface.

a few observations today, bright tuesday noonday.

1.

first days of school today, for those who are still in that world. sometimes I think about my parents, and my sister, and I, and the degrees of commitment/involvement within academia that we have all chosen - to go forth into it, be within it, be enveloped in it, to embody it, to be representative -- and so on.

I am a little sad, but only sad in the way that I have moved away from a city that I loved so dearly, to be in this other city that I am excited about, or that I will be excited about, since in this new city there are parts that are entirely new and unfamiliar and different entirely, orthogonal experiences uncomparable in any fashion other than with analogies. that city will be there, perhaps. perhaps one day I will move back, or I will visit again, in the way that one day I might find myself living in moscow / st. petersburg / berlin / amman / ramallah / bangalore / ulanbataar / hong kong / tokyo / seoul / london / etc etc etc, you know, living an entirely different life.

as I grow older these 'perhaps'es come with caveats of endless planning, considerations, but then I watch a friend just up and leave our world and hop skip away to live in rio, windows looking out onto a heartbreakingly gorgeous mountainscape and cityscape and seascape, and I lie content knowing that really, to some extent, possibilities lie coiled up like wound springs under the skin, lying next to the muscle, tender and dormant and forceful and willing, if you shall be also. inshallah, god willing, you willing.

2.

this past weekend I scraped plaster off the ceiling and sanded my floors. I don't know how to better describe an activity that involves an intimate scrutiny and examination of pure space, square footage, area. scraping the ceiling took hours, in a mask, respirator, chipping away on the top of a ladder under a rain of plaster. sanding the floor involves grinding through layers of grime and rotten wood to expose clearer, newer wood underneath, endless ambulations within a space holding this furious machine that's always yearning and leaping to get away from you. yesterday I calculated that I walked nearly a mile inside of my room. if not meditative, then most certainly introspective, 'spatiospective'.

but really what hits me so hard, punches me in the chest and slaps me in the face as a new realization is the manifestation of space as planes, as surfaces. I know not how to better describe this realization that comes to me as an epiphany, so hard-hitting. (this 'epiphany', like any other epiphany, is best felt, not explained - instinctual visceral realizations that may be conceptually obvious, latent, already-there. epiphanic encounters of a beach, of a nighttime breeze, of a tender midnight makeout session, of the nonnegotiable pain of a physical injury -- irreducible to linguistic descriptions. the stronger the epiphany, the more rooted it is in some sort of bodily action -- aching muscles translating over to the vividness of visceral, body-oriented experience. it's as if a body-oriented phenomenological experience of space is contingent on the bodily engagement with the space itself, not just this kind of optical gesture. robert morris's sculptures are probably the more powerful for the creator, who has labored with plywood to create these boxes, and then as the viewer you walk in and just have mere opticality and vision inform your "bodily presence". right now, those optical gestures feel weak, thin, light, diluted mimicries.)

in any case. right now, to me, space is made out of planes, rather than volumes. there is no such thing as a volume in space, except maybe for the mechanical engineer which deals with cooling and airflow. perceived space is enlarged and shrunken by the elongation and modification of walls, floors, ceilings. and these surfaces are created, fabricated, built, modified, bit by bit, by people, machinery, operations.

these surfaces are not conceptually flat, depthless surfaces at all, really, but volumes of a sort. if you think of one's labor-time, labor-power expended on the creation of a surface, each surface has a kind of depth, a weightiness to it. the fixed capital of tools, the fluid capital of expendable means of production (sandpaper, respirator filters, screws, drywall), and the variable capital of labor is poured into this. the floor looks like congealed labor-time to me, a weekend's worth of hours stirred and mixed, poured onto the floor, spread out evenly, set to harden. every surface operates in this fashion. every surface is the distribution of labor-time, so that in the end, the interior of a three-dimensional space is really the manifestation of six or more planes constructed out of bodily action, physical labor.

suddenly buildings appear different - they are a series of planes intersecting each other. like pouring labor onto a baking sheet with parchment paper, setting it to harden, like peanut brittle, or granita ice. slicing it into sheets. assembling a little gingerbread house out of congealed labor.

THAT IS: many different techniques and tactics exist to conceptualize space and its design; the blue foam model, the lasercut model, the foamcore model, etc. these tactics all carry within them an internal logic of fabrication (blue foam - subtractive planes) that then affect the desired spatial design of the building. whether deliberate or not, these are gestures that approach the building from a spatial, procedural point of view that are not linked to the process of construction or fabrication. this disjuncture between the process of fabrication and the process of design manifests in 1) expensive (difficult-to-build) architecture because they are 'optimized' for the processes inherent in the techniques of design, rather than the techniques of construction, and 2) spaces that are understood to be notable and interesting because their forms appear different from the norms of forms of buildings optimized for construction. In other words, a lack of optimization, or a usage of other kinds of optimizations, is the interest for the formal gesture that informs a designed work of architecture. This is akin to examining the lamellae underneath a mushroom and finding a fascination in it, because it the morphology of the fungi kingdom is so different from the morphological patterns found in the animal kingdom.

The effect of this disjuncture is that desired spaces become understood as being manifest mostly in 1) expensive, high-budget projects, and 2) 'weird', alternative forms. However, 'high-budget' is also coupled with a desire for low risk, which means a kind of conservatism that directly affects the aesthetics of the building -- a 'conservative' alternative, akin to the milquetoast music classification of "Alternative Rock". The union of the these factors (expensive, conservatively alternative) mobilizes the aesthetic of minimalist art for both its aesthetic and its cultural capital -- architecture inspired by as well as invoking Donald Judd, perhaps, in which the uncanny logic of repetition meets the impeccable perfection of professionally fabricated, flawless mirrored boxes.

(I'm thinking also of the satire of the modernist house in Jacques Tati's Playtime, or the any movie shot that features the trope of an evil villain's modernist penthouse, embodying this coupling of 1) expensive and 2) 'weird', explained at a moral level as somehow profligate and degenerate.)

Experimentation or avant-garde (rather than arriere-garde) progression with architectural spaces requires a high-risk approach to space -- which can be high-budget, high-risk, and come out of the deep pockets of "architectural investors" (= patrons) willing to fund unique projects for the non-monetary return of cultural capital. Or - low-budget, high-risk projects could exist that engage in experimentation and pursue the second ("weird") category opened up by the disjuncture between design methodology and construction processes.

low-budget, high-risk, weird projects then fall into two categories -- which name as shorthand: the pavilion, and the engineered hack. The pavilion is, well, a literal pavilion, which successfully experiments with space, with a lower budget, by foregoing certain functional/operational aspects of architecture. A pavilion is a building that does not heat or cool its inhabitants; a pavilion is a building that will last for months, not decades (oma's serpentine pavilion); a pavilion is a building that has no envelope whatsoever (gehry's serpentine pavilion); a pavilion is a building that cannot have partitions (raumlabor's inflatable spacebuster); and so on. The dismissal of certain choice constraints allows these projects to operate with more flexibility, and often times result in profoundly interesting moments, full of joyous experimentation. At the same time, the 'data' and 'results' gained from these experiments does not easily translate back into learned lessons that can re-inform a building, since the experiment was disengaged from the fully-built building in the first place. Q: How does an inflatable pavilion designed to last a month reinform a building that should last for 30+ years?

the architectural hack (of course, I'm touting this as the ideal) is the union of low-budget, high-risk, and 'weird', by placing the 'risk' of 'high-risk' as an architectural/spatial risk, rather than a financial one. Low-budget and 'weird' are then united in a pursuit that accommodates and incorporates the two together. Initially these ideas I'm mentioning were predicated/formulated on the idea of architecture, formed by design methodologies and transposed onto construction processes, and as a result, creating new forms (weird) that are expensive (high-budget).

The architectural hack examines the process of construction/fabrication/building/reification/valorization, and seeks to intertwine or to extract a design out of the capabilities and abilities of these processes. The logic of the computer hack is a clever and deft move that 1) desires a normally illegal/impossible operation as its endgoal (ex: gaining admin/root privileges), and 2) achieves it by utilizing the existing logic of the operating context. Carefully constructed inputs can be created that modify the logic.. (**how does one elegantly explain an injection attack? or a buffer overflow attack?)

The logic of the architectural hack would be one that 1) desires a spatial experiment that is normally hard to achieve/expensive in terms of resources, and 2) achieves it by understanding and utilizing the existing logic of construction processes. Aggregating discarded material into a facade? Utilizing economies of scale to construct custom designs out of commonplace/inexpensive hardware objects. (Fabricating custom joints to interface with dimensional lumber to create a wood space frame system.) Working with pre-existing constraints (fire safety systems) to construct gestures (sprinkler systems that run across the space in a patterned 'cloud', ductwork that snakes and coils around a ceiling). Examining pre-existing process of construction (Wall constructions that use flexible gypsum or lath-plaster construction to create flexible walls? Conduit that snakes around a space. Double-stud walls that hold bookshelves.)

This is not "doing more with less", this is creating new possibilities on the fertile bed of the existing world. At some point this requires a lot of sifting through, a lot of fishing for possibilities, a lot of seeing things for what they could be, rather than what they are categorized as. Understanding that the characteristics of objects lie in their operation and mobilization, rather than as innate abilities or classifications. A flat washer becomes an earring becomes a spacer becomes a hanging mechanism becomes a grommet becomes a stiffener becomes a link becomes a --

3.

what this really is: trying to trace the construction of space and architecture from a marxist capital/labor/industry standpoint backwards into the design of space. how are you congealing your labor? what are valorizing, today?

4.

procreative and reproductive. with my hands I build the planes inside which I will inhabit. in this space are the congealed, hardened, solidified labor-hours (including some sweat, spit, shit) that I have turned into this secondary skin, like a molting snake in reverse. buildings are just that - non-organic bodies, slow organisms, made out of the raw material of the means of production and a lot of time and labor. they break. they breathe. they cycle through, they move, they can be hurt and healed, they age and die, are born again. new bodies by humans, not in our image, but with our beings.

5.

the credit system fucks this all up. buildings are developed on grand scales, understood as exchange value, these second bodies fully utilized as commodities, and subsequently fetishized, alienated from, detached. even the architect is subject to this.

6.

and so. living in a transforming place without walls and a real bed is tiring. but it is valuable. I feel as if it is as de-fetishizing as could be. am fully examining and feeling the built interior of things. I understand everything as being born -- not suddenly made, but existing on a gradient of things. walls are not suddenly walls, but existing on a continuum of plane-esque. there are no such things as walls, just a series of fluid, dynamic gradients of which, after a certain point, we deem as 'wall-like', because it constraints movement to a certain degree. studs 16" off center create a wall that clearly demarcates space - yet a non-solid wall that I can pass through with ease.

a cup is not suddenly not-a-cup when it breaks; it was never a 'cup', but just an aggregation of porcelain that had cup-like functions when it was in that state. in this current state, it has less of a cup-like function. if I bring my hands together, it has a cup-like function. when I separate my palms, that function disappears. where did the cup go? or did it ever exist as objects to begin with?

there are no identities, only functions. everything constituted out of what it does, rather than who it is. home depot is a collection of objects categorized under the building/contracting world's organizational taxonomy. really it is a collection of raw materials with an infinite variety of functions to be manifested, mobilized, under an infinite number of new taxonomies ("objects that can deform other objects", objects that can support other objects", "objects that create a surface", "objects that shine", "objects that can envelop other objects", "objects that create other objects").

and so on.

lumps of nothingness going down tautt. it hurts every time I swallow.

it's been like this for the past few days and I appreciate the degree to which, all of a sudden, this state has become a baseline state; when has my head not hurt? my nose not stuffy? my throat coughhhhy? my body flushed? I am worried for my body, and at the same time I am strangely curious about how everything looks at this point, like: what is traveling when sick? when energy levels diminish rapidly? when points of rest are grasped like little oases in a desert?

well; it's like everything fades a little bit; recedes into the background. we go to petra, and I look at these beautiful stone structures and the architecture that seems to emerge from these stone walls, as if they were always there, latent underneath the surface, just starting to press through. metaphors for archeologyy, maybe, some sort ooof idealized 'heritage' already innate and existing. what a discovery this must have beeen. and so I bring my self out, like I can feel myself dragging myself out into the present, trying to be here in the now, trying to enjoy. for moments I am here; for moments I am not; and I waver inbetween thinking about the grandeur of this scene and the clip-clop of my donkey on these stone steps, and of thinking about the physicality of my breath, the muscles firing in my legs, all of these things that combine to create this kind of experience.

--

today walking through CDG I think about the profession of an architect and what it means to design something that is meant to house bodies; what it means to have a body, then to make something that exists way beyond the scale of the body. does this require a suspension of physicality and of self, perhaps, a sort of bourgeois existence where the mores of physical day-to-day existence are already solved an the only questions are thus cerebral? or would it be possible to have an architect who puts on leead shoes to simulate the wweighted hobble of a grandmother's walk, fully and throughly participates bodily in the elements of one's own future creation?

but - does the study of medicine require that the student be sick? certainly not.

===

so here I am, heading home.

what have I learned, I ask myself. and I do not know. what has happened? what did I see? I could do a sundry list, simple bulletpoints that claim to illustrate something, anything:

kids selling toy-kalashinkovs in the street, people calling out 'welcome, how are you', kids in the small village of deir ghassanah being excited, welcoming, and friendly; figs and more ripe figs given to me by children; the cattle-herding chaos and indignity of qalandia checkpoint, watching people with the correct documents being turned back, over and over again; smears of paint thrown at israeli checkpoints; god-knows-how-old bullet holes in the walls of jerusalem's zion gate, hundreds of muslims praying outside of damascus gate because they were refused entry, an unmarked jeep with civilian-dressed men holding assault rifles speeding by, israeli soldiers/civilians casually walking with assault rifles, the smoldering anger of palestinians against this injustice, a young boy who wants to "take back his country", sweets given to me for free, an incessant sense of curiosity and warmth, a music performance from a music organization founded by a rock-throwing former refugee, an architect's offhand remark about being shot in the knee and having been in prison, posters about martyred/imprisoned palestinian men, a young man's solo room with photos of arafat, hussein, and hitler all alike; pflp logos spraypainted on walls here and there; piles of rubble from construction or maybe from something else; a post-iftar/breakfast-dinner performance in the midst of ancient roman ruins; ahmed, the student at bierzeit university who is busy working at eiffel sweets; adhan prayers ringing across the valley each evening; dry, warm, violet sunsets;

above this all I repeated to myself that this is living here. did I say something like that before? I feel things living, and stretching, flexible and adaptable. people breathing and changing. the elasticity of existence.

--

so what have I learned? good question. who knows. that life is elastic. that people adapt. that conflicts that run deep are hard. that people become angry when people are killed, threatened, imprisoned, controlled, exiled. that people become angry when people are killed, threatened, captured, bombed. that religion and land and sanctity and holiness are strong axioms, the strongest of them all. that even if the israel/palestine issue is less of a religious one and more of a nationalistic one (which it is) then land and livelihood and dignity and security are also strong, strong, strong axioms.

what is that phrase? berger - against axioms we agree to disagree. we fall to our knees and accept the clash of axioms as opinions, neither judgeable until another axiom is adapted as an internal criterion; there is no neutral third party; all viewing is imbrication, participation.

that is perhaps why (have I talked about this again?) the phrase 'justice' is perhaps the most sinister of all; also unhelpful and sinister phrases are: 'love', 'justice', 'right', and so on. justice presupposes a pre-existing criterion; the question of justice is the application of a morality that defines quality/justness/rightness. when you have a situation in which the systems of moralities themselves are clashing against each other, perhaps you are in the space of pre-justice, which is itself a political space. ranciere: politics is not agreeing whether something is white or not; politics is an initial agreement onto what the word white means in the first place.

even 'peace' is subject to this; there is a 'peace' perhaps more grounded in a bodily reality; the reality of skin-not-being-broken, blood-not-being-shed. but then just after that: is an exile without bloodshed 'peaceful'? is a theoretical occupation that happens to generate higher levels of living 'peaceful'?

and then inevitably: the thing meant by the word "peace" will have to be this messy dirty earthy thing, always, an active haggling between pros and cons, gives and takes. never an abstract shining absolute. I'll take five of that for seven of this; let's trade, barter, calculate difference, a quarter fraction of this, a pinch of that, subtract this, here we go. never anything exact or absolute or clean-cut; never a single solution or answer; perhaps just a series of messy messy messy resolutions that will leave each side wondering if it was the right thing.

evacuations from hurricane earl

it's just such, such a nice day. I went for a jog in prospect park and I could feel movement balancing out to a point of comfortable exertion. I bought three peaches, ate two within the hour. escaped (from dean st. mosquitos) to this cafe and there's the sound of cars passing and the breeze comes in through the backyard and here I am.

someone sits across from me and I know I've met him before, very recently, but I can't remember where, I try and I stretch my mind and I roam around the past narratives of the last few days, few weeks, and I get a taste in my mouth of another sense of nostalgia-for-the-present appearing, emerging into the present.

--

idea dump:

mobile home architecture, rv architecture, moving buildings, buildings that are not slow, heavy, expensive, but are quick, nimble, aggressive, light. architecture that works against the aura of the object, work against the aura of the work (of art), work against presence maybe.

architecture of voltron. forms move, swivel, compress, approach and fit into each other, create something new. social cooperation made literal, emergent properties made bodily.

--

oh, and antonio carlos jobim, you make me smile...

tomorrow I start. if I were less opinionated about the valences of adding-labels-to-things I might say that this would be the 'entrance of a new chapter', 'a marked change in my life', et cetera, et cetera, or so on and so forth. but because I do believe that these grandiose declarations are often times unproductive than not, that there's a certain precious value in conceiving my narrative as a gradual flow that bends but never ruptures, I'll say only that I'm: excited, calmly apprehensive (in the best way possible), interested, I'm leaning forward, I have guitar chords and a persistent lovely drumbeat in my ear and I can't wait to move, I can't wait to be in the thick of things. I can't wait to go emerge from studios for a smoke break or a food run at 1am in the morning, a few days before a project ends, burning the midnight oil, looking up and southwards towards the midtown haze, dreaming of brooklyn, dreaming of buildings and spaces being built, falling down, erected and razed, inflated, dug out, projected, popped-up, hollowed out, filled in, pulled up.

and yesterday: was a dream of a day, no work done, no emails sent, was nothing but sun and water and a sense of home. wonderful wonderful wonderful wonderful. and I was so happy to be on the train: it's as if all the trains I was on (and will ever be on) all thread through each other, pleated fabric-like manifolds of space punctured in unison. when I'm on this lovely train (tipsy happy muted voices echoing) headed back to new york, I'm in mongolia, having just left russia, looking out a window, or I'm going upstate in a yearned-for winter train, or I'm here, the lights overhead turning these night windows into mirrors, reflecting and folding the train into itself over and over, over and over and over and over and over.

sunday late afternoon. precious moments of peace.

eat into this day as if it were a peach, cold or warm, dripping, overripe, almost bruised. textured, tender, needed.

Things are kind of really booming right now - there's so much stuff going on in terms of new media/art+technology/etc in this city, this week/month... so I split the past stuffcalendar entry in two.

Marcel Broodthaers: Décor: A Conquest
4 East 77th Street (5th Ave)
Michael Werner Gallery - M-F 10am-6pm, Until Sept 15

Sousveillance Culture panel with Amy Alexander, Jill Magid and Hasan Elahi, moderated by Marisa Olson
Luna Lounge, 61 Metropolitan Avenue, Brooklyn, NY
Saturday, Sept 15, 2007, 2:30pm - 4pm
Rhizome is organizing a panel in conjunction with Conflux, on sousveillance, the practice of watching from below (sous-) rather than above (sur-). A diverse group of artists whose work engages surveillance will explore the cultural and political implications of sousveillance, which tends to be discussed as empowering when manifest as a "taking-back" of cameras or the rising-up of "little brother," but which also unfolds in an era of increased self-surveillance, encouraged by both the government and the culture of participatory and 'transparent' media. Panelists include artists Amy Alexander, Jill. Magid and Hasan Elahi, and moderator Marisa Olson, Editor and Curator, Rhizome.

One Million Forgotten Moments
Wed, Sept 12, 7pm & 9pm - continues through Sunday
38 Park Row, New York, NY
7p and 9p showtimes; $1
One Million Forgotten Moments is a public spectacle-showcase-festival- celebration-performance that features a lineup of 100 of New York's most talented artists, from the legendary to the ridiculous, to the bizarre, to the insane, to the totally mindblowing.
We are transforming a former porn/DVD shop on Park Row (across the street from City Hall) into a beautiful 18th-century jewelbox theater, where an audience of 25 sits in the storefront window and watches the madness unfold on the street.
With the National Theater of the United States of America, Brett Windham, the Vintage DJ, Jody Elff, Casey Opstad, Radiohole, Collapsable Giraffe, the 7 Seconds, Jenny Seastone Stern, Rollo Romig, the Magic of Steve Cuiffo, songbird Johnnie Moore, Jesse Hawley, Chelsea Bacon, Beth Kurkjian, Normandy Sherwood, and more.
-from NonsenseNYC

Evening Talks with New Media Artists: Marina Zurkow + Joe McKay
Rm 313, 163 William Street, Pace University, NYC
6:30pm. monday sept 10 :: marina zurkow + joe mckay
Zurkow creates animated, psychologically infused narratives, which push cartoons beyond the classic perpendicular screen into physical environments. Joe McKay is an artist who makes work with and about digital culture

Art Around the Park: Live Action Painting
Tompkins Square Park
Saturday, Sept 7 11a through Sunday
In what has been considered one of the most visually stimulating and
creative events in New York City, over 140 talented artists
simultaneously paint on a 1,400-foot long canvas. Each artist is
given an area approximately 7 by 7 feet wide. -nonsensenyc

Art Parade 2007
Saturday, Sept 7, 4pm
Houston and West Broadway, down West Broadway, ending at Grand Street, Manhattan
Deitch Projects, Creative Time and Paper Magazine are pleased to announce the third annual Art Parade. The parade will take place on Saturday September 8, at 4PM. The route will begin on Houston and follow West Broadway, ending on Grand Street. Following the success of the past two Art Parades, artists, performers and designers are again being invited to create floats, placards, portable sculptures, kites, performances and street spectacles.

Aeolian Ride
Sept 7, 2007, Mcgolrick Park
Between Nassau and Driggs, and between Monitor and Russell, Brooklyn
The aeolian ride is 52 people in wind-inflated-suits riding bicycles through cities around the world. inspired by a love for bikes, city cruising, critical mass, costumes, sillyness + things that inflate, i decided to make a free, mass participatory event with a sense of humor. it excites those riding as well as delights those watching, all the while transforming the landscape into a playground of windfilled shapes.

New Media Hacks by Joe McKay
VertexList - 138 Bayard St, Brooklyn, NY
Sept 7 - Oct 7, Fri, Sat, Sun, 2-6 pm. Opening reception on Sept 7, 7 - 10pm
The cell phone sculptures give these old phones a second life. Torn apart and recontextualized – they perform new functions. A dog-chewed phone gets to show off its beautiful broken display. Two flip phones become telegraph sounders. Four phones combine to make a musical keyboard. And so on. In Sunset Solitaire, I perform a one man game with the setting sun.

Hektor Meets Dexter Sinister
Thursday, Sept 6, 2007: 6pm - midnight
Swiss Institute - 495 Broadway, 3rd Floor
Machine, man and mathematics unite for a special 6-hr event at the Swiss Institute. The painting machine “Hektor,” brainchild of artist and designer Jürg Lehni, will perform for a live audience, making a series of paintings on the walls in the Swiss Institute gallery and hallways. Consisting of a spray can, two small motors and a computer-coordinated belt, Hektor replicates the motion of a graffiti artist’s hand, making lo-fi graphics with digital brains.

Dissenter Stage
Sept 6, 2007, Thursday, 9:30pm
The Tank presents the first edition of DISSENTER STAGE, a music event focusing on unconventional electronics. This edition showcases Dutch laptop scrapper CAPSLOCK (Ketacore, Bloodshed Unlimited), on tour in the US and fresh from the Forced Noise festival in Providence, unleashing a unique blend of atmosphere and hard-hitting rhythm. Local beat researchers AEROSTATIC (Mirex, Native State Digital) provide supporting cover with complementary explorations of ambience and rhythmic tension, along with BIT SHIFTER (Mirex, 8bitpeoples, 555, Astralwerks), New York Game Boy tactical audio specialist, supplying giant sounds from small machines.

[Perpetual Art Machine] Open Artist Roundtable - Video Art in the Age of the Internet
(This is part of an exhibit going on at the Perpetual Art Machine, which ends Friday)
Thursday, Sept 6, 2007, 8-9:30pm
Chelsea Art Museum, 556 West 22nd Street, New York, NY
The [PAM] founders will be hosting an open roundtable discussion on September 6th to analyze the current state and future of the medium of video art and the emergence of new artistic communities that question the authority and connoisseurship of traditional systems of 20th century art. What is the role and future of video art in this very exciting time? What are the current transformations in modes of creation and distribution of video art in the early 21st century? The possibilities seem endless as open source and creative commons communities thrive, allowing for projects like [PAM] to be made possible. Several experts will be present to address these topics.

Dorkbot
Wednesday, Sept 5th, 2007, at 7pm
Location One, SoHo
Christian Croft & Kate Hartman: Energy Harvesting Dérive
Mouna Andraos: Sustainable practices in electronic art and design
Michael J. Dory: Concrete Crickets

The Artist and the Computer
MOMA, Sunday, September 2, 2007, 2:00 p.m., Theater 2, T2 -- part of Automatic Update
Videos produced by young contemporary artists working with computers, digital technology, and the machine as part of their artistic practice. Artists include Pierre Huyghe, Cory Arcangel and Frankie Martin, Seth Price, Daria Martin, Mark Leckey, Oliver Payne and Nick Relph, Paper Rad, Michael Bell-Smith, Lars Laumann, and Takeshi Murata. Program 90 min.

Tranzducer008
Aug 31, 2007 8 - 11pm, $5
Lemurplex, 461 3rd Avenue, Brooklyn,
"Stephen Lehman, Downbeat magazine’s two-time “Rising Star” pick on alto saxophone, will be debuting new work for computer and sax. Leon Gruenbaum, inventor of the Samchillian Tip Tip Tip Cheeepeeeee, will be presenting his new project “Genes and Machines.” And last but certainly not least we’ll be hearing from creative force and ex-Antipop Consortium member High Priest (a.k.a. HPRIZM). As always, Season of the Bit video game tune selections between sets (http://seasonofthebit.com)!"

ROFL! v1.2
Friday August 31, 9:30 PM $15.00

Upgrade! New York discussion event
August 30, 2007, Thurs, 7pm, Free
Eyebeam
Artist talk with eteam: eteam will discuss the construction of alternate realities via audience participation (intentional or unintentional) within their various projects. In addition, a special guest and a performance/game will set the scene for vibrant dialogue.
(eteam worked on International Airport Montello

Kid Koala.. on a boat!
August 30, 8pm. 3 hour boat tour. $30 day of, $25 advance.
Kid Koala: Moon River.