I am moved. joyous. excited. jumping! super excited to start things. beyond a horizontal axis of architecture, not architecture, is an orthogonal practice of computation, space, embodiment, art, thought.

do we matter? we don't matter. all that matters is continuing on research, sharing it with the future. my work matters, not me. this is so clear.

I want to make work that is not about me, not about the designer, nothing about the author, but about sharing. work that grows and blossoms because more people are part of it, learn about it, share it, talk about it, belong. I want to make work and collaborate and share. I want to make work for which "collaboration" is not a needed word because it is ingrained into part of the work (we don't 'collaborate' in eating together - eating together is inherently social). I want to play. to be a kid. to learn. to share. to teach.

forget the axis of architecture/not-architecture. not that it is not meaningful, but it is one cross-section through the world. there are other things. who are we? where do we come from? how do we think and learn? how are we generous?

how do we jump into the world? how do we swim like fishes? how do we care for each other? how do we care for each other? how do we learn from each other? how do we change how we think? how do we pause? how do we belong?

I am here, buzzing with electricity. as I said to M: I am like a taut string, with my own resonant frequency, feeling with joyous surprise the buzz of my own vibrations occurring because I am listening to another sound, set of sounds, harmonies, layers.

no, like really, it's all just people. I mean, here we are rushing headlong into things trying to convince ourselves that there's more than just people, that we can have solid institutions, formations, holding patterns, lines of desire, trying to subsume ourselves into geometry, lattices, spaceframes, concrete slabs, steel trusses, three-letter acronyms, but look, I mean, look! it's all just people. people all the way down.

productive procrastination makes this happen:

.gsappcam

the other day someone asked online "what can I do to be less bored?" I can't ever understand people who are bored -- or at least who are bored not out of choice. here's my anti-boredom list.

watch blue velvet, eraserhead.
learn chuck.
learn more max/msp.
learn more music theory/sound processing.
learn flash & actionscript.
learn more electrical engineering.
teach myself ruby on rails.
read das kapital cover to cover.
read more adorno, horkheimer, zizek, lacan, foucault, derrida, wittgenstein, heidegger, husserl, bachelard, kant, nietzsche, hegel, hume, dworkin, rawls, ranciere, virililo, mcluhan, galloway, crary, benjamin, lyotard, kittler, krakauer, barthes. tj clark? gunning? spivak, scott, butler. lovink, thacker. etc. etc.
stop referring to authors by their last name only and perpetuating another aesthetic of reference, in-the-know, wink-wink gestures founded eventually on puerile exclusivity. the dream of a treehouse, secret hiding spots. treehouse members only: what's the secret password? knowing their first names.
but no really, read more. read more journals, more new media.
read outside the western/continental canon
talk to more eyebeam-y dorkbot-y cmc-y bitforms-y rhizome-y itp-y people.
shoot more, develop with diafine.
make all the things in my notebook.
learn more objective-c.
make more with less paralysis.
learn to build a wheel.
read more essays by dfw.
read more fiction. read against the day, v, vineland, mason & dixon. read the broom of the system.
walk more.
bike more.

there is the gentle but subtle and altogether active action of 'more' versus 'learn'.
fly more jet planes
learn to unicycle
parachute more
give more speeches
excel more
learn to set an alarm clock
sinister, sinister. I am a failed rocket scientist. I am a k2-climber-dropout.

once there was this course; in this course the professor told the entire class of students to email in a photo of ourselves. bombers flying high, diving in, sir. knowing what this all entailed I took a photo of myself, head shot straight on, white background, neutral smile. sliced at the neck, cropped ear to ear. what are you doing? what is going on here? what is going on here that necessitates not saying exactly what you are doing?

I guess what frightens me most about art is its absolute foundationlessness, ungrounded in everything but whatever it chooses to be grounded in. There is no logic that art wishes to contain but whatever logic its constituents determine as divine. It could be argued that this is the case for anything, any discipline or discourse; I just say it's especially harder when the specific arena insists on not having a logic.

What drives and structures it then is the series of underworkings, the operations. What is the ideal that artists strive for? What are the aggregate vectors of demand and desire that structure the buying, the selling, and thus the continuation of art? Does this mean only a materialist examination of art is really proper? 'proper'?

Maybe it's that I have a masochistic need for desire, that I look for a structure. Freewheeling float isn't my thing. Or rather it's not floating that I'm doing -- it's this simultaneous, contradictory, and altogether hollowed-out desire for a grounded and 'legitimate' beauty, faced with the despair of a fashion-of-taste-driven world, but after having discarded all hopes and beliefs in legitimacy and groundedness as ultimately classist, stratifying, divisive.

Everything goes back to the question of equality, similarity; do I have a right to be here and make you not be here? Everything is always political. Everything is always politics.

When aesthetics becomes an attribute and not a contextual relation it becomes a politics that tries to wriggle itself out into pre-politics, language trying to be grammar.

When aesthetics is still a contextual relation it continues to be political.

right now, my hand is over my o-shaped mouth. dark deep high city skies. simple words.

I guess what frightens me most about art is its absolute foundationlessness, ungrounded in everything but whatever it chooses to be grounded in. There is no logic that art wishes to contain but whatever logic its constituents determine as divine. It could be argued that this is the case for anything, any discipline or discourse; I just say it's especially harder when the specific arena insists on not having a logic.

What drives and structures it then is the series of underworkings, the operations. What is the ideal that artists strive for? What are the aggregate vectors of demand and desire that structure the buying, the selling, and thus the continuation of art? Does this mean only a materialist examination of art is really proper? 'proper'?

Maybe it's that I have a masochistic need for desire, that I look for a structure. Freewheeling float isn't my thing. Or rather it's not floating that I'm doing -- it's this simultaneous, contradictory, and altogether hollowed-out desire for a grounded and 'legitimate' beauty, faced with the despair of a fashion-of-taste-driven world, but after having discarded all hopes and beliefs in legitimacy and groundedness as ultimately classist, stratifying, divisive.

Everything goes back to the question of equality, similarity; do I have a right to be here and make you not be here? Everything is always political. Everything is always politics.

When aesthetics becomes an attribute and not a contextual relation it becomes a politics that tries to wriggle itself out into pre-politics, language trying to be grammar.

When aesthetics is still a contextual relation it continues to be political.

right now, my hand is over my o-shaped mouth. dark deep high city skies. simple words.

1. there's an immense joy in things sometimes. riding a bike fast on city streets at night next to a river. bright lights passing by. photographic/filmic bokeh rendered by the not-so-mechanical aperture of my pupil.

1.5. paint is wet.

2. I ollied for the first time, like actually rose and then landed flat on a stationary board. what, what, a thrill. thanks to the sir.

3. we went to see 'medicine for melancholy' the other day, there were maybe eight other people in the theater. do you lie at the intersection of 'indie/hipster' and, 'non-white' or 'thinking about race'? do you come to movies at the thursday night in the west village? the cumulative intersection of all of these meant that eight other people in a city of eight million were here.

4. I had a sincere conversation in the lobby of all places about race and class. it's nice to talk and discuss. there are constellations of activity that take place concerning interactions. there are minute observations that make so much sense. these things. there are tangents made at three am. etc etc etc etc etc

5. what am I doing? what am I doing? fucking art. high high low low up down fly crawl right left dexterious sinister etc etc etc. gated non-gated, bounded non-bounded. closure, outside, etc. spatial politics, disciplinal politics, examination of boundaries.

6. there's the dream of homogeneity, of translucence, permeability. I could be you and you could be me. exclusions are not here. motivated by not just equality but the possibility of equivalence.

7. and when you make art it's your aesthetics I subscribe to. obvious things, obvious things. once I see this it overwhelms and I can't see anything but this giant monstrosity in the room. how do you move beyond it? how do you, or you over there, or you in the corner? how do you act with the necessary self-critical action of denying your own beliefs to peer around the corners, the rims of your glasses to shake things up, to generate earthquakes that always rock your own foundations, to walk on slippery streets on purpose. upon this shakiness which instability itself is at stake, changing, unstable. how do you move beyond?

Just before I sleep! The sudden sensation of a rush and a tumbling, a horizontal vertigo, sideways trails -- these sensations make me wake back up, write these down. All of a sudden in this darkened room: I perceive the visceral sensation of change, like dipping fingers into river water. I like it here; I like it now; things are perfect in this moment.

Is Marcuse correct, and art, literature, music indeed oppressive? what are my orders of discourse? I am cheating by living in the 21st century, reading about post WWI art, post WWII art, vicariously experiencing the shock, distortion, horror, solution of ideology, of progress and change, of a failed suprematism of art according to a hegelian history -- all of this is vicarious, secondary, descriptive, remote, indirect. From the vantage point of my historical position, I cheat. All the while, new media and interaction design passes me by, people write about ludology, gamer theory, new media art, systems of technology. I would like to take part in these narratives, these global narratives. Should I break free from this metanarrative of the global narrative? Where is attempt, solution, ability?

Ultimately (and this is totally outside of theory or philosophy, utilizing my own terminology), everything comes down to the molecular moment, the indestructible event outside of narrativity, everything power-related is determined by the instant. perhaps.

I'm thinking things, I'm re-thinking my own systems of thinking things, thinking about thinking about thinking, epistemologically ouroborotic, curled up in the fetal position sucking at my own bellybutton, wishing for some sort of exit, entrance.

I'm so young. I'm so young, so young, so young. this is good, good, good, good. this will also change so soon, so soon, so soon. Is there any way I can grow younger? Is time really relentlessly operative, are we all growing older? Is this change really a necessity?

at the same time, simultaneously, I can't wait to get older, have hard hearing, realize that my brain is slower, be wiser, more understanding, maybe even have kids, delight at the dexterity of accumulated and cumulative knowledge. I also face this all with utmost dread. right now, the question is the order in which I undergo these operations: do I anticipate, then dread? or do I dread, and then anticipate...

Hot damn! So earlier, full of Foucault and notions of systems of discourse and knowledge-power and whatnot, I was thinking about the structure of the modern computer system, and its structure of power and permissions --- of the computer's discursivity, so to speak.

I had thought of this sometime last semester, but the thought came back: *nix, Windows, and Linux systems all operate on a world/group/user organization of classification, with specific permissions of read/write/execute attributed to each classification level. Is it possible to move beyond this system of permissions and roles, where at the atomic level of things, each 'process' is hierarchized and restricted through a hegemonic power into roles of accessibility (read), ability (write), and power (execute)?

As it stands, operating systems seem to be run in a feudal system, in which processes have child processes, and the hierarchy of processes is a progenitory one more akin to a lord-vassal relationship, not of a meritocratic one. Is it possible to have a 'capitalist' operating society, in which Adam Smith's 'invisible hand' guides the usage of computing resources? What about a socialist operating system in which all processes have equal power, abilities?

I'm reminded of the Setun Conspiracy, which apparently was a Soviet attempt at creating computing systems operating on ternary logic rather than binary logic (-1, 0, 1 rather than 0, 1). This is different, though, because systems running on binary logic can emulate ternary logic, albeit with a performance hit -- much like how a Turing machine can simulate another Turing machine. That is, the difference in effect achieved by creating a ternary logic computer from a binary logic computer is probably on the level of the individual atomic calculation than on the level of processes, programs, or operating systems.

Granted, simulatability (that a TM can simulate another TM) is not an argument for a lack of difference on an emergent scale. For example, a Lisp compiler can be written in C, and those are two completely different languages operating with completely different efficiencies, abilities, etc. What I'm saying is that the modus operandi behind the Soviet Union's researching of these ternary logic computers probably has to do with the same details of their implementation that makes them uninteresting in my view: that their divergence from binary logic is on a mostly elementary scale, and therefore suitable only for the ideology of the Soviet Union vs. the US at the time, of a computer ideologically and fundamentally based on an alternate (and arguably better) system.

Going back to my original question: what are the systems of computers, and how are they a reflection of political/judicial systems? Is there a discourse concerning the architectural design of computers?

Lo and behold, someone just wrote an essay about this, called Computer Juridisms, by Cornelia Visman and Markus Krajewski. I haven't read it yet, but plan to do so as soon as time entails.

The essay itself was published in Gray Room, which one of my art history professors co-founded. I just started browsing the issues, and it's great to see so much serious and thoughtful discussion on the usually neglected realm of ""low culture"" (that's some dangerous terminology, so I used extra quotation marks): technology, games, etc. Alexander Galloway has an essay titled Starcraft, or Balance, and McKenzie Wark, who wrote Gamer Theory (which I'm reading now) has an essay that seems like an elaboration of his book, called Digital Allegories (on The Sims)..

Diana Cooper, "Orange Alert UK" , 2003 - 2007

Cai Guo-Qiang, Inopportune: Stage one, 2008

Merce Cunningham & The OpenEnded Group, Loops, 2008

Wood
Until March 1, 2008
Paula Cooper Gallery
Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Sherrie Levine, Sol LeWitt and Jackie Winsor: here's a lot of Minimalist sculptures, done in wood, of Judd's "one thing after the other"..

Outside In: New Realms for Taiwan Art
Until March 12, 2008
Taipei Cultural Center, 1 E. 42nd st

The artists in this exhibition seem to work in new media/installation art; might be interesting.

Power
Until March 29, 2008
Foxy Production

Diana Cooper - Overdrive
Until March 29, 2008
Postmasters Gallery

Brainwave: Common Senses
Until April 19, 2008
Exit Art

Design and the Elastic Mind
Until May 12, 2008
MoMA

Cai Guo-Qiang: I Want to Believe
Until May 28, 2008
Guggenheim

Ever since I saw one of his giant explosion-paintings at MoMA, and watched/read about his Transient Rainbow, I've been waiting for this retrospective/exhibit. Looks exciting..

Loops
Feb 26, unveiling of choreography and code

This is a digitization/opensource documentation of Merce Cunningham's loops, data captured using motion capture systems, released under an open source license. Not quite an exhibit, but something to work on.

Tangential to this is the White Glove Tracking project, which utilized the collaborative power of internet users to track the location of Michael Jackson's white glove in a video of his performance of Billy Jean, and released the source video and coordinates for further use.

One of the first ideas I immediately thought of (after seeing Paul Pfeiffer's piece at MoMA's Automatic Update exhibition at the time) was to move and resize the video so that the white glove would remain the same size, in the center of the frame. Of course, somebody (a Zach Lieberman) also had the same idea and had done it already.

update:
Honey Space
Westside Highway, between 21st and 22nd streets.
Article here.

I am so lucky, so very grateful, so very lucky to be healthy and to have these opportunities, to be where I am working towards the what-I-will-be, to have the state of being to be looking forwards, to have the peace of mind to be looking back as well...

Outside some vehicle drives by scraping snow away with a shovel. myself : 1:13 in a dark room, not quite alone. Look how far I've come; look how much is left to see -