Author: james rouvelle

it is something close to me.” hiro yamagata

i think i completely mis-understood this quote when i just read it on yamagata’s site. i took him to mean that nature is, literally, and simply, whatever is close to him at any moment. that idea blew my mind because it suggest that the understanding of what nature is, is an ongoing process that varies over time and is not embodied in specific things, like trees or birds, but is everywhere and the realization of the natural comes from understanding the essence of nature within whatever is closest, whatever is pressing most firmly against one, at any given moment. to me that seems like a rewarding, knowledge enhancing practice.

but then i settled down and realized he was stating, simply, that he feels close to nature. oh, well… i think i’ll work with my misunderstanding for a while.

McCain and his crew are brilliant strategists. Palin has become a national fascination, how couldn’t she be? All the questions, all the resulting “huh?” from trying to parse her record with her story.

With no resolution or concrete understanding in sight, the din of the resonating media feedback loop she’s in the center of, and we’re pouring energy into, has hijacked this campaign and stymied the meaningful and very important national discussion about the differences between McCain and Obama, and where each plan to take our country if elected.

To me, I can’t help but think this was exactly the effect McCain et al wanted, and we are all complicit in allowing this to continue.

Of course it is important to know who the VP pick is, and what they stand for, but it’s also essential to know when we’re being played, and to respond accordingly.

A brilliant political maneuver, feeding us Palin, but inciting and leveraging our folksy and ignorant bravura, fears, and addiction to gossip as a means to become president suggests one candidate is doing this not for us, but for himself. If he’s willing to select a VP who’s moment of national fame probably should have come from a brawl with her family on the Jerry Springer show I strongly suspect that his behavior as commander and chief will be equally manipulative and self-serving.

Reaching out to our lesser selves will produce a lesser country.

We’ve already had eight years of that.

I don’t think McCain wants to be our president, I think he wants to preside. There’s a huge difference.

He has an agenda and, based on the way he’s run his campaign and political life over the past several years, seems to be willing to do whatever is necessary to make it to the oval office.

For the sake of our future I think it is essential that we bring the focus of the national discussion surrounding this campaign back to the essential challenges facing our nation, and how the two nominees plan to deal with them.

Taking four years off from working through the serious issues to be potentially amused by the antics of a politically savvy grumpy old man prisoner of war hero, and an inexperienced, say whatever it takes to win politician who seems to really believe not only her own bullshit but the bullshit others write for her, will be, in my opinion, a terrible, terrible mistake.

The more I think about it the more McCain/Palin = Bush/Cheney, and I don’t want four more years of that for you or me.

Less Palin, more (national, global issues)/(McCain v. Obama) = Future.

Maine TV/McCain Interview

Reporter does a fine job interviewing John McCain, follow the link, please.

For some additional analysis, see this.

here are some notes from our last (and first!) interactive scripting class:

We train to the medium and the medium trains to us.

Knowledge has a biological function, and arises out of action

Knowledge is basically “operative”–it is about change and transformation.

“Operative” knowledge is knowing about and learning from “what happens when I (or it, or they, etc.) do….”

Knowledge consists of cognitive structures.

Development proceeds by the assimilation of the environment to these structures, and the accommodation of these structures to the environment.

Movement to higher levels of development (knowledge) depends on “reflecting abstraction,” which means coming to know properties of one’s own actions, and coming to know the ways in which they are coordinated with other’s actions, and how one’s actions influence, and are influenced by, another’s actions and cognitive structures.

Interaction is a relationship of mutual influence.

Interaction can increase operative knowledge when it raises awareness of the degree to which one has influence over something while at the same time understanding how that something is influencing one’s self.

Our sense of identity, down to our recollections, beliefs, ‘private’ feelings, etc., may be evoked responses – aspects of a persistent, collective interaction with our environment, highly dependent on the moment, environment, and interactions occurring at a given moment. We may not, in other words, carry our memories, and specific personality traits as static objects into an environment. They may be, instead, patterns of responses evoked via interaction within a given moment, and within a specific environment.

Different affects and qualities of experience (including, it seems, memory, and other ‘private’ mental events) are evoked by interaction with specific combinations of environmental elements.

Interactive artists and designers benefit from careful study of the qualities of interaction that are evoked within given environments, and must think broadly about which combinations of elements, including human participants, gizmos, nature, etc., seem to evoke which qualities and understandings.

Development, and the resulting qualities of that development, proceeds by the assimilation of the environment to this knowledge and its related structures, and the accommodation of these structures by to environment.

We adapt to the medium and the medium adapts to us.

Internal/external paradigms are useful but one must bear in mind that interaction goes both ways, so that, ultimately, consciousness exists at a midway point between the internal and external.

i just returned from the Hirshhorn with a group of students. if you can, please see this exhibit, it runs only through sunday. there is a gallery talk with one of the curators friday at 12:30.

it ties into several ideas i’ve been working on lately that i will describe in detail a bit later.

in the meantime, if you have time, please do visit the show, and let me know what you think.

more info

in her speech last night sarah palin mentioned that:
hockey moms are pitbulls with lipstick.
she, apparently, is a hockey mom.
“dick cheney is the pitbull of the republican party.”
sarah palin is dick cheney with lipstick.
that’s the way she sounded to me.

the crowd responded passionately to her, in particular near the end when she said something about dealing with the terrorists and how her opponents were concerned with reading them their rights.

in class yesterday we talked about interaction, and how interaction is a relationship of mutual influence. we also talked about operative knowledge, which we defined as awareness to the degrees to which, within an interaction, you are influencing something AND how it is influencing you.

with the republicans leaning heavily on the pathos, heroism, and indignation they associate with McCain’s imprisonment and torture, i thought it strikingly short-sighted to suggest that not playing by rules designed to at least minimally acknowledge a prisoner’s humanity by making him aware of his rights while being held captive is somehow ok if we do it.

in general i found palin’s well written and well performed speech to successfully reach and stimulate my inner caveman.

it occurred to me that much of the rhetoric of the Right seems designed to resonate with that violent, uneducated, short-sighted, frightened cave dweller persona that lives in many of us, and then match that stupid thing with a candidate who seems to preach those very values as a code to live and govern by.

i accept my inner caveman. i prefer to have my leaders speak to, and inspire my thoughtful, empathic, productive identity.

also, at some point during her speech i actually thought i heard some people in the crowd chanting “four more years!”, maybe they were – would be a good protest chant at their appearances.

on my way into work this afternoon i boarded the train wearing a blue, striped, button-down shirt and green, cotton pants. the car i entered was crowded so i walked into another and took a seat. as i looked around i noticed that there were three people sitting in front of me with almost the same shirt that i was wearing. funny coincidence. i looked around a bit more and noticed that the car was almost full of people not only wearing a similar shirt to mine but the same type and color of pants, too!

as we entered each station some of them would get up to leave, and meet the eyes of their fellow workers and nod their heads as they left – several people met my eye only to give me a puzzled look when they realized that they didn’t recognize my face.

when i got up to leave i took another look and ended up making eye contact and nodding at a bunch of different people who seemed as puzzled as i was about this trivial but unusual event.

i’m writing this just before i start teaching and the students are filing in so that’s it for now.

thanks for sending me this, mike!

[googlevideo]http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8453814925462673894&ei=0GCjSJ2aEImSrwKx08DTDw&q=richard+serra&vt=lf[/googlevideo]
Some quotes (please watch it for yourself):

mediazation (something that has been reduced to a flat surface, a screen that allows you to partake in its own reality, and not the situation of the reality in which it exists, a frame, a box), direct experience, metaphor, the immediacy and actuality of the place and moment, this being like that, the intensity of the work as it exists in its’ place, curves: concavity, convexity – no one knows a curve until they experience it, until they walk it. the latter part of the 20th century was devoid of curves, it was the tyranny of the right angle, we are entering an era when the curve will predominate and the corner will evaporate, art evolves through misinterpretation of what came before, and to use it as their own ideological purposes, every new generation purposely misinterprets what has come before, if you are just re-articulating what has come before you are being academic and probably treading water, a lot of art that doesn’t reinvent form, it lays a new content on an old form, if you look at pop art it is just rehashed cubism with new commodities thrown in, form, to a certain degree negates value, and that remains interesting to me.

Interesting. To me it’s not a question of either/or, it’s a question of integrating these experiences (in Serra’s words mediazation, and the experience of things as they really are in their place and moment), and understanding a given moment as a series of realizations that are built from a sequence of understandings embodied in different logical constructions (metaphoric, direct experience, etc.). He mentions simultaneity a few times, too, btw, and I’m not so sure we have any real ability to sense a genuine simultaneity in detail. I think our, or at least my, understandings often come down to sequence(s), anyway>>

To me, any given, known moment seems to be a cubism of different, but related logical constructions, and the exciting discovery comes from acknowledging the different logics present (whether based in the mind, physically instantiated in objects, or somewhere in between), and exploring that moment via the specific, shifting light that each provides. Put another way, the experience of a given moment is derived from the interaction between different modes of understanding that reside equally between the external and internal worlds. the oscillation between expression/participation, and observation of the specific modes, and their concentration and collective sequence seems to be where the fun is. cultivating an ability to see things this way and to accurately express one’s experience in those terms strikes me as a promising practice for thinkers and mashup artists of any discipline today.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eil7HfMg5Xk[/youtube]

a performer i know shared this story with me:

he and his family moved to nyc from puerto rico when he was in the fourth grade. he was asked by his teacher to memorize and recite a poem to the class. he chose ‘little brown baby‘ – (read the comment below the poem from january 7th).

while he was memorizing the poem his family was happily watching caddy shack in the next room. he decided to recite the poem the way bill murray’s character spoke in caddy shack. he doesn’t really know why he chose to recite the poem that way.

after his recitation his teacher took him by the arm into the hall and told him that what he’d done was horrible, and to never do something like that again. she was visibly upset with him.

his teacher was caucasian, and he had frequently experienced caucasians as unwilling to express their true feelings to someone’s face – and had heard they often seemed nice but then, behind your back, would do mean things. he was amazed that she would be so honest and direct with him about how she felt.

at that moment he decided to become a performer.