here is an audio clip from this recent project that exemplifies some of the material in the previous post. the voice is mine. if you follow the link to the project and click on the links to the various maps you’ll hear other ideas about time and urban development.

  Perhaps you’ve read Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan. I did, and was struck by, among other things, the idea of the chrono-synclastic infundibula. The idea is that the universe is so large that any location can be observed from a variety of vantage points – and each vantage point will establish a different context for the location. Imagine looking at the earth from mars, or the moon, or another, distant perspective. Each perspective contextualizes the earth within a different data set, and, the chrono-synclastic infundibula accept each of these perspectives as equally valid. Vonnegut describes the infundibula as places where these “ways to be right” coexist.

  Perhaps you’ve read some earlier posts where I mention Dr. Manfred Clynes’ Sentics. Here is another quote, from pages 12-13:

Recognition plays a key role in genetic processes: the shapes of molecules are recognized with high specificity. The loose chemical bonds used in the processes of building instructions and of replication depend fundamentally on the recognition of specific molecular forms. More recently the importance of vibrational modes, introducing time, has been discovered. Indeed, recognition implies time as well as space: the frequency of a photon is recognized by an electron – forms in time may be programmed by genetic instructions as well as well as forms in space alone.

In human language we have been far too negligent in naming forms in time. The precise reality of forms in time has escaped the language-making processes and words denoting specific time forms are quite rare (e.g., sigh, caress, etc.)

Here is a constellation of personal, current associations:

           nyc Rachel Columbia 00’s eric change

                    mike eric time xenakis nikos 90’s Columbia

nikos noisy neighbors nyc xenakis

eric rachel Columbia time 90’s mike 00’s

I grew up in nyc and am familiar with noisy neighbors, street noise, bright street lights, etc. I don’t live in nyc at the moment and have enjoyed, for perhaps the first time, the experience of a quiet apartment, and real darkness to sleep in. I associate neighbor and neighborhood noise with nyc.

  A good friend of mine is named Nikos. We became friends in the late 90’s in nyc via some musicians I worked and socialized with. Nikos is a mathematician with whom I share common interests. He and his wife now live in England, and we rarely get to see each other. We exchange emails a couple times a year – seemingly at random. I associate Nikos with living in nyc and elsewhere and comparing the differences.

  I spent my early years as a composer and performer in the contemporary music world, based in nyc. Nikos is an aficionado of contemporary classical music, he and I became friends based, in part, on our mutual commitment to that artform. Nikos is was one of the few “civilians” (non-composer/performer) who seemed to genuinely like the music of Iannis Xenakis. I associate Nikos, nyc and Xenakis.

  About a month ago I was awoken at 6:45am by a blaring clock radio in the apartment below. I did nothing, as it was the first time since moving in that such an event took place – I accepted it as an aberration. Perhaps someone was visiting. It made me think back to nyc, and caused me to appreciate the silence I enjoy in my current apartment.

  Two weeks ago I again heard the clock radio, and I thought about saying something to the neighbor, but forgot. Things returned to “normal” – but I began to reflect more often on living in nyc.

  Last week I was browsing youtube and typed in Xenakis – just out of curiosity. I hadn’t really thought about, or listened to his work in quite a while (like years) – his name just seemed to pop into my head late one night. I found some stuff to listen to; really liked it, especially a solo violin work I hadn’t heard before.

  Last weekend I went up to nyc – first time in a long time. Participated in a discussion held at glowlab via red76, and then visited my friends who are expecting their first child. My friends went to Columbia U. at the same time Nikos did, but they never met. My friends are also deeply involved with contemporary art and music. They have much more in common than their relationship to me. I associate Columbia U., contemporary classical music, nyc, the late 90’s, early 00’s, and my career as a composer with them.

  While wondering around the city last weekend I thought about Nikos and how much he loved being there, and how much I love being there, and how many of my friends who are still there think often about leaving.

  Two days ago I spoke with my friend Eric about his new baby. Late last night I received a “random” email from Nikos. Hadn’t heard from him in about eight months. Just saying hello. I started to answer it but felt tired and went to bed.

  Yesterday 6:45am blaring clock radio woke me up. Couldn’t get back to sleep. Went online, wrote to Nikos.

  This morning, 6:45am blaring clock radio woke me up. Managed to fall back to sleep. When I woke up I wrote this post.

  I’m not sure how to represent the form(s) of this constellation in such a way that the interrelationship of the elements will permit others to experience them as I am beginning to consider them: as simultaneous. According to Clynes, we neglect “naming forms in time”. The events described, sequentially, above are perhaps one event that I’m experiencing from different perspectives, and those different perspectives may have more to do with interrelationships of things in space than events in time. In other words, I am in a space where the probability of the experience of the events described above is high. The order that I experience those specific events in speaks more to the level of probability of the event than some temporal displacement. Put another way, the present is where all of us always are. We understand things in terms of relationships, and it doesn’t make sense – and is perhaps even impossible, to compare something that is (present) with something that no longer is (past), or isn’t yet (future). That which we can touch touches us, and we only know that which we can touch (be in some physiological contact with). This is to say that my ability to relate one event to another indicates the presence of both – and, probabilistically, one of the events is revealing aspects of itself that cause me to consider it in the present, while other aspects of itself I experience as a memory of the past – or an anticipation of the future, but they are all, really, present. Does that make sense? I experienced a sequence of events but know that the others (and I include people as well as their memories and things [the Xenakis videos, etc.,] in the category of others) involved within this sequence where involved in different sequences of events – all of which were no doubt very real to each person, and all of which were happening simultaneous to mine.

I’d like to add that Eric and I have spoken frequently about the nature of Time. I will also add that another friend, Mike, is a conductor/composer in nyc that I am also rarely in touch with, but began thinking about last week. I have also had long talks with him about the nature of time (starting last spring), and was surprised a few days ago when my father, who doesn’t know Mike well and rarely asks questions about my friends, asked about what Mike was up to.

I wonder if our understanding of time isn’t based on our experience of the probability of change, and if our belief in the past-present-future paradigm, while seemingly, experientially, true, isn’t, perhaps unreal. I wonder whether the challenge (to reference Clynes) isn’t to name forms in time, but to name/model/metaphorize/ forms in change. To explore these forms we may have to consider the implications of concepts like Vonnegut’s chrono-synclastic infundibula and to minimize our reliance on our (ref. Newton’s) concept of time.

i went to visit my friends in their new apartment over the weekend. monica, who is a dancer/emergency room doctor, told me that recently someone arrived at the er with a condition described in writing as “WHAT IS IT?!” by the ems tech. at first she was annoyed with the lack of meaningful information, and then, as she approached the room where the patient was she noticed that he had been firmly tied down to a gurney and situated in a room apart from the other patients. suddenly the description of “WHAT IS IT?!” made her nervous. she took a deep breath and passed through the swinging doors. the patient was facing away from her. she said, “hi, I’m doctor-“ at which point he turned his head, looked directly into her eyes and screamed “WHAT IS IT?!” over and over for about six hours until whatever it was he’d taken wore off.

ps: monica is nine months pregnant and has no insurance or maternity leave, and, to repeat: she’s a doctor.

Dr. Manfred Clynes, from Sentics (p10-11):

 

…our own genetic construction is such that it allows us to recognize natural forms in different ways from the inanimate.  The ear, for example, is more sensitive to animate sounds than inanimate. (The nervous system is built to recognize special types of frequency modulation characteristic of animate sounds.)  A mother will recognize the cries of an infant in sleep, and our visual system responds differently to living forms than inanimate ones.

 

…Recognition plays a key role in genetic processes: the shapes of molecules are recognized with high specificity.  The loose chemical bonds used in the processes of building instructions and of replication depend fundamentally on the recognition of specific molecular forms. More recently the importance of vibrational modes, introducing time, has been discovered.  Indeed, recognition implies time as well as space: the frequency of a photon is recognized by an electron – forms in time may be programmed by genetic instructions as well as forms in space alone.”

 I read this a few days ago, and while I have spent a good bit of time with Herbert Simon’s Sciences of the Artificial to be uncomfortable with some of the inanimate/animate rhetoric, I was nevertheless struck by the excerpt above.  After thinking about it a bit I went into the kitchen for something to eat.

 I took a bag of rice-cakes down from the cupboard and couldn’t tell, by sight, whether they were white or brown, so I consulted the wrapper.  It occurred to me that I could – and perhaps should, be able to tell what the stuff was made out of via my senses, without having to consult the symbols on the plastic bag – but the bag was between my senses and the food.  The bag required a body of acquired knowledge to decipher it, and is designed to emit only the faintest odor (this is significant as our nose is so important when selecting food), and survive conditions that the food inside wouldn’t.  The inanimate was wrapped around the animate.

 Packaged Food, in and from the grocery store, is packed to keep it from the elements.  As such we identify it, in the store, by decoding symbols usually on some impermeable membrane – like a plastic wrapper.  The recognition is one of symbols on the inanimate wrapping and not by direct contact with what is in the container.  We have to read, think, and consciously process in order to satisfy this primary need.

 In re: Clynes; once familiarizing ourselves with our parents, friends, children’s voices we maintain that experience of recognition for long, long periods of time, perhaps for life. This understanding is an aspect of an intuitive relationship we are born with – we don’t need to learn it, or to acquire it, it seems equally available to every human.  In our current system of object management, the contexts are often different enough (if we hear a recording of a familiar’s voice shifted by 1% we won’t apparently, recognize it.  Have you had the experience of trying to find something in an unfamiliar grocery store?) that we are required to continually maintain a database to satisfy an increasing number of our needs.  We are becoming, perhaps, overwhelmed by how many of our inborn abilities are being “enhanced” by living in environments that require ever increasing interaction with the inanimate, and by extension require a learned, acquired familiarity with the data necessary to know what the inanimate is as a first step towards the animate. The inanimate (a plastic bag, in my example above, but there are many, many examples seemingly entrenched in all aspects of our lives) is often used to coat the animate.

 It seems to me we’ve decided to prize the acquired and “other” the intuitive.  Our technological advancements have accelerated this process, yet our bodies are virtually the same as they were thousands of years ago.  Our technological development has outpaced our biological development and it is troublesome – no wonder we have begun to cyborg ourselves – we need to keep pace.  I remember a lyric to a song that went “only fools have needs.”  We seem to be becoming increasingly needy.

 Consider the Myspace phenomena: 1,000 friends (!) vs. the quite probable small, and perhaps even shrinking number of authentic, really close friends/family members that interact with deeply – meaning getting inside the wrapper, i.e., with the full complement of our being.

 

“…during the past few decades, modern technology, with radio, tv, air travel, and satellites, has woven a network of communication which puts each of the world in to almost instant contact with all the other parts.  Yet, in spite o this world-wide system of linkages, there is, at this very moment, a general feeling that communication is breaking down everywhere, on an unparalleled scale…”

                                     david bohm, on dialogue

 

 The inanimate wrapper phenomenon is simply making it harder, literally making it more work, to recognize someone.  Instead of a known voice it is an email, or sms – we have to go through some steps every time until we can say, “ok, that is xyz”.  We use caller id, custom ringtones, buddy lists, but the point is we have to consciously think, and check, and cross-reference, and factor data – and while it might take just second or two, this delay is significant because it suggests, to me, the colonization of the dynamic, animate, mammalian meta-consciousness (the integrated conscious/sub-conscious systems working together) by the explicit, by the conscious mind, the ego, in the form of the learned, the acquired, the index-able, repeatable: data.  If you had a look at the collective intellection entry you’ll know that I think there is a value – perhaps difficult to quantify – in the convergence of minds engaged in simply sharing associations together – in just talking, aimlessly, but listening, and cultivating empathy with each other.  This communal benefit and value is what gets left off when we privilege data.

 Bohm mentions that we are linked to each other on a world-wide level.  This linkage is not simply person-to-person, willful communication, I don’t think he’s referencing the potential to email millions of people (on dialogue was written prior to the internet boom), instead, I think his excerpt implies that more of us are linked within database tables somewhere in ways that are not always clear to us. While this is analogous to what I think is the related phenomenon of a sort of species connection we have, and need to explore, our current linkage is, at its root, a numerical representation of our performance and position within a severely limited index that takes into account only a few bits of our total experience – and inevitably seems to complicate our interactions via its limited, and inaccurate scope.

 I’m not making a “this way vs. that way” statement. I’m advocating for an integration of the “two” at the service of creating better working models to aid us in our collective development – a significant aspect of which is the social software elements of our cultural forms.  In other words, how effectively our stuff and our built environments enhance our ability to simply, and happily get together and continue to develop towards greater and more complex integration – analogous to the level of integration among the various elements of our bodies.

 Too often our tech seems to be at the service of creating a tiring, alienating, and limited daily experience. When we are so overtly and consciously managing our interactions so much of the time (our environments seem to demand increased, active, conscious processing) and when our exchange with our environments is based increasingly on symbols on inanimate wrappers, we are prone to ricochet from one surface to the next across the symbolic landscape, as our connection to what is external is often, literally, limited to information gleaned from our eye or ear to mind, as opposed to the complex arrangement of senses and systems including the “sub” conscious that seems natural to us – all this skating around the surface costs energy and is, frankly exhausting and unsatisfying – it leaves us always wanting, and needing more.

 In response to this common environment and experience, I wonder if our social interactions are becoming similar episodes of data categorization, exchange and management – facilitated by the tools many of us now use for socialization.  Are we genuinely close to fewer and perhaps fewer people because it is simply too much work for us to maintain multiple, and active deep interpersonal relationships?  Does the inanimate wrapper require us to be in constant analysis and upgrade mode, to be always learning, and always acquiring, and, when applied to what Clynes describes as our inborn, natural systems and patterns (our bodies haven’t changed much over the past several thousands of years) have we placed ourselves at odds with certain fundamental and utterly necessary aspects of our experience?

An irony of the www is that it provides opportunities for more and more people to be reachable by more and more people but the methods of connection are such that we spend significantly more energy fending off unwanted contact than happily integrating with an ever-expanding array of genuine friends.

 The development I’m interested in brings the various, currently disparate, elements of our experience into a relationship of mutual influence that produces greater and deeper environmental, personal, and collective integration.

 

Silence is a commons – Ivan Illich

The origin of the words art and entertainment have a lot in common. Their essences seem to be a notion of bringing people closer together. A few nights I went to Melissa Moore’s SoundPillow to hear some new works by John Berndt entitled Three Ambiguities. The pieces were excellent and the ambience of SoundPillow – six or seven blue, circular seats facing each other around a blue-lit basement space with a good sound system – was conducive to deep listening. There were about thirty people who wanted to listen the thirty minutes of music and John had to keep things moving so that everyone could have a chance to hear the works.

Last week, as a part of Baltimore’s Free_Fall events, I was involved in a project at the Cork Factory that will culminate in a micro-radio event in the Station North District featuring audio created by residents that speaks to their experience living in the neighborhood. In brief, participants will record a few minutes of spoken words and broadcast their ideas on short range fm transmitters all tuned to the same frequency. Visitors and residents can then walk or drive through the neighborhood and listen at any time. The content is entirely up to the residents, and can change at any time. The key to the work is to provide the opportunity for us to listen to each other.

In preparation for the recordings, and to familiarize ourselves with the neighborhood and locate participants, my collaborators and I have participated in various events, the most recent at the Cork Factory. This last event involved about eleven people, a diverse (age, race, ethnicity, orientation, etc…) group, sitting around a table with a microphone on it (I think the presence of the recording device was a great help, see below) speaking about community. In order to establish a comfortable atmosphere for expressing ideas, we set up some very simple ground rules, principally that overtly judgmental, contentious, argumentative statements would not be verbalized – instead, they would be suspended – not repressed, or ignored, simply suspended within the mind. We imagined giving our will to judge a vacation, and realized that it is an essential aspect of who we all are. Instead, we decided to voice experiences, associations, or observations that integrated one participants experience with another’s. The last caveat was that we would work to listen and accept – not blindly agree with – but accept (i.e., think through until we understood the idea) whatever anyone wanted to say as a legitimate aspect of the dialogue. If we disagreed, that is fine, but the idea was to contribute relationships we experienced between whatever was expressed in the dialogue and not pass judgment on what was said. Simple rules produced a complex result. Our dialogue went on for several hours (unforced, btw), and at the end it seemed that we had all become significantly closer. I had what felt like an aesthetic buzz for a long time afterwards, and when I came home, walked into my studio and saw this:

It occurred to me that much of my actions are intended to bring me closer to others: lecturing, teaching, art making, but, post Cork Factory, I questioned my reliance on the creation of gizmos, and the paradigm of performer/audience to do it. My practice seemed to be placing a gap in a gap, to be complicating my will towards integration, when what I seemed to really respond to (I’ve had the aesthetic buzz many times before, but this time it was of a longer duration which seemed to be because the connection I’d established with others was not one of triangulation via some social [performer/audience] or plastic [gizmo] construct) was the close up, real time act of face to face integration with others, at the “conclusion” of which we were still in the same positions – suggesting that what we’d just experienced was readily available and didn’t require additional hardware.

Back to the SoundPillow, and how this started, I wrote: “the origin of the words art and entertainment have a lot in common. Their essences seem to be a notion of bringing people closer together.” Sitting in a comfortable room on Argonne St, seven people facing each other. Of course I thought back to the Cork Factory Dialogue and wanted to just listen to these people I had just met. To connect with them one person to another, and to work on how our varied experiences, as vast as they are, can be associated to form a glimpse of the complex nature of our collective experience. But that wasn’t necessarily the plan, and that is ok, this is not a criticism, it is an expression of my experience and a portrait of how, really, the present is a mix of remembrances (past) and anticipations (future) and how our “own” understandings are connected to others’ ideas, and how, perhaps, there are forms of interaction, even “forms” of intelligence: intellection, founded on a practice of listening hard, thinking collectively, and working to associate all the experiences within any group. George Lewis, a fabulous improviser, refers to this social form as multi-dominance.

I left the SoundPillow thinking that our mechanized, individuated culture has defined intellection perhaps too narrowly and located it somehow within one person’s mind. Yes, if you, or I proceed along a developmental path of greater and greater limitation of possibility, until we become “masters” of a certain abstract body (or part of a body) of knowledge there is a decent chance we will be respected as such. Our intellective practice will be understood to have produced a clear result, and we will be rewarded with a higher level on the pyramid of personal achievement.

We are a significantly homogenous, and deeply social species: we depend on each other, and the collective, to survive, literally, yet we seem to relish and even worship the concept of transcending the group. It is as if our social forms are so fundamentally unfair, complicated, and controlled from elsewhere that we idolize those who seem to escape – while simultaneously knowing that there really is no escape from the collective. Our structure seems to rely on being able to position ourselves as individuals in relation to those above, and those below. We celebrate competition and praise rugged individualism. Our Freedom is a freedom from – to reference Kant, among others. Instead of taking action to make it better for all of us we take “action” (I worked for a guy who used to say “not saying something is saying something”…) that makes it great for a tiny subset of people. Given our inherent and seemingly necessary closeness this system we’ve been cultivating strikes me as odd, and utterly reversible.

The physicist Lee Smolin says, “there is a city, but no city maker”. We are the city and its’ makers and the construction unfolds in real time – it happens glocally – where the local is a focal point of the global, where the unfolding is a collective act and the moments of enfoldment, of clear focus, where we experience ourselves as individuated, when one’s experience is understood for a moment as clearly, uniquely one’s own, is literally an ephemeral focal point of the collective process. we are part of a complex collective and our glocal actions are all equally essential to its development, yet we maintain the illusion of servitude to some absent authority while multi-dominance is always at our fingertips.

I feel strongly about developing models, or metaphors, to aid me in exploring the idea of what I’ll term collective intellection (I should probably develop a better sounding phrase, too…). My instincts are to build some gizmo or network a bunch of stuff, write some scripts, do some programming, build something – but the act of building things on my own seems to segregate me from others – cooped up in my studio. Also, for me, designing things seems to be a sort of “duty now for the future” routine. I will build this thing for a future event that will suggest other future events, etc… I imagine researchers being engaged utterly in the present as they work – noting cause and effect relationships, trying things, looking for/creating/engaging connections – a process similar to musical improvisation. It seems that the tools I need are actually improved integrative techniques for the building of the now (I need to become a better listener and learn to balance my ego with the other aspects of my, and other’s experience to understand by engaging the complex nature of the present), and it will be better, and more accurate, to engage in this practice in concert with other people – and, it seems to me, with as diverse a group as possible. The idea, in short, is an understanding of higher intelligence as an environment in which as many members as possible are being heard (implying serious listening and thinking on the part of each member of the group), and what they are expressing is understood as a fundamental element that must be supported in the developing structure. The degree to which the experiences of the parts are supported by the structure of the whole is the measure of the intelligence of the group. You can see this is a different model then the individuated human off in a room by themselves developing a branch of knowledge that, purportedly, is for the common good.

Our inherent collective, de-centralized nature seems obvious but creating social forms that respect it as such seem elusive. To demonstrate: try to organize a diverse (race, socio-economics, age, orientation, ethnicity, etc…) group of fifteen members and speak aimlessly while listening actively for several hours – working hard to accept other’s points of view without competing with them, and bear this in mind:

The concept of a field in physics describes the integrating property at a point in space of adding up contributions from various individual particles, so that individual contributions cannot be identified, only their sum.

And the sum, like the collective process from which it comes, will be multivariate, and take on different meanings when it is collapsed into and individuals frame of reference – and the depth of our understanding of the sum of our collective actions will necessitate the collective action of groups listening to each other and exploring the connections among the individual experiences expressed by its members. Shared, relational intelligence. The resulting constellation of experience is the real answer, and this practice may provide an appreciation of the complex nature of our experience while affording agency to each member of our society. We need to be able to connect all the dots to glimpse the complex picture. I suggest we develop forms that explore this practice.

I just read “Could it be a big world after all?” by Judith S. Kleinfeld, a re-examination of Stanley Milgram’s “small-world” aka “six-degrees of separation” study. The following will make significantly more sense if you look over Judith’s paper.

Her abstract is here:

“The idea that people are connected through just “six degrees of separation,” based on Stanley Milgram’s “small world study,” has become part of the intellectual furniture of educated people. New evidence discovered in the Milgram papers in the Yale archives, together with a review of the literature on the “small world problem,” reveals that this widely-accepted idea rests on scanty evidence. Indeed, the empirical evidence suggests that we actually live in a world deeply divided by social barriers such as race and class. An explosion of interest is occurring in the small world problem because mathematicians have developed computer models of how the small world phenomenon could logically work. But mathematical modeling is not a substitute for empirical evidence. At the core of the small world problem are fascinating psychological mysteries.”

My point:

The internet is connecting us with the people all over the world, its true! Even people from different social casts – something that seems truly amazing: but the people from other social classes are quite probably connected to us and the internet in the sense that they are working in differentiated areas connected to the web. Meaning that the internet is built and maintained via an all too familiar division of labor where job is more often than not associated with class, similar, if not identical to the offline world. There are the people working behind the scenes, “under the hood” of the internet: programming, building the hardware, or answering the phones at the outsourced tech support centers, and people using the web for entertainment, research, etc…. the usual divisions.

We’re “in touch” via the internet but under the conditions of the divide and conquer mentality of the recent past – so we’re really not any closer as a species – it’s not like we’re actually making friends with people from other countries AND other classes. Sure, we’ve all met people from other geographic regions – sometimes online, sometimes at an event – a conference or festival, but I’m wondering if, aside from a different mother tongue, if the people we feel we are genuinely connecting with, becoming authentic friends with, don’t already have a lot in common with us – and that commonality may very well have to do with class – I’m tempted to say education, too, but while similar education certainly goes a long way towards creating resonance with others, I’m still wondering whether, at the end of the day, if our primary common linkage, the thing that resonates strongest and bonds people most readily isn’t socio-economic.

Of course there are exceptions, but given all the hype about the small-world and global village we are all being woven into – think carefully about your MySpace experience, I’m wondering whether we’re not really mapping the “old” social cast system, developed over the past centuries or more, into the “new” wired world. Lawrence Lessig, among others, makes the point that the freedoms we experience now are in proportion to the degree to which we can fight off the attempts of the past to re-establish itself in the present.

The web as metaphor suggests a more equal relationship between participants than we are currently experiencing. That more equal relationship will be very different than what most of us are familiar with.
Are we willing do the work and take the risks to make the promise of greater integration real?

Listened to Mark Hauser interviewed a few days ago about his book Moral Minds. He said:

“…our moral faculty is equipped with a universal set of rules, with each culture setting up particular exceptions to these rules.”

We have, according to Hauser, a biological basis for our sense of morality. Morality as an instinct, common to our species, and cultures tend to contest these impulses in various ways, and in so doing establish identity – the ways it chooses to manage and respond to its collective impulses. This “consciousness at the point of conflict” can scale up to national identity or down to individual identity. I’ve been reading David Bohm lately in preparation for a project and the notion of proprioception (self-awareness), and the thought process being very much connected to judging activities and generating conflict is a theme in his later work – his ideas are that we tend to overthink and complicate our lives, and that we should take a lesson from the other systems in our body. But more on that later.

I understand the exceptions we create in response to our instincts as boundary conditions – something that we can establish a dialectic relationship with – that enable what we have come to understand and identify as selfness, or consciousness by establishing a perpetual conflict – that conflict is the perception of choice when faced with an impulse.

We have to decide what to do, we have become aware of our inner mental processes and a relationship we have with them. We are continually discriminating and triangulating between our inner, moral faculty and the resulting impulse(s), the particular cultural exception(s), and the actions of those we share space with as they navigate the same terrain.

As a personal point of reference, after I heard Mark’s interview I went for a walk and noticed the squirrel activity in the street – gathering acorns. I don’t drive but a friend who does describes Fall as the season when squirrels temp death for acorns.

What came to mind is the fact that the squirrels’ impulse to gather and bury acorns is no doubt instinctual – and from what I gather, squirrels maintain a memory of where they buried an acorn for about twenty minutes (this is debated, I know), and the point becomes whether they are burying acorns for themselves, or for squirrels in general. They apparently mark their burying territory in just a few different ways, meaning that any hungry squirrel finding their self in a burial location would probably realize, instinctively, that acorns were nearby. In addition, the qualities that make certain acorns attractive to squirrels are the same qualities that make the acorn a good candidate to germinate and grow into a tree – so the relationship between oak trees, acorns and squirrels is complex, environmentally balanced, and doesn’t seem to require too much of what we call thinking.

Given the environments that we build for ourselves I wonder what we respond to instinctively, what are the “unconscious”, physical elements of our environment – what generates a response that is palpable but not conscious, and is the unconscious a relationship we have with elements of our built environment – does the unconscious exist at the intersection of our internal (senses, brain) and the external (the elements of our environment)? Everything is physical, right? Perhaps the difference between unconscious and conscious experience is the degree to which conflict is generated – the degree to which we can experience a choice in our response to specific elements within our environments.

I certainly don’t have an answer for this but the idea of our identity and even memory existing as an active relationship between internal and external may be supported by something I read regarding the sensory deprivation experiments by Dr. John C. Lilly – he of altered states fame. Apparently, after several hours in the tank, subjects would emerge without knowing their names, ages, marital status, address, etc… this information would gradually return to them within about forty minutes. Very interesting.

I admire Jan Chipchase’s blog(s) for the way he seems to be locating elements wherever he is that: relate to his research, suggest questions, represent ideas or, generate concepts. He is exploring active connections between his mind and the artifacts he encounters. He documents these interactions and posts them in a way that, to me, suggests that a blog is a shared thought object – as much about the content provided by the author as the fact that it will be seen and considered by whoever happens to find it. Jan’s posts are expressing his interests while asking “what do you think?”. My experience has been that I leave his site and take his observations and, perhaps more importantly, his observational practice into my offline experience, where they integrate with whatever happens to be on my mind, and expand the dialogue I seem to be having with my own environment. In short, Jan’s work seems to have made me a better, more willing listener.

Jan is a scientist and researcher, and works for Nokia. As such, we can assume that his efforts are close to the ideas of the mobile web, perhaps the internet of things, maybe even Web2.0. This makes sense to me as I experience the mobile web (cell-phones, pda’s, rfid, semacode, qr, ar, wifi, bluetooth, etc…) as extending the form of the www beyond the desktop. The de-centralized, personally customizable, collective, interactive “form” of the web is being mapped onto the offline. As the points of contact and interaction within any environment are expanded, the electronic gizmos we haul around with us will have an increasingly active and overt role in the meanings we harvest from time spent within different spaces. This seems to be a model of something familiar.

A couple of years ago I was teaching a course on computation and interactivity and was preparing a lecture on how we use tools to compute our identities. I was motivated by something Ron Kuivola had said during a meeting while I was a grad student: “we train to the medium”. In preparing for my lecture I read some of Dr. John C. Lilly’s writings about his experiments with sensory deprivation tanks, and was struck by his findings that after several hours in the tank, subjects would emerge having forgotten key elements of their identities: name, age, where they lived, etc… slowly this information would return to them once they were out of the tank, but I was intrigued by the idea that our memories are embedded within our environments, that our identities are formed and exist at the active intersection of internal and external, and are not stored within our individual brains, somehow apart from the external world. After doing some research I concluded that we, as a species, have sensed this, and acted on it, for a long, long time.

It seems we are always pinging the environment and adapting accordingly. I heard an interview with the physicist Julian Barbour where he mentioned that the human body is producing and destroying 100 million million hemoglobin molecules every second, and that if one were able to view this life-death-life cycle through a powerful microscope the structures we would see second by second would be indistinguishable from each other. My point is that with each second we are coming into being and probably engaged in a persistent act of connecting, interacting, and establishing a relationship with our environment. Over the past few hundred years, however, we (especially in the west) have become fascinated with breaking things into discriminate parts, atomizing and analyzing our experience – our consciousness as very much “ours”, creating dialectic arguments based on the polarities of two concepts that are proven to be irreducible to each other: robust categorical thinking, sites of discernment, focal points of discrimination, development along a trajectory of greater and greater mastery of one distinct activity at the cost of a radical limitation of other potential experiences, etc…

The development of the internet seems to have coincided, or simply be an aspect of, another form of development, and we seem to be experiencing a shift towards understanding relationships between things, systems, interaction, and integration – a developmental trajectory of greater integration and broader experience.

Much of the latter seem embodied in the internet, and are expanding with it into the mobile web, which seems to be an excellent model of a dynamic, integrated, and interactive relationship between our selves and our environments.

As long as we don’t forget that it is a model, and, like any model, that its purpose is to create better understandings of our experience, leading to other, increasingly accurate models that will undoubtedly supercede what we are working with now, we will be ok. If we fetishize our current tools and prize them above the ideas they embody we will have some problems.

The tools of the mobile web and their potential for explicate, overt networking both locally and globally within various spaces are modeling our dynamic relationship with our environment, providing tangible forms to explore the idea, specifically, that “we” exist at the intersection of the internal (individuality, brain, sense organs, consciousness, ego) and external (that which is beyond our skin, the non-human, inanimate, built, collective), and the elements of both are engaged in active, persistent relationships of mutual influence – intercourse, in other words, where one does not exist without the other, and where both are tightly coupled and dynamic. The categories, the differences, don’t matter: what counts is the interaction.

“We train to the medium”, so said Ron Kuivola. There is a responsibility with creating objects, as the objects, made by someone and an embodiment of an idea, speak their intentions and interests to those who use them.

If we accept the web as model of a collective, evolving form it can teach us to become better listeners, and, if we chose to learn to listen, and take that knowledge with us into other interactions then regardless of what forms our models take we will develop along a trajectory of increasing empathy and greater integration within our species and our environments.