Wednesday, February 08, 2006
I don’t know how many of you other bloggers out there have this experience, but blogging totally cuts down on my sleep time. Not that I stay up late reading and writing—I usually manage to hit the hay by 10:30—but once I’m down I can’t cycle my brain down enough to sleep after so much input and output. Partially this results from not hitting the blogs until after the kids go to bed at 8, so I’m trying a new process today (which is where I started with it, actually), and getting some of the input/chronicling done in the afternoon.
Not a whole lot of excitement today, as I mainly worked on next week’s lecture on the Origins of Multimedia Art in the US. The upshot of this was focused time concentrating on Black Mountain, and all the awesome artists who were involved with the project (today particularly digging Albers, Cage, Creeley, and Olson). I designed an interface for the lecture (which is going to use projection and Internet), which uses a grid of 25 different thumbnails of Albers’s studies of the square I nicked from Google Images. I’ve got a few more than half of the links determined so far. The idealism (and subsequent corruption) of Black Mountain is seemingly perfect. I wish something like it were out there today. I know Fielding Dawson wrote (in the Out of This World anthology) that Naropa is our Black Mountain, but that’s a highly contestable view (and I say that with all due respect, as an alumni of many wonderful summers in Boulder). The closest thing to it, as far as I can tell, is the utopian/realist setup of Dreamtime Village, which mIEKAL aND, liz was, and various other cohorts have cultivated over the past decade and a half. But its remoteness and (as far as I know) lack of financial support hasn’t made it what could be made (not that what it is isn’t beautiful and important). I know the great Butoh dancer Min Tanaka used to have an Art Camp up on Mt. Fuji, where dancers in training worked half a day and then danced/studied half the day, which sounded good to me, but I don’t know if it is still happening. I also remember reading about Joel Kuszai's presentation about the Salton Sea project, but that was a really long term proposal. So What to do? Form our own micro-communities, support the lifestyles with our day jobs? Apparently so, presuming we have them. Well, the lecture will also address Fluxus, Kaprowian Happenings, and Intermedia, all of which I got into on the WWW today with great pleasure. Found some great sites out there, like Fondation Langlois (http://www.fondation-langlois.org), an interview with Dick Higgins (& related materials), etc. I’m building the thing off of a couple of old lectures, which I’m glad to have in hand, but quite severely refining the earlier perspectives. Feeling like I’m spending too much time on the preparations, but not really—all of the materials are somehow quite nurturing and continue to be informative.
Side note: In order to find the original essay, which I didn’t have until this morning, I had to scour my njit web server, and doing so came across a funny little html/MOO piece that I hadn’t thought of in quite awhile. You may be humored too: http://web.njit.edu/~funkhous/ps1.html. Maybe I’ll put this on the Technopoetry Rising CD…
I learned that the ISIS program, which I spoke of yesterday, is being postponed until March, which works out better for me in terms of logistics I think.
Hey—it’s only 5:30 in the afternoon & I’m pretty much finished with this report. Maybe I’ll get some (always needed) sleep tonight!
By the way, thanks to those of you out there - mostly folks I don't even know in fact - who've linked to aisyalam, I appreciate the gesture (which I dutifully return so as to be a cybernetic blogger), and am glad to know that anyone thinks its worthwhile...
