MAY 2003

THURSDAY, 1 MAY 2003

(Friday, 1 May 1998)

Publishing, Message Passing

Messages. Especially when the messenger is left completely in the dark as to what is actually happening and thinks his or her mission is to simply carry a message -- this is wrong. Errands are great diversions and examples of misdirection (October 15, 2002).

Pandemonium reigns when the message really isn't the message at all.

(Thinking about Universal Parasitism and the Co-evolution of Extended Phenotypes.)

FRIDAY, 2 MAY 2003

(Saturday, 2 May 1998) It's been a few years since I regularly visited the zoo. Been thinking about buying a zoo membership again.

Two notable CNN stories:

Kaczynski's cabin saved at the last minute.

After five days a climber cuts off his arm with his pocketknife and hikes to safety.

SATURDAY, 3 MAY 2003

(Sunday, 3 May 1998) The End of the World: Chernobyl (1986) Gustave Courbet: The Origin of the World (1866)

Oneironautics

Should we not classify web browsing as form of dreaming? Especially disinterested web browsing, web browsing completely unmotivated by greed or desire, where one at best is driven only by a gentle curiosity (or extremely gentle escapism), where browsing means wandering freely down corridors of thought and each web page jogs the soul in a new direction?

(Link to incomplete subject page.)

Life Review

A term used to describe the phenomenon of "seeing your life pass before your eyes at the moment of death." Also used to describe the (therapeutical) process of conscious review in order to prepare for one's death.

Watched two classic review-this-life films, Powell and Pressburger's The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) and Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972) today.

Given his oeuvre it is not surprising to read that for Tarkovsky "the past is more real than the present" and that the purpose of art is to prepare us for our future.

"The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good". (Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema)

MONDAY, 5 MAY 2003

(Tuesday, 5 May 1998) Funny, if I hadn't read this I wouldn't have remembered it.

I Wasn't Looking For It

Funny too, that just hours after expressing surprise at the infinite appeal of encrypted data and just days before the Personal Publishing Pandemonium conference in Maastricht, I stumble across this:

konspire2b is the first broadcast-based p2p filesharing system. Instead of downloaders routing search queries through the network to find content, sources route announcements through the network looking for downloaders (in other words, sinks). k2b uses channel-based subscription to define the content that a given sink wants, and digital signatures are used to ensure that only one person (or a chosen group of people) can broadcast content on a given channel (the broadcasters for a given channel are called "channel owners"). Thus, the focus of k2b is on trust, reputation, and accountability---subscribers learn over time which channel owners can be trusted to send high-quality content. kast, the first GUI front-end for k2b, builds a recommendation mechanism on top of this infrastructure. A channel owner can send a secure recommendation for another channel to his or her subscribers. With recommendations, we can achieve a full web of trust, which is an interesting sociological phenomenon in its own right. More information on k2b can be found at the konspire2b homepage.

As far as I can tell Konspire2b is the brain child of a guy called Jason Rohrer.

More Konspire2b information:

The Revolution: A brief history of content distribution.

How Konspire2b works.

THURSDAY, 8 MAY 2003

(Friday, 8 May 1998)

Das Untergehen

To go down. To go under. Underwent my fourth encounter with ayahuasca last night (third in the last couple of months) and, like the previous excursions, the experience wasn't pleasant. Not sure if this creature is a friend or a foe but the crisis did give me a number of things to think about (including the importance of swimming and certain cooling foods!).

The room next door, the morning after).

De Refter, Ubbergen. Site of the event, the morning after.

FRIDAY, 9 MAY 2003

(Saturday, 9 May 1998)

"Be my guest. Be my host. Be my ghost."

N.'s amaryllis

Note to Myself

A demand for pull over push and tonight's dinner conversation concerning various forms of networks (with Macha Roesink and Jouke Kleerebezem) made me realize that I've got to go back to January and re-read those papers that I found on the Penan in the library of Anthropology.

(Think: "wandering" proper names...)

Similar network conceits: Max Ophül's La Ronde (1950) and Richard Linklater's Slacker (1991).

SATURDAY, 10 MAY 2003

(Sunday, 10 May 1998)

Notes from Maastricht
(Symposium: Personal Publishing Pandemonium)

Nothing is true. Everything is permitted.

This practice makes me crazy.

Pandemonium rules in the land of personal publishing. Why? I expect because things have changed so much. Means have changed. Space and time has changed. What was once expensive and the domain of the professional has now become cheap and the domain of the amateur. Professionalism is dead.

The devil is everywhere.

In space, the effect of superdistribution, the ability to easily distribute messages across great distance at zero cost, has afforded an explosion of nano-markets, increasingly smaller, increasingly diverse, attention traps.

In time, the growth of archives and the development of tools and practices to review and re-enact histories, both our own and that of others, has afforded a schizophrenic pluralism, a simultaneous acceptance of multiple points of view.

The upshot of all these changes? Dreaming has become our currency. Existence one long identity crisis.

SUNDAY, 11 MAY 2003

(Monday, 11 May 1998)

(Maastricht)

Shifting signs and system thinking (conference pause). Contemplating the Penan of Borneo and their system of shifting proper names I overhear Joke Robaard discussing Roland Barthes The Fashion System.

FRIDAY, 16 MAY 2003

(Saturday, 16 May 1998) Urban ethics: "Cities are for change, not for people."

(Hotel Orlando, Amsterdam)

Since Monday I've been putting in long days as part of a jury at the Rijksakademie. Our job has been to carefully review the work of the more than 600 artists who made it through the initial pre-selection round and from them choose 60 to come to Amsterdam in June for interviews. In June from the 60 candidates 30 will be selected as next year's participants.

SUNDAY, 18 MAY 2003

(Monday, 18 May 1998)

The last two weeks have been exhausting -- this weekend has been dedicated to rehabilitation of sorts: sleeping, clicking around reading online documentation (moveable type, apache and mysql) and preparing for our upcoming trip to Vancouver.

April 2003

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