a story in the air

My interview in ART SLANT is out...on my work and RE DRAWING BOUNDARIES EXHIBITION

2011-12-19T17:27:00.000-08:00

http://www.artslant.com/global/artists/rackroom

Interview with Jeremy Hight
San Diego, Dec. 2011 - When the internet emerged as a creative forum, scholars, artists and practitioners were hopeful that it would become an overwhelming artistic utopia. Although the internet has established itself in everyday life, internet art has not become a central force in art discourse. Computers contribute greatly to contemporary art creation but internet art is still somewhat marginal. Yet the internet offers extraordinary platforms for discourse, discussion and innovation outside academia, where artists and thinkers can produce and share immaterial works that can be viewed as art, and at the same time can be free of dealers and the agendas of state institutions and corporations.

Scholar, artist and educator Jeremy Hight is a leading thinker in on-line art and the internet’s intellectual potential. He currently teaches at Cal Arts and in the ICAM and VIS ARTS departments at U.C. San Diego, as well as serving as New Media curator and Contributing editor for MIT Press's Leonardo Electronic Almanac. He is an expert on locative media, which challenges conventional forms of narrative and augmented reality.

Now, Hight is curating a multi-part exhibition of key creative artists in Locative Media, New Media and Mapping. The show raises vital questions of how we interpret time, place, space and history. Here, Jeremy and I discuss the current state of new media, the internet’s potential and his scholarly and artistic work.

LEA RE DRAWING BOUNDARIES TIM WRIGHT INTERVIEW AND EXHIBITION

2011-12-17T21:12:00.000-08:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: TIM WRIGHT
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_tim_wright/

Tim Wright is a digital writer, a cross-platform producer and a director of XPT Ltd. His writing credits include two BAFTA-winning interactive projects: the comedy self help disk ‘Mind Gym’ and web & email drama ‘Online Caroline’. He also co-developed, devised and scripted the BAFTA nominated science-learning Web drama ‘Planet Jemma’ and BAFTA nominated online holiday farce ‘Mount Kristos’. In 2004/5, he created the popular collaborative web fiction and Sony Award-nominated BBC Radio 4 play ‘In Search of Oldton’, pioneering the use of user generated content within a narrative fiction format. He has continued his relationship with Radio 4 contributing to a radical overhaul of Today’s website, whilst writing two further Afternoon Plays that involve online audience participation (‘Say What You Want To Hear’). The web element of the popular public art project ‘The Telectroscope’ was co-developed and written by Tim. He was the lead writer of the RSC’s recent Twitter drama ‘Such Tweet Sorrow’ - and in 2009 he completed ‘Kidmapped!’, an experiment in literary blogumentary, involving a 240-mile walk across Scotland and the use of geolocation and mobile media tools.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), ISSN No: 1071-4391
LEA International Curatoriate:
Lanfranco Aceti & Christiane Paul (Senior Curators), Jeremy Hight (New Media Curator), Vince Dziekan (Digital Media Curator)

lea RE:drawing boundaries presents Kate Pullinger

2011-12-14T22:08:00.000-08:00

LEA New Media Exhibition Re-Drawing Boundaries Focus On: KATE PULLINGER Curator: Jeremy Hight Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_kate_pullinger/

Kate Pullinger writes fiction for both print and digital media. Her most recent novel is The Mistress of Nothingwhich won the GG, Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction, 2009. Other books include A Little Stranger(2006), Weird Sister (1999) and the short story collection My Life as a Girl in a Men’s Prison (1997). Pullinger’s many digital fiction projects include her multiple award-winning collaboration with Chris Joseph on ‘INANIMATE ALICE’, a multimedia episodic digital fiction and ‘FLIGHT PATHS’ a networked novel. Kate Pullinger is Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University; she lives in London, England.

Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA), ISSN No: 1071-4391
LEA International Curatoriate:
Lanfranco Aceti & Christiane Paul (Senior Curators), Jeremy Hight (New Media Curator), Vince Dziekan (Digital Media Curator)

novella/story collection ..

2011-12-05T14:20:00.000-08:00

The odd grace of

the incomplete

Jeremy Hight

A piece of yellowed paper fell out of a homemade book , it was like a smelly pressed flower some lovestruck teen would put in a favorite passage at 15 when they discovered poetry. The page was actually made by the author and snuck in to as many book shops as she could as she realized a year after publication that this was the ending. This was in 1953 and it fell out decades later to a floor in a dorm while a television blared.

At the end of a book on economics an author had actually planned an instructional short story you could piece together by reading through lines in the main text in a different order. He made it as a sort of odd esoteric economic map. It to him made a deep point. The publisher quietly erased it from the manuscript before publication.

This is a mis-step , an error, a hollow dead end, an arrow making an ill formed arc, a poorly timed overture, that vessel that made sense as an idea but sank away, a wretched, wretched failure.

I want to show you.

The above text was found on a pile of papers in an attic that had been sealed up when the earthquake hit and cracked that dull old seal. Who knows how many others are scattered around towns and cities rotting away in such a tiny exile. Why should anyone care? On one hand there may be some historical significance right? An artifact of some other age or place ? No, it is rarely ever that. Could it be the value of something that another person can finish? No, that is the worst idea in the world to think of in this regard.

Timothy felt a dock slip slowly into cold waters. He was not standing in
the mist and rain watching the tides. He was not sitting smelling the
rotten wood along a place long abandoned to decay and decline. No, Timothy
was sitting in his room thinking of a girl. Her long shiny hair. Her
honey eyes. Her soft lips. The way she laughed and her lip curled just
so. Timothy was sitting by his lit lamp after dark in his room. He had
something in him that he told no one . It was nothing dark nor criminal,
nor of that girl. He at that moment just had come to realize that she was
not interested in him and was clearly falling for another boy. No, poor
Timothy , he felt in metaphors.

This was found in the papers of a penniless man who died of starvation in 1917. He had started several novels amidst obsessively re-reading the same old books alone in the house he inherited from his long dead parents. It has notes in scribbly pencil in the margins but time and mildew have rendered them incomprehensible. When he was found dead curled in a corner this paper was on the table in front of him. This is all we know about it or him now. Even this account is surely all of these years later unreliable.

I have a collection of failures. I have spent 35 years traversing the globe to find them. I am a curator, a collector and yes a neurotic obsessive in many senses of those words in this regard. I once collected works by famous artists and writers. It got boring, like fishing in a lake overstocked to absurdity; there is no pride in that, no risk, no accomplishment, at least not to me. I must explain that I am the grandson of a great great man. He will be left un named. I have had a lifetime to live under the shadow of those 11 letters and to cower under their weight.

We in the family all have had comforts from his vast fortune, don’t get me wrong, but that shadow , it is longer than years, huge, a black mass. Here I sit writing this with him dead 30 years and still it all pours out.

I collect failures. My study has horrid sculptures by a great master he thought were destroyed, manuscripts of one of the great playwrights that are of that period when he drank himself to death, I have a few paintings by the young untrained hands of future wealthy men with names outsized and no longer mortal. It takes so much more time to find the wretch than it does the beauty queen; I confess I have paid many people huge sums and went on long rambling journeys to acquire these things. They mean more somehow, these curious, oddities, addendums to the things that just worked and had time riding shotgun with them with all of the related momentum and advantage. There is something even more to the others I have not yet mentioned, the unfinished works I rounded up, some by greats and others by those with no name or one forgotten. Here is another :

Mel Sanklekowski is at the airport again. He is nearing the ticket counter. He does this twice week.

“Another beer” he orders sitting on the slightly faded stool to a grimacing familiar countenance, a mass of scowling comtempt held in check that pours it from the cheapest tap and walks a few feet away. Mel drinks it down staring at the walls. Then another. Then another. Oh yes dear reader, he is heading to that ticket counter. Patience you. Mel is sloppy now, belligerent but not as much as two days ago. Thebartender wishes he could wish him away. Flick him like a fly. Others are not so kind. Mel tosses his coins down and does a shot. He falls from the stool. The crack is his head hitting the floor. He is unconscious but not from that fall. The ticket has been punched. Wait you, this will come clear. He drools and mumbles while the bartender has the bouncers from the club next door toss him out again.

Mel may soil himself again but he is heading down the aisle now , those temporary narrow portals, toward the door, toward the flight. Almost away. A light cold rain falls on the sidewalk but Mel smiles to the stewardess, feels the warmth of the cabin...looks to his seat , ah yes a window...Bermuda this time. As planned..

This was the first paragraph of a 214 page unfinished book. The man went on to do other work of note (not writing) including an invention we think nothing of but use on a daily basis. As best as the seller could recall (his daughter) this paragraph is all that was left after he had tried for 7 years as a young lab assistant to really instead “make it” as a writer. She told of one night watching him burn each page one night one at a time in a bbq pit as fireworks ironically shot across the sky on the 4^th of July. She could not remember what year it was. The text may have been horrible or amazing, we will never know. The thing that grabbed me was that this thing both sustained him for a time, and maybe, just maybe shuttled him into something else. His daughter was surprised anyone would want it as he was a man of science, a self confessed failure at writing. I treasure it in a way I frankly can’t ever fully explain.

There are many others, in fact some are either complete short stories or non fiction accounts, sometimes I can’t tell. I only know that I bought them in some boxes from a man closing a diner who had a tenant above who collected odd things and claimed once in a strange drunken ramble to have ‘collected the toenail clipping of a dozen other lives”. The boxes had old yearbooks, photos, baby clothes, a tube of toothpaste with a brand I had never heard of, cups, a dirty fork still with a piece of unidentifiable food on it, a plate with a dried bit of blood or sauce, a wrapper to a burger with a diary entry on it in pen, a page about some wild weather ideas with a stain on the corner, a couple of name badges flimsy and sad with broken strings and cracked corners with names rubbed off, a polaroid of a booth in a dark room and a hint of a man horribly out of focus, a pile of broken glass shards and no rhyme or reason as to who they all were from or were at all.

I burned my most valuable painting one night while sitting nude in my pool late at night. It curled near fetal as the flames had broken its shape with their seemingly random force; the thing died before my eyes and as stupidly decadent as it was it seemed like the right thing. I sat on the steps in that bright moonlit night as the smoke curled up across the waters. you see I placed the thing(it is just a thing after all, as all things are..), a Picasso on a plank of wood to float in the water like my own little private titanic. I would never do this to the random things , the un-named objects, the failures or the unfinished pulled from those boxes. The ashes of that painting caught a brief little nothing summer breezes off the desert and swirled.

It spread across the waters in little pieces, from one thing with some ridiculous provenance to a bunch of little airborn particles, published chapbooks by an author of poetry about cactus , photo essays by someone sent out to 50 rejections that later gave up altogether, the collected works of insert name here. There was something to the way the little things lifted for a bit , then fell.

There is a grace in things. These shards come from boxes and are from things never to be published by names never to grace a book , lit magazine or anything of the sort. I know this as it took years to collect these things from families in cities hundreds of miles from me or the pool that once held those ashes.

Let me show you a few.

First is one from a box recently found left abandoned in a condo in New Mexico...

The fog in June is a coward that way

by John Eziklias

This room stinks of that old elegance that made a lot of sense in the 70’s; naugahyde that squeaks in big booths sunken into the walls. The dim light would make a lot more sense if I was having a torrid affair or plotting some sort of crime instead of just sitting waiting to meet a client. No, I am here in the shadows nursing an iced tea and a salad that looks like a burger had a seizure and the toppings slid off.

The music seems to be coming out of the mouth of a chipped wooden owl on the far wall. The best I can tell is that the easy listening music has never stopped being piped in since before some people driving by outside were born. The slop comes from that crappy wooden statue facing me with its almost judging, lazy painted eye. Thirty minutes ago I wished I could glue all my stale giant croutons into a little ark or brick and hurl it at the tired old bird’s red painted mouth. Now I want to rip it off the wall or just leave.

I think the old man that went to the next booth when I got here sunk into some naugahyde quicksand. I have not even heard a peep in I don’t know how long from his little shadowy corner, not even the clink of his knife on his plate any more. The couple kissing behind me when I walked in have fallen into some soft corner as well. There is a stain on my napkin. Just saw it. It is almost shaped like a horseshoe.

My wife makes me take pictures. I am not talking sweet tourist shots or pics of food to show to relatives. No, she makes me make artifacts, alibis, proof. It drives me crazy sometimes. My lettuce has wilted now, drowned in blue cheese dressing. A sad little death. It is 2:27 in the afternoon on this Tuesday (my phone thankfully has a strong little light). I have been waiting since 1:30. I am starting to think that I am being stood up.

She makes me shoot photos at times like this. She wants time stamped little images shuttled off to her while she waits at home whenever I am away from the office. It was cute at first, sort of charming and I assumed more playful teasing. That was 3 years ago.

I think the old man just passed gas. At least I know he is still here and I am not alone. She is surely already tapping a finger on a countertop waiting as is. It is too dark. This room , this place, this crappy restaurant, it was the idea of Sarah. She is a client. I am that antiquated thing in this digital age you see. I am a talent agent. Sarah is one of those people that wait tables and once in a while get a spot dancing in front of toilet rolls in a commercial for 10 seconds then back to the grind and the dream.

Sarah loves to wear sexy boots that go above her knee. She wears lipstick that is deep purple even when she is in flip flops. Sarah has nails painted in crazy colors. Sarah has eyes that shine when you talk to her. Sarah is my client. Sarah also is 50 and 3 times divorced. My wife would make me take pictures even if my client was a break dancing poodle or a cat.

Sarah kissed me once. Once. Her lips lingered on mine a bit too long as we said a professional good bye. She caught me off guard, I swear I saw a tiny reflection of me as she zoomed in for it. The tiny tingle of something soft was just instinct. When I kissed back it was like some reflex. And she had those boots. I mean I am not dead. But that was the one time, the one little island. She is late. She chose this place. I can’t take a shot and have big news to tell her so I really can’t leave here. I am screwed.

The music now has crackled away into static. A loud pop. Now it is back. So many small details to observe when there are none. I have other clients. Against my stomach’s protests I have elected not to have any appetizer, main course or dessert now. My last 3 croutons are pushed in a corner together with the white napkin laid over them. This little diorama will be my companion till she gets here. I will know her from the click of those high heels, or the smell of that perfume. She also has one or the other or both. I swear I can spot the sound of her boots at lunch time on approach like a specially trained dog by now. The news is something she may love or may not like. I really am not sure. Once she wore gloves, soft satin, like in old films, she ran them through my hair from behind thinking she could surprise me, trick me, get a rise out of me, but I knew. That day I had to tell her that the roles in the dog food commercial and soap opera she tried out for had called to turn her down.

Another ten minutes have gone by. My wife just sent a text. No words, just a bunch of letters. It may be a scramble like on a game show or her anger this time. I really don’t know what to make of it. She just sent it again. Same odd sequence. I mean if I shoot a pic here it will come out like the lens cap was on during an eclipse. Well, that is an exaggeration but you don’t know how she gets. She has me send pictures to prove I am where I said I would be. Alone. She wants me to send pics of things too, lamps, candles, menus, proof. She sometimes sends me pics too. Things. I have to guess their significance fast. Or else.

The waitress looks like a walking shadow. Kind of a relief to see her face emerge as she nears the table. Not that it is one of those that is a light or anything, her simple tired features withered a little when I said I was not ready to order. Her uniform looks like it is from a time capsule from old photos. She looks about 26. Something about those eyes though. Hmm. A presence even behind that tiredness of someone who hates their job in a slow place. Wonder if she sings..

More iced tea , sure. Why not. It tastes less like water from a rusty tap now anyway

The old man has quieted again I keep wondering about him, listening. Really just nice to know someone else is here. The couple must have left. The quiet footsteps of something either saccharine or you know what. It is now to the point I usually would have left, angrily burned some tire rubber and even left a nasty message. I could cancel her. I really could. Could stop contact and leave. The worst part of sitting too long is not so much the cramps for me,but the nagging sense that the body needs to move. Another text. A single word. No clue. A plate just broke somewhere in the kitchen, heard it. No, I really don’t, not at all. Fifteen more minutes. That is it.

Sarah. That kiss. Let me elaborate on that little thing. I had not eaten all day. My lack of sleep surely factored in too as I remember. She swept a polite gesture into something soft, plush, the smell of leather against her citrusy perfume and like a twitching finger my body responded. That is all there was or is. It lasted no longer than it takes to pour cream in your coffee. And no one knows but us. There is no us.

Wait. I hear wooden pegs on the ground. Approaching. Don’t smell the perfume though. Can’t quite…She is coming this way. Glasses. Indoors. Fast steps now. She is coming closer. Long coat. Closed. Red lips now emerging in the bit of light slightly curled …..there is that instinct again..that lizard..that cave man Stomach is curdling. Boots. Conservative. A bit scuffed. Not the drama Sarah usually brings wrapped around her pale legs, not the familiar of my wife either. She is standing at the edge of my little booth now. She is just standing there. Now she is walking away.

A photo. My phone is buzzing to tell me of it. It is a picture of me. I am wearing the same shirt. My expression is accurately annoyed and yet that little bit of hope or whatever it is called. But that can’t be…. My hair looks the same. The guy must not be me. She must have shot a pic of another guy in a white shirt with short graying black hair in a dimly lit room. It has no time stamp. She must have cut that off. That can’t be me. He looks so timid and lost, a few inches shorter than I am. Yes. That is one of her little tricks. Look at that poor bastard. He is this little melting candle of a man.

The old man is making some faint noise now. Like a gurgling creek. Ah, now I hear a fork on a plate. This is so strangely comforting right now. A few more sips of this rusted pipe tasting iced tea and then I am gone. Another picture is coming…….It is of me again…alone…

That is enough. There is some money on the table. The room is now shrinking behind. Good day solitary old man and your meat and bread. Good bye shadows and stink and a wasted 78 minutes. I just looked over my shoulder and could swear I saw the waitress crying with something in her hand. Don’t want to know. The kitchen smells putrid as I am passing it and its vapors and stink. Ok it is not that horrid but you waste time under 3 kinds of stress and see how that lunch tastes and looks in a dull dank room someone else sent you to. I see the cars are wet from some little freak summer rain shower. There are little beads of water like that timid weak dew in June mornings here from the fog that burns to death at each noon till the real heat comes.

The fog in June is a coward that way. The clouds are already evaporating. Pathetic. Now it just will be more humid as that heat comes right back. I must fight the urge to hit 80 mph on this little ancient alley of a street. The sun is back out and the tiny meek blob of cloud like today has little time left before completely burning away. My phone is buzzing another text or picture. I am, for now, for once, immune. I will swerve at trash cans until the light and when I have to turn back into the main streets again. The old man must be a masochist to eat at that place. That thought is now too burning away clean, wasted. I could hit a can and crush it , bend it into something else, at least in the impact, the bend and release as I pull my broken bumper clean away.

News is always good. The world will always spin on the same axis and the seasons will forever fit like sweaters on shoulders, and photos in frames. There is no chaos Virginia , Sarah or Elaine. Yes honey, things are fine

here is one that came in a bent wet box shipped to me from the guy's sister...he never told anyone he wrote ...

They only peer in

by Eliot Rimson

Their voices had just bounced around each other as though they were stumbling in the dark.

Andrew once worked at the city dump.

This fact had come to be something he hid away inside. It was not the best line to pick up a girl or impress her parents over dinner He got the job while taking a few classes at the local junior college and it was easy. His finger hit an oversized red plastic button that triggered the crushing of cars into neat little metallic bouillon cubes. The station wagons, pinto wagons, junkers and sports cars all made the same basic shape when utterly destroyed. There was at times something pleasant about this to him in a way that flitted across his brain quick as crickets into scrub brush. He sometimes lazily watched the jetting blasts of the eternal flame as it burped out methane from the rot and ruin below. He read pulp novels and magazines while waiting for any questions from people dropping off things that once had some clear use and purpose.

Being a small town, he mostly waited around, killing time while still on the clock. Little games emerged and his mind began to spin on about that one man that had boxes of all of the things of his family to toss en masse, like nothing more than toe nail clippings. He tried to not think about the cubed cars. He tried to make music in his head to the pulse of the methane blasts and crunching sounds around him during his shifts. He ignored the nagging sense of comfort that was emerging in him despite the tedium, hit away the tendrils of that phd he had dreamed of, the degree he had still not gotten , of science as a whole despite that award back when he was a kid, that little certificate mom had somewhere.

He wondered toward the end of his tenure in this putrid little land about places to build on ,on how you could “reclaim” lots of land and places that to some may as well have been called refuse. The thing about it was that the place just as he was moving toward quitting had come to fascinate him.

He once made the mistake of sharing this excitement at a party with some college friends. One of them was recent class buddy Mara. They both needed to take a weight training class and when this came up in conversation had decided why not take it together. She was 2 years younger and the sister of his buddy Nate. She spent most of her time in the class drinking coffee from a beat up old thermos and tuning out. When the coach/teacher came by though, she would lift more weight than many of the boys and would always work harder than anyone with amazing feats of what seemed to the teacher as diligence and focus.

Here is an example of a typical day in class=

Great work Hill 60 year old impossibly tan and muscled man slightly grinning (for once)

Thanks coach..feeling it today amazing smile, even more so for the fact she was not “feeling it”

You could follow this example Andrew disdain dripping from that old tanned crab of a man

She would then reach behind a bench and sip more coffee from the beat up old thermos. She had a lot of old things: machines, calculators, tools, books, weird toys… She kept waiting for Andrew to ask about them. He never did. He always talked about garbage and history and would ask her questions, but usually would cut her off mid sentence to blurt out more of what he was excited about. Andrew would try to work out as best he could but had little muscle and sometimes found her really attractive and would lose focus. He figured she had no idea of any of this. Mara actually had been reading a lot about archaeology and of lost languages, but no one ever bothered to listen so she kept this to herself.

Andrew showed up to pick her up for this one party and she was wearing a dress. She never wore a dress. She usually dressed more like an auto mechanic or Amelia Airheart somehow but with big cop boots or motorcycle boots. Andrew was stunned and although she moved in it like someone stuck in a bag at first it was amazing that she would wear something so alien. And she looked great.

“…you look nice….” Nerves. Awkward sweating all of a sudden.

“thanks.. oh ha..yeah…never wear these things…thought what the hell” sweet smile.

“oh uh…yeah cool deal then” car put in gear nervous tapping of finger

“mind if I” fumbling in purse

“oh yeah..sure…uhm….so let me tell you about work today” avalanche commenced

She rolled down her window and pulled out a long cigarette holder, really fancy and dramatic and placed her cigarette into it. Waited a few seconds. Andrew oblivious talked on about an old man dumping cans and a car smashed to a cube. Mara leaned a bit toward him. Waited a bit more, the long holder intentionally languid on her red lips, lips that usually have no lipstick at all. Coughed. Tried best pose from old film she could think of then gave up. She lit it herself , her arm absurdly stretched to reach with her cheap bic lighter, to her totally killing the look she thought he would like or at least get a kick out of as he had told her before about watching so many Mae West and Marlene Dietrich movies on tv. She smoked while he told the stories and then when they arrived had already put the telescoping holder away, even thought of maybe toning down her make up a bit or just taking it off like a regular Friday night , maybe time to shift into one of the guys mode again. She was disappointed and had briefly been thinking this would be the in to get past his friendship and awkward silences or long monologues about trash and cast offs. Also, it never seemed to occur to him that she not only understood him but collected old things herself. Maybe the party would loosen him up. She walked in with him curious as to what the night would hold and trying not to think about what just happened. Andrew walked in thinking about garbage and beer.

Andrew hours later stood by a sliding glass door at the house party, beer in hand, Mara next to him and had turned excitedly at the question of what are you up to from a guy named Jim who he used to go to parties with and said:

“did you ever think of how archaeologists see artifacts as indicators of layers of the past, of time even in a way? A pot, a tool, a piece of tile and yet we throw things away all the time, mementos, that bowling trophy, the heirloom that is just too scuffed now, those clothes so painfully out of style that a few years later cycle back …so in a way you could do a dig in a trash dump and move back in time…”

The looks to Andrew ranged from he farted to wow maybe my friend is a little closer to tin foil hat town than I want to visit letting him know that this was again the stuff that he could not share. Unfortunately, as other times before, this realization came just that little too late. He drank more of his beer and shifted back to what was to later become rote, of talking about current events, the latest crazy and or drunk and or drug binging celebrity and grabs from an assortment of funny stories of other parties or other dinners with the people he was with. He never let them see those drawings. That he knew was too much.

The rest of the night was ok, some beers, talks about current events, jokes , the usual. Mara seemed to brighten to Andrew when he complimented her lipstick and vintage calculator button purse that she had made. Later Mara drifted off to play poker and Andrew hung out with his friend Bill talking about work.

Mara on the ride home had already hurriedly wiped her makeup off on a burger joint napkin and chatted a bit about some book she read and mostly listened to Andrew. He talked about how what we throw away tells stories and how things change bit by bit like this. Andrew came to her street and then house and dropped her off in mid story about a fascinating thing he read once. He thought the night went well. She seemed a bit distracted as she opened the door in front of her house. Andrew wanted to kiss her earlier, figured he would do another time, would wait and then it would be easier, not so awkward as it felt, maybe she would give him a clear signal, maybe there would be mistletoe or a bet about kissing made that would open that door. He did not the little plastic tube thrown to the ground , cracking on impact, a little artifact and now just a ruin. After a few hang outs she just kind of stopped talking to him and he wrote it off as another person who did not care about it; life being as it was to just be it seemed, like a suburban curse. He did not see those looks she gave him in the car that night, long warm or quick smoldering gazes as he rattled on about garbage and never once turned his head.

That was 1988, it is now 2004 and boy wonder is a grown man. He thought about grad school. Many times. He got a phd application and for years at random intervals would get the itch and would literally pet it like a cat, then put it back away in its drawer. When he got a second job back then surveying plots for a somewhat crooked developer he actually saw something one day, something odd that resonated in some seemingly dead part of him. The house was torn down. That one day back in 1988… He found something. He did not tell this story at parties or to anyone. There was a house. Door wide open. The strangest part was that everything was in place as it had been from a day decades before. And those papers..

The kitchen of the little blue house had been the oddest carnival of sights. The recipe laid out on the sink yellowed and stuck now to the ugly old tile, the stain that must have once been a spill or who knows what, the ice box now just so much geometry and a few boxes of long putrified and dried vegetables , the absolutely terrifying can of salmon marked 1938 with a bulge the size and shape of the fattest black widows fat belly. The stove, clean as a whistle amongst the gloom of a corner with bags of newspapers.

Andrew and two other men thus came into the little house to find a living room left not just intact, but like a mundane time capsule. It was bizarre, unnerving and completely unexpected. After a few steps in the tiny entry way they found such odd sights as a television guide open to August, 23, 1958 on one of those brown t.v trays people once used to gather families or alone around a beloved show or evening of the “idiot box” droning away. There was even a pencil next to the page.

The crew were three men, 2 of which had started the tiny company, if it even could be called that, 15 years earlier as an idea from a drunk poker game. The idea of surveying as a team would mean not working for their sketchy bosses and dwindling work could perhaps be met with their hustle and drive spent on their other “activities”. The kid as they called Andrew was the one outside person to be hired on the only outsider and they knew one of his relatives to check him out.

In that odd living room they found many other little scenes, artifacts. There was laundry still folded neatly next to a basket. The toothpaste sitting on the bathroom sink was a brand not one of the men had heard of. The shampoo had a drawing of a moon rocket and was next to a dull , filmy residue where a bar of soap once had been left. The men walked in and at once were fascinated and troubled by this place, this odd collections of things of some moment in time and a past before all but one had been born. The smells were not too horrible which was the oddest and most disturbing thing to Andrew. At 23 he was expecting rancid smells and mold. He instead only found a mini swamp in a fridge. Otherwise it was all still as though the man would come back, 1958 flipped back on like a light switch, the chair occupied by a bored man looking curiously at these visitors/intruders in his small home.

There was no body. There was no hint of foul play. There was nothing but what you saw. The steady climate had also done weird tricks to what remained and the topography and isolation had somehow let no one notice this place , let alone that anything was amiss. The oddness of the man who proved to be its owner also would come into play. The light afternoon breeze wafted in through the open door as it surely had for 30 years. Somehow the couple of hurricanes that came through these parts had done little either. The typical afternoon sea breeze blew in across scenes that looked like the owner would pop out from a shower and politely wrapped in a towel say “hold on a minute guys”…or whip out a shotgun. This was not to be the case. That realization was the oddest thing. This was 1958 in the minutia of a life and a day and it was 30 years in things evaporated and it was right now, the intruders stepping around each feeling a bit dirty somewhere inside in a way hard to explain.

“Did you see that tv guide?”

“yeah it even has a crossword puzzle part of the way done…elvis….hula hoop….crazy man”

“shouldn’t it smell worse in here?”

“is this trespassing? What happened here?”

The reason no one came to the little house was that the man had no close family or friends after all those things that happened. The house was paid off, he had made those ideas briefly really work. The research scientist was supposed to be on a leave working on a project but had been fired, a man had even thrown a box of vacuum tubes at his head with malice and the rumors had venom in them. His name was Richard Ellenbrook. Andrew and the others saw it in the little corner of those absurd tv guides, on some bills from companies no one had heard of and on some books he had apparently published on meteorology and climatology along with the stack of papers. 17 letters. 6 vowels. 11 consonants. It was a name that may as to the 3 men have been a talking spider, a piece of moon dust that glowed and sang, an alien, strange thing, nothing more.

Richard Ellenbrook was many things. Scientist, Inventor. Pioneer. He also was that other list of things, the much murkier one: cheat, liar, manipulator, poor loser, to some a man who lost it in isolation (but later to others to be seen as a tesla uncredited beyond his known works). A boy at age 7 working with forecasting with pinpoint accuracy for his father and neighbors. A prodigy who had mastered calculus and iambic pentameter both with equal mastery at 9. Admitted to MIT at 14, phd at 17. The inventor of the core of hurricane forecasting and modeling. These things Andrew later came to learn. The man been rumored to have been on a huge team project but had become more distant,erratic, possibly from stress or from being forced to work on a secret project for another country or for working on something on his own.

Ellenbrook has also become very much another Ambrose Bierce , bitter bierce, el gringo. One day he just walked away. There is no record of his death or any correspondence after 1958. His house to the conspiracy theorist type could indicate being sucked up by aliens from mars or any crazy theory, in fact check some of the many home brew web sites people have up just for these things. . In the worst way. The vanishing man. Not the scientist. The odd ideas that people balked at. Not the inventions and hard work. He has since become a man that has been overshadowed by himself. The blogs about his supposed whereabouts glow bright like christmas lights around the outer rings of the internet's very fringe.

Andrew once wrote a 12 page paper examining cultural aesthetics, the slow progression of ephemera as dissolving such overblown concepts as “era” and “generation” that focused on garbage and things tossed away as needed over time filling in these gaps. It had an audience of one, himself and he threw it away soon after completion. He also had taught himself physics and won an award as a kid. These things he did not tell anyone anymore.

Andrew really liked that girl at the party years before who in that odd moment made it clear to him that she was not into him. He had hung out with her before a bunch of times before and a few times after not counting the times with their other friends. Even a few times meeting for dinner. The sting of that and his always being the kid at work and never seeing anything like that house proved too much by the time he was around 27. She surely only humored me he was sure of at 25. She never liked me he had burned in his mind as he turned 26.

By 27 she was gone in his mind. They all were, all of his friends of that time. It was if they were never born, just part of a toxic morass, a half formed swamp made of those years, no longer of faces, moments or limbs. The drive to California felt cleansing even as it also felt a bit desperate and led to working a job and living in a simple, dumpy place. He was away. He was somewhere else.

Andrew now sits in his bedroom in his small apartment in the dark with just the glow of his monitor and a small lamp. Andrew works odd jobs in construction , maintenance and freelance in basic web design he picked up easily on the internet from free tutorials. He also has other things going. He is working on a secret project. He has been working on it all these years. It may finally simply be time. That man that walked out in 1958. He was on to something.

The problem is this: who will believe a man who has nothing but blogs and comments on videos and message boards? Who will believe what he has found? Who will believe the words of another man who erased himself, that likely insane mental breakdown fall from grace collapse that left laundry in the south Florida breeze to just walk away? Will anyone believe it is not a fake before any of this is an issue? Andrew types away , transposes, works at calculations , thinks he gets those lost notes , it is all seeming to make sense now where before it was just those first few lines…those wild ideas…that long awkward toss of genius.

Andrew has a roommate , they have a shared living room and kitchen. The young man is a part time student who also works random jobs. His roommate tolerates him, leaves him alone, is gone much of the time. The set up is near ideal for Andrew as he clicks away. The young man is out for the weekend at his girlfriend’s. Andrew still prefers being in his room like this, a tick , a quirk , it is what it is. Gone is the 23 year old boy. In his place is a 39 year man. Gone is the surveying work as the kid and the dump. In its place is working as far across the country as possible and whiling away the hours at work to get back to the big project.

Two conferences are in town this weekend. Andrew has even registered for one. This is the first time ever that he has actually made this step after staring at countless entry pages on his glowing aging desktop’s screen. Much to his surprise, the topic so closely relates to his big project that he tried submitting an abstract (lying about a master's degree). They liked his abstract, were quite enthusiastic actually. He was surprised that they did not care to check and find that he had no credentials though, also that he actually never completed that bachelor’s degree, was 3 classes short and lied to family and friends to get them off his back so long ago. When asked what his affiliation was to put on his name badge he checked “independent researcher”.

That damn man in Florida who erased himself was onto something, something still not seen. His work was unfinished, downright sloppy, incomplete and even scattered and wrong in parts. Andrew has spent 16 years fixing them though, making them solid, just right. He lost count of the number of edits. Ellenbrook’s papers that now sit in a drawer in Andrew’s messy bedroom may have been onto something big. The problem is they are incomplete. Also , the problem is their ambition is one of those strokes that ice skate on the line between a huge leap that would change the game and those time worn steps down into the morass of madness, the order of a break from reality and its drawings and flawed math.

As best as Andrew has seen, the man was onto ways to see storms form in pure data as flawlessly as to predict with an accuracy still unseen; some sketches depict amazing computers and wireless that no one in 1958 could have had clues to. Others were farther out, wilder, of things some still see as impossible. Tantalizing. Incomplete. Richard Ellenbrook just at some point walked away. Andrew has spent much of his life since that day trying to fill in the blanks. As of this week, today actually, he might just be done.

The conference is tomorrow, the first one.

Andrew falls to sleep as an odd little storm pulls the remants of a hurricane into showers and even a few thunderstorms across Los Angeles. The little low on its own would be nothing, just a swirl and the ruins are only moisture but for a few hours will bring an almost zombie rain in spots across the city. Hurricane Luis had reached cat 4 off southern baja, had been powerful, a beautiful thing to behold even with its dangerous power. It also then had the potential to do more,. Grow stronger still. A cluster of dull clouds is all that now no longer even qualifies for that name , it is pulled into lightning by a little nothing. Andrew bolts awake, a dream crashing inside, closes the window, surprised to see big drops.

Andrew sleeps all night restlessly. At one point he has a dream that is awarded a nobel prize. In another he is laughed at as a fool and run out of a town. In another brief one he is a bear lost in a field , tired, hungry, then in a zoo inside a drug store in 1962 during a hurricane in South Florida then a single vacuum tube being pulled out of a box. He awakens many times out of nerves, others from thunder rolling really hard.

In the morning he is a blur of showering, dressing, going obsessively over minutia , spiling milk on a tie he last wore when he was a boy. At noon he gets in his car and heads off to the city center and whatever awaits. The papers sit in the backseat neatly bundled and packaged. He must not mess this up.

Andrew sits in his car on the 10 freeway. It is a warm-ish day, a mish mash of the tiny bit of humidity from the hurricane remnant that by 3 am had beaten itself effectively to death on the face of the San Bernadino mountains and the almost cool air east of that little nothing low spinning a tiny bit of low cloud off the coast in feeble decay. The rain is all over the news , that freak from last night, but he has no radio. The traffic has come to almost a dead stop. The music from a dozen radios make a dull soup of noise amidst the occasional pointless impotent honked horn. Andrew is going to be late. The thin mid level clouds look like hollow space craft or , well, thin cylindrical clouds. God I hope it won’t go that way Andrew thinks looking up at one cloud slightly rainbow hued near the sun. A bee hits his windshield with a small motion and hesitates then flies off. The traffic lurches suddenly up to 7 mph. A woman screams at a driver in front of her who is texting with head down. A dog pants with wide red open mouth in a van. Andrew hits the gas with the light touch so familiar on Los Angeles freeways, the at least we are not standing still pump. Two radio stations play the same song in passing cars with one distorted on old cheap speakers. A mini van of mid 80’s vintage passes playing dvds of 2 diff old cartoons at once for the two kids in back seats. Andrew is in the slowest lane again. Murphy’s law. The pile of papers in the back seat shifts ever so slightly. The manuscript. Finally. The traffic just as soon as it began to move hovers back to a stand still,the phantom of moving over again for another spell.

An hour has passed. Andrew is a full 4 exits closer. Today is the conference. Andrew sweats in his rarely worn shirt and tie. His c.d player has not worked since when the last president was in office, his dash is sun cracked , but he is moving now. The manuscript is 274pages. He is not sure how much he had to add any more. The little weird clouds are gone but one heading over the hills. The convention center. 5 o’clock. Booth 24 . Check in at front desk at door. These facts loop in his sweat dabbled head even as he has them written down in his notepad in his faded brown leather fanny pack. A car crash sits in the middle lane behind him shrinking in the rear view now. The cars looked almost fused together, the metallic blooms of front and end sculpted into one ugly ruin with 8 wheels. It is 4:03. Andrew turns up his non working air conditioning to welcome in the slightly cooler stream of air as he spots a car pass him with a huge “the weather is a corporation “ hand painted sign in the back seat. Oh boy

Parking lot is full. Amazing. Another car with stickers about star trek , star wars, haarp and aliens all at once. Yep. Andrew is only 10 min late. He rolls up to the parking attendant in a little booth with a huge “Lot Full” sign in front of it with an old E.T doll stuck to it. The attendant is sweating profusely, looks about 18, bored out of his mind and has a little name tag that reads “Paul.” He also has clearly thrown or dropped said name tag on the hard pavement by the big cracks and chips in it.

“so uhm..the lot is full sir” shrug. Sweat bead.

“oh uhm…so..where do I go then? I drove all the way and..” slight panic. Irritation. Eye twitch

“ you have something important to tell people and the world needs to know …” dead eyes. No emotion..sweat in eye.

” yeah….but this is really..uhm..you know…uh” panic. Dread.

“ different..an exception..look man…there is a lot over there…turn around and make two rights..they don’t care…their business went under and it is vacant ok?” pointing scrawny pale arm with now clear badly drawn tattoo of what looks like a clown on a pogo stick. Slight look of are you a crazy one or just a garden variety.

“oh ok……” Andrew turns around and sees in the rear view the kid slowly shaking his head as he heads back to his little shack. This is now clearly not looking like what he had hoped for. The humidity is still ridiculous even with no storm and the walk will be brutal. But who cares about that. This is not looking like a place full of nasa badges. Not at all.

The small lot is almost full. A skinny weird looking kid with greasy hair is playing some kind of board game in a lawn chair with his exact counterpart as a woman. A car has hundreds of dolls and stones across it and the words “the truth is out there painted surely a thousand times along the spaces between stones. A sweet elderly woman smiles at no one in particular as she parks an aging tiny station wagon just beside Andrew. The pile of papers. The years. That house in florida. The amazing thing about storms. These things make him open the door, kill the engine. Smile back. Feel a bit of adrenalin amidst it all.

The pile of papers. Now put in a binder. Why did I not do this before. Sitting in hot car with old woman still smiling, board game played by people my age. I thought I did this already. What. Can’t even read the notes there. Ah ok, these are good, ok just put pages in. Stop obsessing. For once. Those little gnats inside. Ok half done. What is that diagram doing there? What did that equation mean? Ok , good, more pages, ah, good stuff. Almost done. Wait. …..

An hour has gone by. The woman has long left to go inside the coliseum blocks away. 3 vicious rounds of risk have been played. With doors open Andrew has wasted an hour he will never, ever get back. The sun heats him like the one that brought the rains in Florida those years before, like the one that the man wrote about in pages about hurricanes. The conversations blocks away chatter on about space crafts, machines, lasers, mind control, after life avatars, and yes some science. Andrew shuffles through a pile of paper. He has found something. Something he did not like. Did not let hit him in 16 years of obsessively tinkering away. It is irretrievable, irreparable. No knowledge of garbage, methane , storms or anything can take this , fix it. The text is only 2 lines long. But he failed to let is seep in. pg 224. Paragraph 4

Inside the auditorium , the conference, the place he supposedly has waited all these years for, the lunch break will begin soon. An opportunity will pass. A man has come from Deep in Mexico to see the presentation on a panel that has a missing chair. He will leave unhappy and unnoticed. He also will have known the answer to those 2 lines.

Andrew stares at the page. More time is to go by. His text has become no longer a mystery or an unfinished great notion, masterpiece, a work of genius by some stranger that needed his hand. It is a pile, a heap, a beast failed by a tiny scab. At least to Andrew. He will drive home slowly as cars speed by. He will awaken in a day and will never see 2 things. 1 he never has truly tried in his life 2 the lines were not wrong ..just to him

That house in Florida was torn down. Apartments were built after the condo plans failed. They never got enough tenants and too were abandoned for several years. They then were raised to make a lot. An empty, nothing , a maybe someday to be built into maybe something grand marked spot. If Andrew had actually followed the man into Mexico he likely would have never found him. He could have died there in a freak accident or in old age still chasing this ghost. But these narratives, these tethers of possibility, at least something more than his underachieving, were plucked every time he talked himself out of it. He also never chased that girl, the one at the party, she really liked him, any fool could see it, why else would she have listened to all the other stories of worms and methane and cars left to rust? He could have finished that degree , even a masters, a phd in fact. These phantoms long waited for him, still do, but will not come into a single atom, second or anything; Andrew instead will drive home at a steady speed. Will post a few vague unhappy comments in a blog , will watch a video of hurricane behavior and will sleep into another day.

The odd thing about time capsules is that they so often come up as mud. The sad thing about burying things intentionally is something so often seeps in, decays it all. The car pulled up in that one city was rust, the papers in so many come up as a wet nothing. It was the same with that safe and Capone’s money. Time wins. They only peer in to the see the time capsule, not the ruin.

That metallic desk in that house in Florida had been cluttered with piles of paper, random bits of old newspaper clippings, a glass with a residue of what appeared to have been decades ago milk, a magazine that was turned to a photo of an actress thought at one point to become famous, important, something. The refrigerator was stocked for meals during research. All the usual rot and ruin were long gone. Richard Ellenbrook had just walked away, yes, but only to Andrew. He so wanted it to be this way. It made a hero and legend out of failure. It made the man’s story also wide open. No conspiracy theorist takes a closed case to their perpetual mental prom of obsession , nor do they take a few known details to the submarine races. Ellenbrook was to watch that panel and would have spoken to him. He just stopped publishing and hated the internet. He did disappear himself but in that closed set way, to just move from who he had become and his life to somewhere quiet. This silence left like that long gone florida mold that dried to dust in that fridge behind him was to Ellenbrook nothing, a lost shadow. To Andrew and his ilk it was the cloud of secrecy, the “hallmark of genius” , the mad scientist wiling away beyond the realm of mortals and closed minds. Richard Ellenbrook moved away.

.Andrew’s old, soon to be lost acquaintances had found the house not him. They stopped talking to him after a few years of occasionally checking in with him to see how he still had not changed at all, spending more and more time at home and they moved on. It is like the crowds when they pry open an old buried container one of the guys once said. The expectation is always better than what you ultimately find inside.

Here is one more from that sad little box of things...to me these seem to connect...I am no writer but see what you think..look of me..directing again...like those paintings again..curating toe nail clipping from other lives....please just read...

I Was the Vapor Trail not the Plane

by Eliot Rimson

He had this crazy paper he somehow snuck in. I listened intently as he started out with a long intro that frankly made a lot of sense. It was scientific, it had lots of references and was a lot of overview about the history of the field leading into his area of study. He wore the nicest suit I had ever seen. It was yellow/orange and perfectly pressed, not a wrinkle and had a really interesting cut to it. His hair however was a bit greasy and looked like he cut it with scissors. It was when he got to his thesis that it got strange. He was proposing something that basically was so out of any field of study in the field that it seemed to a few of us to not even be from science fiction, a dream any of us recalled or a comic book; the thing about it though, the cruel wicked anchoring thing about it was by the end it made sense.

Let me give you a little background about me. I am a scientist. I have a phd and all the shiny credentials (dormant as they may be at this point). I have written many articles and a few books. I was chair of that panel that that man snuck his weirdness into. At one point I was the most famous person in my field. My field, mind you, had about a thousand people in it so to me that is like being king of the playground in 1^st grade or the best at cow chip flipping (no offense to the purveyors of that fine sport as well as the warriors of lawnmower drag racing). I am a tall man, 6-9 in bare, bunioned smelly feet. I am now a man in his 80’s. I am also, to some, a phantom. I will explain this later.

The conference was in Chicago. It was many decades ago. The hotel I was staying at was nice enough but I was used to the warmer weather of the south. The snow showers were stinging as I walked from my hotel out to the University and conference hall. I remember that well even now as it hinges on some weird corner of what came later, like a tile, a nail. The campus was huge and full of tiny snow drifts amongst students bundled to nearly appearing to be giant worms walking upright to the occasional frat boy in shorts and tennis shoes surely trying to prove his manhood to someone. It was, to them, just another Tuesday. I asked one of those bundled creatures “where are you from?” and heard “mmmphhhhh”. Then she took off her muffler revealing a pretty face with tired eyes and quickly spat out, “San Francisco” and rushed off, fading away into white.

I finally found the hall by asking around as the worthless little map I was provided was horribly designed (I also have a degree in cartography and did some work in that area too) and not only was wrong in scale and some icons but blew away in the first big gust as the snow began to intensify. A cocktail napkin would have been just as successful in the 40 mph gusts. It could have been written on in grey crayon too.

The large entry room was warm, marble tiled, oddly ornate and full of students dressed in suits with crooked little badges. I picked up my name badge from a boy who looked 12 but was a first year graduate student. He knew my work and pointed me to the room down the huge hall where I was to chair the panel. I looked out the front windows and saw it was snowing hard. So far from Florida.

Ok, enough of an old man rambling. You don’t want a blow by blow account of every step I took that day. I could describe every bite of my sandwich I had that day though, every crunch of the lettuce in the side salad, many more bits of detritus; that is how much of an impression he made on me.

The panel was called “Data Analysis Tabulation Processes and Methodologies”. A dry title to anyone not into weather I am sure, but to us a hot topic then. There were 4 people presenting. He was last. His presentation had a title that gave no indication of what was to come; “Statistical Analysis of apparent inconsistencies in Convective Cells and related phenomena”. He stood up to reveal that amazing suit on a giant of a man; he towered over the podium like he was to at any moment crush it with a pinkie finger. He began his 30 minute slot (which I later memorized from a tape an acquaintance made of the talks) with:

When updrafts rise they are known to pick up solar heat bouncing back, they are known to lift moisture high into the upper atmosphere above the freezing level in stronger thunderstorms which brings hail. We also know that clouds are not water magically defying gravity or up there on buoyancy and air currents alone; tiny bits of grass, leaves, insect wings and legs and soil float in those air currents and the water condenses like dew in the morning when you grab your paper. The thing I am reporting to you today is something else. These reports provide evidence of an exceedingly rare phenomenon. This phenomenon will be diagramed later in my slides and mathematical data at length.

The cumulonimbus being the tallest of clouds, born of the strongest rising motion, can release destructive downburst winds curling out from the rain shaft, it can also with dry air below bring virga only, that tail of lines drawn as though of pencil with instead wind hitting below, fanning fires, making dust storms. We also in it can debunk the fairy tale myths of hundreds of years of lore. The rains wine colored in many tales are not magical, not fantastic. Nor are the rains of frogs or fish or a million living crabs scurrying amidst outdoor weddings miles from shore. The colored rain is simply airborn silts and soils mixing with the other airborn particulates in water droplets that eventually fall as simple old rain. The Sahara a few times a year brings this to south Florida as well as Spain and Portugal. Nothing more to it.

The frogs and other creatures have been the subject of not only countless moments in magical stories but of woodblock prints, paintings and legends. This too is nothing more than simple science. A waterspout picks up creatures from the water and as it comes ashore and dissipates, they fall. The creatures are actually sometimes cooked after the fall by happy hungry observers. There is no mystery to any of these things. My latest research, however, is a bit different.

At this point it all seemed interesting, a nice take on language within a Meterology paper, a concise debunking of frivolities pinned to hard statistical data. But then he continued, hair flopping more excitedly on his head as he paced back and forth and continued with.

Case studies. One is a student in high school with a scholarship for college in that fall, one is a reporter with 20 years experience, the other is a Mathematician and trained sea captain. They have one thing in common. Let’s return to updrafts for a second. So, they lift up vapor and can mix with ash, smoke, pollution and particulates. Check. Rain drops form on floating bits of material. Check. There is much to this field of science that is yet to be understood, Check. Ok, here it is. They each heard bits of audio fall from a storm. Snippets, muffled among the thunder, but falling, undulating, one case repeating as it moved eastward at different volume levels. They heard conversations dropped from the downdraft amongst the rain and wind.

This was the point when we all were thinking that this was a train sliding off the proverbial rails. This was madness. A break from reality. A delusion born of sleep deprivation and isolation. To use his words “nothing more”. His greasy hair flopped around like a drunken jellyfish on his head as he spoke, thick clumps of shiny black hair doing slow serpent dances as he began moving around the area behind the podium as he spoke. This would only intensify. His amazing suit may as well have been a wad of old grey gum to all of us in the room as we were both fascinated and horrified by this bizarre work we were hearing amongst papers about rainfall rates near cities, cloud enhancement debunking data and statistical analysis methods for better tabulation drizzle data. I had to as chair make notes to prep questions when he was done. I just stared. He continued on with:

The reporter’s article published Aug. 4, 1952 included this section (shown on the slide behind me) “I was staying on the farm first built in this town out of the kindness of Farmer Joneston as my car was having trouble and it was late. I awoke to rolling plains thunder and spits of rain. It was a dry high based storm, I could tell by the lightning lighting the high based clouds above the farm and by the little batches of big fat rain drops. I went out to watch as he had given me a key if I needed to go before morning for some reason and as I headed out the back door of the farm house the wind was warm and the drops cracked like eggs on my head. I looked up waiting for the next lightning to light the night sky when I heard something else. It seemed to grow in volume from a muffled vague ruffling to what grew into some sort of clarity. I must say here that I am not crazy, was wide awake, was not drinking and have thought long and hard about even writing about this. Ok, here goes. It was voices. Yes. Two different voices that as they grew louder were of an older and a younger man, both with a firm almost grave tone of voice, one was saying something of a warning to the other but I only could make out a few words amongst the wind and my disbelief. The words were these: hill, wound, you can’t and something that sounded like bandage. Then it seemed to move east away fading into quiet and then nothing.

The sailors on the boat were a crew of 10. They all heard these words: gold, hurricane, fire, down, armada, Aruba. This fell during a dry thunderstorm of the coast of Texas. They were all on deck together in a dead calm as it also was a very high based storm. Here you see slides of their stories in 4 different newspapers and here are the drawings and notes of the captain who also was a mathematician of some note before he tired of it and returned to merchant work in the gulf.

The teen awoke just last year in Orange, California. Here are photos of him from the newspaper articles on his story with a corroborating account by a local meteorologist who could not give his name but was noted to be a well known local figure. The boy’s name is Jeff Ellings and he was up late studying when a warm rain with occasional thunder seemed to ease but then he heard what he thought were kids playing outside at 2 am. He ran out to see if they were ok and what in the world the parents were thinking allowing this. He walked for blocks and the sound never got closer or farther….he then realized it was undulating, rolling like thunder but of a young boy and girl. He heard sentences fairly clearly at one point in the loop of audio. Here is a tape of what her heard ‘I could make out certain words but they were in Japanese, the words translate to the wooden house is in flames we must run and the horses are running in circles , scared. He had read a few books on Japanese out of an extra credit project and a wish to teach English overseas while in college.

There are a dozen others. Here is the hard part. The thesis of it all. The first voices were soldiers. The second set were sailors in a galleon sinking on fire. The last were Japanese children. The pattern shown behind me in my data analysis shows that each case was a dry or semi dry higher based thunderstorm with a long reach downdraft. Each was a storm that had peaked and was in dissipation stage.

He produced photos, graphs, diagrams, math equations and a growing overview of how this was just science, data analysis, nothing more. This was in the early fifties so much of the later weirdness we now call weather was not even on our radar yet. He was a lone odd voice amongst the early days of radar and pre satellite images, really prehistoric times in comparison. This made him all the more odd and surreal in that suit with this wild thesis of his. The weirdest was the way he was actually convincing. He also seemed to have no tone of excitement or even interest beyond cotton dry research and data findings about the whole thing. He was suggesting that at times it can rain human voices somehow carried aloft. This was by far the wildest thing I had ever heard. This broke so many rules of physics and weather and yet he droned it all out in that flat tone like it was just simple facts; he had evidence and a an overview that actually by the end of his 30 min slot was really making sense to not just me.

Sailors for years were scared to speak of “St Elmo’s Fire” as to not seem insane; it is simply a heightened electrical field near impending lightning channels and is now basic knowledge in high school meteorology classes. Fighter pilots also never dared speak of seeing huge balls of plasma shooting high into the outer atmosphere like gooey bombs of fire above some storms. These sprites and jets are now studied in most Meteorology departments. Ball lightning has been noted to ooze out of televisions like crackling jellyfish during thunderstorms sometimes to pop like a soap bubble and other times such as the well documented incident back in 1638 in a church, to explode like a bomb killing 5 people. It was sci fi till that one plane flight where it crept along the floor in the plane on the one scientist’s trip to a conference, true story. Now it too is moved from crazy to cooled science. One noted physicist in the 1980’s published a paper arguing they are mini black holes, talk about weirdness right?

A hurricane in 2005 formed in waters too cold and too far north and hit Portugal. No one has explained that one and it was on the news worldwide. Even I knew of it way out here. Lightning actually partially rises up from the ground, the leader charge, few know this outside of weather folks but it is basic to us. A famous photo in many books on weather sold in stores in the 70’s had a man posing smiling by his truck in Texas; he had a tiny bolt of electricity about 4 feet high rising from his head …another much thicker rose from his truck ..others from two small trees behind him; meanwhile a bolt “struck a tree behind him. He was simply lucky. Rock paper scissors. He got lucky and his leader was not met in the channel to complete a circuit. Weather is weird. Science is weird. This man was weird in what he was saying but how were we to know he was not onto some breakthrough like these other odd things?

I wrote no notes. I was fascinated. This began a journey for me.

I am sitting right now in a place 10 thousand miles from where I grew up. I am typing these words on a typewriter not for affect but simply as it is all I have. I have no contacts back there. I have no mailing address. I am sitting at a tiny little table made of stone. I left one day on a whim, an impulse small and clean as a fish on a line. It could have been “buy milk” or “do another crossword” or “ do the dishes “ but it was “leave”. I got up and left. That was 1958. I opened the front door into the south Florida humid sun and just kept going. I had money in my wallet and in my bank account then. That was all I needed.

Walking led to a crowded city bus, to a shiny cab, to a packed newer model commuter plane, to the plan of a year of traveling around the world living in hotels (burned a huge research grant on that and surely pissed off a lot of people as it was for a team on hurricane research not for me). This “year” ended at hotel room with blood red curtains and my thinning wallet laid astride an overly comfy pillow as only 5 months of boredom, fits of depression and a realization almost iron clad as a mathematical equation or logic set : nomad = ghost=adrift=unmoored=transitory=ducking something…I wanted none of this, I just wanted a transition.

I then took a sketchy, rust patched old ship, then another even more beaten by the years, then a small boat possibly run by drug runners, then a few impossibly brightly colored ancient buses, and another month had gone by. This led to a donkey(yes, a donkey, he was a sweet animal and it saved money), a tired older horse, a carriage left behind by a failed circus with a driver who was a random guy in need of any money, a terrifying high mountain bus full of crooked eyed old women and finally an old car that careened down a high mountain with me just able to scramble out on a high Andean road to here. “HERE”. “NOW” I cannot say more of them and will not. They are just place markers. The irony is that it is pretty cold here right now. Kind of like that distant Chicago.

The man made a lot of sense. His last 10 minutes were not the usual summing up, ending too early or running out of time like the rest of us; it actually built like a story, an arc to it full instead with numbers, stats, charts and his narration of their interconnections. He finished to me with almost a crescendo and my foolish almost platonically smitten self had no questions for the 10 minute discussion and only one note. The note read “wait, could this be possible?” That was it. To my dismay there were only two general questions, one dismissive and mean, the other about dull details of his last graph.

After the panel was done, most people left to lunch with a look of bored annoyance or the blankness of total dismissal. I have come to know these looks well, but that is another story, well for no other time as I will never tell it. A few of us gathered around him and asked lots of questions, each getting a calm, articulate, logical answer. I went with the tiny group with him to lunch and we learned more of his background. He had been a meteorologist for many years doing research on electrical conductivity and ionic charges in thunderstorms (lightning is a combination of positive and negative charge ) and had a phd in electrical engineering and 2 master’s degrees in Meterology. He also told us of how he had been stunned by those findings he spoke of and how it changed his interests and frankly made lightning seem pretty unsweetened oatmeal dull in comparison. He calmed and his hair eased its earlier dance as he calmly loosened his tie and ate his sandwich, talking all the while.

I left that afternoon before giving my talk. Who cares I told the kid at the door as I left…his confused face shrinking behind in that huge entry hall. I chaired a panel. Did my part. This guy risked his career today. He just did the same as that reporter he quoted. I realized as he spoke that I had frankly never done such a thing. I had never considered it nor had any wilder ideas like that. I left lunch with the feeling that I also never would. I walked out improperly dressed into what had become a ferocious snowstorm. I did not care. The stinging needles were almost pleasing in that moment.

I welcomed any icicles to form on my nostril hairs hard like antennae on a crab in a shell. I welcomed ice fields on my eyelashes. I had room and board ready for each bit of snow that that clung to my foolishly worn khaki pants. I reached my hotel honestly disappointed that none of this came to pass. I went to a heated room and mini bar and it was like being punched in the face. Comfort. Familiarity. A womb of it. How familiar. The snow was framed by a thick paned window away to a feeble like moving painting of a far off concept as I changed into dry clothes and watched the room’s tv.

I should probably fill in some blanks here, scotch tape some sections, glue some of this old man’s ramblings/confessions here. I originally planned to mail this to several people when the day came to purge some of this ancient bile, nice pretty stamps on the outside envelope. Now I don’t even have those addresses anymore, lost some in luggage that plummeted down that Andean hill, others to the years and not caring any more.

I came back from that conference to a research job. I returned to a top end tv, closets full of clothes and 20 tv dinners in the refrigerator. I returned to the place that 3 days before was just stuff. At first it was just that usual dull returning from a short trip sense of the alien, then something rote, then something I kind of held in a deepening disdain. That brilliant, odd brave man soon faded back into academia, tucked in like a fold of butter into a bowl of cookie dough. He did not seem to have lost or gained a single thing from that crazy speech and amazing ideas. This infuriating and sad information dribbled my way over a long period of academic journals and letters from my few acquaintances.

Statistics are cold. Graphs are over-simplifications of massive varied data just to place information. Numbers are ice. He had been lost in these things as though he never spoke. At least he wasn’t raked over the clichéd coals for it, but I began to wonder if that at least would have shown that people reacted, cared, made the effort it takes to roast a carcass, to destroy something. He just went on with no ripple at all. Ignored. I was hoping however that this was temporary and he was onto something more with it, a book, a research grant, maybe, just maybe, my dream anyway, with a wilder notion to stun us all.

I, on the other hand ,was coasting on an earlier period of work that had perfected radar signature study as well as a method of better studying ship reports for storm position triangulation (this was the 50’s). I headed a 12 person team (each man had better ideas than me). I trained 2 young guys who had better dissertations than mine by a million miles. They carried notepads with them taking notes of my safe lizard like machinations and observations as though there may fart out greatness or a ladder to fame shown in some string of errant words. They even once did this was while we were at the urinals and I was babbling about obvious aspects of cloud formations.

I was really just so much ballast and inertia. This gnawed at me more and more over the next 3 years (the man spoke in 55). I basically filled my clothes with an efficient, smart man who likely was past his peak in a life of work that was lucky as a lottery winner in its timing and money. A talk on one panel I went to around that time that I went to to see a physicist speak spoke of how it may be possible to run gliders on the air streams behind jets as they break the sound barrier and how it also might be possible to use this for space travel behind rockets. I did not enjoy it at all. I was the vapor trail behind a jet, not the plane and definitely not that cloud that briefly forms as a barrier is broken.

That man may have had a mental breakdown that I saw science in. We may have been seeing the artifacts from a breaking in him, a break from reality filled with numbers and grand pale theories like Nash and those others. There is often that possibility. Those wild notions may have been on their own as valid as auras and pyramid power (look it up if you don’t know) but with all of his words and drawings and numbers it seemed so much more. The thing about theoretical science and research is that it does have a “fringe”. The wilder ideas are of what is possible, could be perhaps proven to cool into textbook chapters; cold fusion anyone? String theory out your window? But it also nears the mirror side sometimes of schizophrenia, of obsession, of science fiction and sometimes just plain balloon juice/road apples/bullshit. He at least took a chance on that stuff. He congealed something tangible and eventually tantalizing and seemingly quite plausible out of newspaper clippings that made a “leading scientist”(me) wander off in the snow frankly pissed at his life.

Need to pull out that scotch tape again here though dear reader, like what is the point, how is this tied to an empty house in Florida, a stone bench, a man erased, of other ideas, of weather?

I bought that blue house when things were peaking. The nice furniture I purchased when things were past it but I did not know it yet. The fridge was at one time filled only with expensive meats and things back when I cared about such things. Back at work months went by and things were fine, just fine. So much so that I contemplated stealing from a paper from a young phd. So much so that I stole office supplies just to do it. So much so that I held that paper on my desk telling him I was “reading it” to give him “feedback” which of course as I was supposedly somebody, that rock around my neck of past dull being first accomplishments thrilled him. It sat limply on the back corner of ignored things in my study. At first it was to read it. Pilot light lit inside,yep, uh sure I will check it out.

I was first with some radar interpretation advancements, not invented, not dreamed it up, not made it better, just first headed a team among many. The shipping reports was just obvious, so dully, drolly, painfully obvious that no one saw it. It was not inventive at all. To realize slowly that there really was nothing else grabbing me was not even a bother. That man though; he gnawed at me even as the journals few read began to rarely even mention his name.

1955 and 1956 I can describe in a few words really: smile, nod, blather, foam , look awake. There were a few conferences I chaired. A city. A hotel. Some notes to lead questions from the 10 people in a crowd. A plane flight. Meals. There was the hurricane a few us chased in a plane for a study. That pretty much was vomit, look at clouds, vomit, see the equipment fritzing out again. See the storm as a sheared goop of spinning low clouds and a few impotent little showers. Head back. Write a report to justify a grant and all stay up late finessing the details to sound more like something was seen, studied, happened. Published 2 papers that I cobbled together from old work and notes like some laughably shoddy b movie Frankenstein monster.

1957. It began with news from an old acquaintance about the guy in Chicago. He had run into him again. Told him how I was still interested in that talk. He was giving a presentation soon in Miami. I was full of giddy excitement, a sock hopper hearing that elvis was coming to town and remembered their name. My mind spun with possibilities of what that man had been up to, what wild notion he had snared in the name of research and science.

The next month or so, my team co-published a paper on radar signatures. It got notice in some journals and even a few newspapers. Give co author credit to time and timing on that one. It was not revolutionary, not groundbreaking, not even at the level other teams were clearly at. A reporter saw my name. He needed a lead on a science story with local color. Another paper saw the Miami newspaper’s article and picked up on it as did 3 others. To me it was all just stating the obvious, to the team it was stating the next thing and how near it was, to those national papers it was like predicting space cars that ran on spaghetti. They loved how oddball it all seemed, so wild and weird.

I arrived at the conference in Miami full of anticipation, strange jolts inside like errant lightning. It was nice to feel this again. I rushed across the campus not out of any hurry, but that giddy little ember returning again. He is here. I reached the conference hall early. I did not care. He may have something more on those concepts, perhaps it is some sort of convection and echo chamber physics we have never thought of. Maybe the voices are carried bouncing off those tiny bits of leaves and insect wings and the clouds, maybe, maybe. My mind was spinning anew, finally again awake.

I sat in the main conference lounge area drinking coffee for about 20 minutes next to a group of eager young grad students going over a talk on Radar errors. The coffee was mud, old from the morning clearly but was delicious to me. I savored every sip in the little throw away cup as the 20 something crew scrambled over their timing and graphs. No one noticed me. I realized years later in some random recall that their ideas were not only correct but would negate major notions of a few people including me. It would come when I was somewhere in Europe negotiating that failed lost year. In those minutes I just soaked up my own anticipation , gleefully , gloriously an anonymous invisible nothing in a plastic chair salivating over a coming talk by that wild man.

I checked my watch a few times as to not miss his slot and walked in just as he was about to speak. I hate to be rude , but there was to me no one else there, really, no one like an empty room. I grabbed a seat near the back as to not make a tiny spectacle of myself. His hair was short. It was really short. Like a gym teacher or a drill sergeant; it was a boring old crew cut. There would be no greasy octopus dancing on the man’s head as he uttered wild notions this time around. His suit was a generic grey. What happened to the wild piss yellow with the almost sharkskin? Where was the wild colored tie that seemed to whisper of some whiff of clowns or at least a used car salesman with something to prove? He looked different too, hard to explain, not 3 years older, but more robotically precise somehow. These were to me very troubling details.

He was introduced and began to speak at another one of those identical crappy wood podiums.

The title of my paper today is “radar signatures and you” (wow what a generic title…what is this an inspirational speech at a staff meeting in the lunch room?) I am going to discuss the common signatures of hurricanes on approach to land, thunderstorm clusters and cold frontal squalls. (wait..what? ) As we see in slide 1a behind me, the characteristic “eye” can be seen surrounded by an intense core. This “eye wall” can be noted as consistently being a strong rain signature that seems to coincide with the storm’s inner core (we all know this already don’t we? Even I have presented this stuff before, is this all he is shooting for now? Where is the other man? The one in Chicago?).

The core consists of greatest uplift and we can see it as the area of imminent wind damage. In slide 1b the thunderstorm line appears as….

This went on for 30 long dry as dust minutes. He showed a range of images. He made talking points. He discussed errors and machines. It was crashingly accurate, catastrophically concise and informational. At one point I recall daydreaming of a giant hand sucking him into the sky and away and no one really dropping a coffee in shock. It ended with a bow on top with a neat wrap up and summation with no larger point or theory or overview at all. It was like someone reading to you from the last few years of news magazines they had piled on a coffee table as though they had some point to doing so while you were trapped politely nearby in a chair.

No one chatted with him after. Well I did, but more as a parasite than a colleague. There were several questions this time. It was that whole conference game, ask a long drawn out question to hopefully appear eager, engaged and thoughtful but actually be flogging your own findings and research before some people who may bat an eyelash at it and maybe ask you a question instead. It is a passive aggressive , obtusely sadistic constant of such affairs. It is not unusual, normal and to the older salty dogs like me , extremely boring and amateurish. Six young men in suits did this that day after the man gave his dull , deeply erasable talk about something deep in the pocket of established norms and information.

He had lunch with me outside the hall where the free conference food had been laid out. We sat at the end of a long table. He complimented me on my latest team publication. He put down his roast beef and said “ nice work,I really enjoyed reading about it and how stable the data was kept in analysis and summation” I was mortified. He asked if we were hiring. He looked at me with something I did not like rising up in his eyes high above me as the tall man sat across from the table and said “You know if you guys will consider someone like me, I can work hard and will start at the low end position to earn your faith in me “ I was sad. He said his other talk got no reaction at all . With exasperation he explained that:

“I even published it twice which I thought would either get me offers or fired, but it just seemed no one cared either way about it, I after a while just lost interest because of it, I am now working on radar analysis”

I was floored.

He bought me lunch not to chat or reveal some new ideas he dared not speak of yet, but to butter me up and confess that he was sensing that he was never to get to where I was. He had come to accept in the way one accepts their lack of movie star looks or third arm. It was an awkward ,uncomfortable, deadening afternoon. My Elvis was revealed to be your friend’s dad in a button up sweater reading the paper at dinner .

This shaped the rest of the year. Hurricanes were tracked. I won a big award for the old work; after the ceremony I urinated on it and threw off an overpass from my rented car. The girlfriend left. I stopped buying nice meats and just stocked up on frozen dinners, some basic food stuffs and beer. Why waste the energy, why look for some ornate “special “ thing when it is all just fuel to turn to compost? I still had that young kid’s paper. I read it. It was good. It had things he would not realize had been lifted too. It was tempting I must admit. Really tempting since I did not have the guts to go out and smash random windshields, streak a conference with “I am a fraud” covering my hair body in say mustard or tell someone that in reality I have never been original. No, those would be too awkward, too much work. That man in Chicago had been a fetish to me, an outlet, a vicarious outlet of wild possibilities, innovation and risk. The guy I saw in Miami quietly murdered him while meekly wearing the same face.

I had wanted to freeze in that snow. I wanted it so bad but knew I did not have the guts to do it. The warmth of the nice hotel room was a punch to the face of here you are, back in your cozy place in the universe, and look it has snacks. This while a storm rages outside and some man may have just shot a hundred bullets into his career in a way you can only dream of.

One morning I awoke to small high based thunderstorms drifting into Miami from the south east and they were just as he had described. The high decaying thunderheads were laying lines high in the sky of virga, that rain that evaporates before it ever comes close to the ground, eaten by the dry air. I drove after the main one for 30 minutes north up the coast until it came ashore right above me, a few lightning strikes high over the empty beach. It was barely sunrise and it lit the dying thing red orange. I felt one rain drop hit my head. The cloud was shrinking and losing shape as it had lost that updraft that had somewhere at some time sparked it to life, whatever that is for such a thing. It died above me in a few minutes, the virga vanishing, the cloud breaking into a few parts. Then nothing. I must now confess. I actually thought that maybe this might be the time, those voices, that amazing thing the man spoke of, maybe of sailors, maybe some guy in Cuba speaking of the skies pre dawn to fall down to me slow like leaves in a breeze, or in this case a last gasp of breath. Maybe the guy was slumping down a beach just as broken and that shout was to be curse words , self hating words not some grand poetry.

Several things died on that beach that wasted tiny morning. The cloud and thunderstorm was just one.

The next day I left.

Sometimes it is just time. The procession of cars, ships , walking lost and even that ride on that animal's back out of desperation felt so visceral , so real ...it is really hard to explain but it was not the years before, not by any comparison. At one point I even spoke to some woman for hours on a filthy ship deck and she never once asked what I did, and it never occurred to me to bring it up or even think of anything beyond just being a seat on that passage, a vessel. Now in this tiny village, sadly, my past has caught up to me, my old name riding shot gun. One man found something on the internet. He then found others. This dead man spilled out site by site, lie by lie along with the past. I smiled when he told me excitedly that he found science fascinating and asked what I thought of the town's weather. This was a question that he has asked dozens of times before, I have lived here for 20 years and we used to work sweeping floors together. It is time move on again. That man has followed me here, that man that used to wear these same clothes, that mediocrity, that ghost of a man who drifted around florida and the weather like some dull bank of stratus waiting to be eaten alive by an afternoon sun as the hope of becoming a storm, some original turret of promise had faded with time.

May the miles again erase things.

Here is something I retyped as it came badly damaged from water, mold and age. I bought this from a distant relative who got it after this woman passed in a snow storm of some historical note. So I was told anyway. The other manuscripts were well written too but starts and sudden stops in a box of clothes and magazines with covers ripped clean off. The woman apparently was well known amongst other stenographers in her town back in the 50's. This will be the last text I show you. Please read on....

A Few Lost Pages

By Ann Larison

A cold icy morning in Chicago. That whim to not take the train for once. To walk, to break some pattern if even in such a meek tiny way. It brought me to him. Six in the morning and he was fused to a lamp post with ice, his mouth open like words were going to tumble out in cold brief clouds. His eyes were open like he was still waiting for a ride that didn’t come.

His arm and torso had fused to the pole with ice. His hands below the street sign made me think of hamburger, turkey, chicken wrapped in plastic, what my dinners might look like back in the slaughterhouse freezers, flesh and ice. My stomach churned in a little ugly flutter. Those horrible pits that had once been his eyes; they were like sinkholes in the street, just iced over. I wanted to shake it, this stupid frozen meat, this corpse, wake it up to beg it to explain what he had been thinking. I couldn’t get away.

I looked closer and saw more little horrors. His eyes were open sewers, his nose hairs were iced over like the feelers of a crab emerging from the shell, his eyebrows were melting ice in drops dripping across those open expressionless brown eyes in horrid little rivers toward his open mouth. I knew I would soon be running late. I just couldn’t help but stare, couldn’t pull away. You could almost see a thought, some faceless, lost thought trapped in that frozen piece of meat.

In a crazy impulse I put my hand in his coat pocket. There was a bundle, I could feel paper and rubber bands. An image of needles: I yanked my hand out. His coat pocket tore clean off, weakened in ice, the little worthless rectangle of fabric falling to the ground with a key, some bits of metal,what appeared to be a button. It was a rush. I have to admit it. It felt like when I stole a box of ice cream bars from the market as a kid bored over the summer. That strange thrill and fear.

There was something clenched in his dead iced right hand. It was melting tiny drops. In a crazy impulse I pulled them from his hand. No one was around. The ice cracked off in little pieces. It was a bundle in rubber bands. A pile of burger wrappers, those cardboard coffee cup temperature protectors, cereal box tops, candy bar wrappers. Junk. Refuse.

There was writing on them. Smeary pencils and pens of different dull colors and fades. I looked at the old cardboard of a really old burger container and in blue ball point was:

1.Shoes
2.Jacket
3.Hair
4.Pants

((((plan))))

.got it

It made no sense. He was simply insane. Yes, that was probably it. I took the little bundles anyway. Artifacts of a bored curiosity, what the hell. I put them in my backpack that I brought instead of a briefcase for the walk next to some papers. Whatever. I put it back in the rubber bands and away. As I rushed off as fast as possible to catch up some lost time I only looked back just once. As I moved away he grew smaller and smaller to me, big black shoes becoming ant sized dots, the whole corner just a bit of texture along a single street, a stain in the snow.

I came to work thirty minutes late and it was those minutes at the random corner with the frozen man, I carried those thirty minute throughout the day. Everything was one beat off.

Later that morning after a dull meeting I went back to my office. It sent one of those little crumbs tumbling in me, those little far corner memories. “Rise Rise young lions” went a poem we all studied back in college English class. I can’t picture the teacher’s face anymore, my mind lost the syllables of her short name, the color of the classroom walls, even most of the campus now after 17 years. That poem remains. It used to pump in me at 19, 21... seemed sad and fading when I got closer to 30, started to wipe away. Now it lurks at night clear as light and car alarms.

I worked for another hour or so before lunch and it was smoothly, placidly uneventful. I ate lunch warm in the windowless employee cafeteria in the middle of the building on the 5th floor. I could have done like some others and eaten in my office to keep appearances, that sense of layers and absence that is what management sometimes seems to be veined with. I am tired of that.

I am tired of so many things that it would be like some perverse anti-Christmas list of all the things I don’t want, can’t stand, hate, fear, feel bile and disgust for etc… I feel like I did in grad school that last semester when I looked around the room and at all the styro-foam coffee cups with cute little ironic doodles and messages, the steel coffee containers so sleek that scream student like italics, the little snacks and notepads and at everyone quoting dead French philosophers like it held up gravity and the planets at 2 in the afternoon on a fucking Wednesday. I should mention that I went to art school. Fancied myself a painter of enough potential to take out student loans. Not everyone follows their major after school, in fact some say that 90% don’t. I sit in that majority.

I finished lunch and when back in my office. ice. cracking. that man. It hit me again that it even happened, the tedium had so nicely dulled it into something smoothly unreal. The oddest part that I couldn’t shake was how he was dressed. It was like he bought the cheap piss colored ancient suit to go to some big dance. It was neat and pressed, a matching antique stale piss colored tie wrapped nicely around his neck. His shoes were polished and shined, an effect almost lost in the slush and ice around his feet.

After lunch I sat at my desk. Time crawled. Even more than usual. I made some calls. One was big with a major buyer back east. Oh , right. I forgot to mention to you what I do exactly. Exactly..that word is so specific..how about fog or oatmeal instead.. I work for a company that ships artwork and sets it up for museums and for private collectors that can’t bother with all the trouble. It isn’t a career in art but it is....

When I first started it was after a long dull series of jobs stirring lattes, packing boxes and eventually up into managing small businesses in auto parts and whatever else after fudging my resume to get out of the coffee and bookstore loop as 40 loomed. It was exciting at first, inspiring almost in a way. I thought it might stir me to paint, to do some video art again, to make some kind of conceptual leap inspired by art’s far proximity like a whiff of poetry in the stench of old musty books yeah, I know….

I talked to the client for 40 minutes about all kinds of tiny details and complaints, shiny specific figures to lure him in, dull ugly concerns. I then emailed some of my staff about a Sunday meeting that would be needed as a result. This was about as enjoyable as kicking your dog or gingerly pressing your lips up to a red hot radiator for 5 minutes at a stretch. I remembered the bundle of papers now surely melting in my back pack. I pulled them out to save some important documents and throw them away. I scanned the top one, red ink on a stained napkin:

He had offered me some gum. I said “yeah, sure” then he fumbled with it absent minded for so long that I forgot I had even asked. Minutes went by and I didn’t even want it. He looked more and more lost. It went from a simple bit of conversation then wandered on, mechanical. It was like the conversation had lost its skin, was just bones moving like they do.

Was this a quote from something? Did he carry it with him or was it just in the coat when he bought it used? I didn’t know what to do with what I just read. Should I turn it in to the police? Throw it away. I was panicking a little For a second it felt like I defiled a grave, it was a pang of recognition.
I pulled out another one from the now thawing pile. It was on a piece of a cereal box top

I sat in roses red light and had a sandwich and coffee. There was a picture on the wall. It looked about twenty years old. It was five people smiling in an open field between two groves of huge shade trees. They all had the same smile. They sat on a blanket. The smiles were like they were all laughing at the same joke, that laugh that just lifts out light and easy like the sunshine in the picture. I almost swore I was in front of a heater That would be a good trick. I swear on mom’s grave there was warmth coming out.

Who was he? I thought before that he was insane. I just saw anonymous crowds in white gowns in some huge old building behind barred windows and on its grounds under watch. Now I wasn’t sure. Damn. It had been so much easier. Why did he do it? What was it exactly that he did anyway? Why did he have to be there? Why in my path?

I worked the rest of the day feeling off, distracted. I got emails back agreeing to show up at the meeting when the scheduling was nailed, little glowing bundles of terse words professional and carefully servile in regards to surely ruined dinners, family birthdays warm with out of town relatives and whatever else that now to be wiped clean Sunday would have entailed.

I got out of work in a bitter cold Chicago. It wasn’t even the same one as that morning. I got out fast. Ran the few blocks whenever there were gaps in snow drifts and got to the train station. The light glowed warm orange against a few flurries beginning their fall from the lamps along the station. I had just missed a train and as it headed off I imagined the ride on it home, how much more time I would have to spend in the cold and how much later I would be home. At least 20 ice needled minutes passed me by until another came.

Once on the train I began to get tired in the plush seat and in the warmth. Places blurred by in colors, lights, the rattle of wheels on tracks a constant against the signs and parking lots. It was gloriously uneventful. I napped briefly into an odd dream about an older train station and its wooden benches and waiting, waiting. The dream was dull and seemed like hours. I snapped awake at some random stop and looked at my watch. Five whopping minutes had passed.

The morning walk took an hour easy. I had a ways to go. I looked in my backpack for a bottle of water and found instead the other rubber banded bundle. forgot all about it. It was not as iced as was almost pristine while the other had massed into a plump moist ball for the most part. I plucked out a random bit written in shaky pencil on one of those coffee hand guard things on the side that wasn’t meant to be seen and thus didn’t have the picture and phone number of some surely wonderful doofus real estate agent with a head like a pez dispenser and a smile that even smudged radiated dishonestly like the worst posed pictures can.

I saw a bus pull up. I was late. Two minutes. I ran. Caught the one right after it. Sat next to a woman in a dress I swear was made of drapes. I caught a glimpse of the bus ahead. The oneon time, on schedule. There was a guy that almost looked like me. He got the schedule. It pulled ahead at the lights just the same every time with a cloud of exhaust. The distance between us was two minutes on a watch long. Those two minutes I had lost forever even though I could see the smoke behind it, almost smell it.

There was no asylum anymore., just that piss colored suit, those shiny shoes, a collection of ice on hairs and the quiet before I kept walking, before Who were you in those pits for eyes and that open mouth? I wanted to shake him. Why? Why the hell did you go ? What is this? A journal? A diary? I was so upset I found myself shaking a little as I held the paper in my hand and the train shuttled along warm on its elevated track above the streets. Then just lights, warm seat, my weight and the rattle of the tracks.

I sat half asleep and thought about random junk drawer things: errands, things to fix in the bathroom, the cat’s little bald spots where he licked himself too much and what the hell to do or not do on January 7 , my 45th birthday. It was only November but that day would come soon enough and frankly I didn’t want it. I don’t feel old, it isn’t that.

I just don’t get excited about things on calendars or any thing that is supposed to be exciting and all that. Who cares about cakes and balloons at 45 when it was the same pretty much at 44,43,42,41? I mostly just doodled little meaningless swirls and stared at the blurs passing by. Out of boredom I rifled through my backpack. My fingers touched that bundle of papers again. All right, one more. Why not.

I drove with Him one time to see some relatives. We took all the small roads, the back roads, through desert towns and along the spine of what remained of route 66. I slept sometimes just from the heat. I noticed at night that several of the signs had burned out letters, misspellings along the roadside buzzing meekly and blacked out spots. Out of a need to just talk and something different from the radio and naps I mentioned it to him. He told me that he wondered sometimes if you could make sentences out of those missing letters, business notes along back ways, secret love notes in the buzzing broken signs for motels and drug stores along the 5. Or maybe it was just the miles and the quiet and nothing more. Who ever knows anyone anyway? he asked me , his eyes narrowing into a squint as I let go of something that seemed so interesting a few seconds before. We drove on in silence for quite a while, things just moving. I decided a ways down the road to still imagine it, to make it mine, to try anyway to make what he said disappear.

I got off a stop early by mistake. I thought it was my stop. Everything looked about right. Brilliant me didn’t catch the sign but saw the door open, recognized the usual clot of groggy people massing out in an easing bulge and the escalators. I shuffled and shrugged on through, accidentally elbowed someone and felt a soft cool strange cheek, got a flash of burning pain from a push from behind me in my back and ribs.

I glared back as far as I could in the crush and saw only the usual cluster of strangers. I wanted to yell, scream, sarcastically thank the jerk that sucker punched me or just was so careless with that sharp elbow. I instead said nothing, just turned back around and pushed ahead toward the door like everyone else in that madness of arms and shoulders that makes a crowd.

We eventually all uncoupled as we spilled out of the doors and I headed for the escalator.. I was a third of the way up when I heard the train pull away and caught the name of the stop, pretty much at the same time. One of the letters of the big plastic new station name looked like it was full of dirt or a rat nest in the warmth underground. I didn’t care to stop to see.

I slowly walked toward the shiny escalator and another crumb fell loose, dislodged. It was from an ancient yellowed papyrus of a place and time, more like a stale, brittle little nothing. I recalled the feeling sitting in a room on a Wednesday afternoon years ago in grad school staring at those coffee mugs and hearing yet another discussion of dead French men in relation to other dead French men, of reconsidering and questioning the point of reference through the words of other dead men and it was like being in the wrong body, the wrong eyes. I wanted with every hair, every atom to be working, to be in the real world again, swimming in its details. The talented were few and stood out glaringly as did their actual work ethic. Many people seemed to be just floating through.
It had felt like that this was all there was and like that was the biggest lie ever told. It was a pang of recognition I guess. There was surely far more than this and there surely was far less and it was just stasis, blank, empty spinning in place. I had had enough but had 2 months to wait to get out, it seemed like forever. A girl made a painting as part of her thesis. It was a painting of 2 horses, muscles flexing, manes in an impossible glowing light only a kid in college who never saw horses up close would see as real. The horses were facing 2 different directions, pulling with their tails tied together. The entire crit I wanted to put a plastic knife through it or pour all the coffee from those stupid personal mugs all over the damn thing.

The escalator moved up smoothly and slowly. No elbows, no crush. Everyone was spaced out just so and lifting slowly up in the train station at the same angle of dull ascent. The turnstile was almost entertaining as it banged my arms as I pushed through, my used ticket being swallowed in a little metal mouth and checked off to regurgitate the meaningless stub back in my hand.

As I left the station everything was that weird place between familiar and foreign. I had a little bit of cold drool on my lip from my semi nap. This could freeze I thought as I headed the few blocks home. I used to love the feeling. In undergrad at the University of Chicago we would bundle up into the snow in the middle of the night sometimes just for the novelty of it and to get out of the boredom of dorm life in another snowstorm with the same people all year. In grad school I didn’t have time except once to head out like that and we went into curtains of white in the streetlights. One by one we each seemed to disappear at times as we spread out. To be invisible. I was so sick after that I hallucinated a rain forest one night out of all my snot tissues and soup bowls.

I thought of the frozen guy for a second again. Those notes were more interesting than any of the crap I made the first few years after school before I got busy and he had them on burger wrappers. I took 2 classes alone on how to mount your little treasured crumbs properly and my great works had the equivalent value of a letter of his text on a box top.

It is so hard to assess though. Everything old seems to look like someone else’s after a while. So many thing belong to the other guy that used to use these eyes. There is a crowd of them in old photographs of someone, of older pics of me, one of those other tenants. Whatever. He was some dead guy. He died with that stuff in his hand.

There is this other crowd of people, a fog of them , an oatmeal, a yellowing wallpaper pattern in a city. You see them in coffee shops scribbling away or clacking on laptops loudly clinging to the mythology of some big shot chomping a cartoon cigar pausing to glance and being dumbstruck by some random thing they carried at the ready. They are just part of the furniture, a lamp, an overly gaudy red upholstered chair, those curtains, Victorian just so. If cliches were a crayon box they would be its flashy silver or dull white and we know how much the kid will use those. I am not one them. I am not. At least I am not that...

I passed a closed sandwich place and an all night market. My task part of my brain thought of several details of work I almost forgot, little odds and ends but I rotated them dutifully in little loops in my head for several blocks to not forget. The air was stinging cold now but as long as I was preoccupied I almost couldn't feel it quite as intensely. Little lists of things can dull things nicely. Clip things too.

The streets grew comfortably familiar and the distance home felt shorter and shorter. I passed the sign for a movie theater that had recently closed, the letters for the last film still up but with a few missing, fallen off in the last storm or maybe taken by some of the more devoted or spiteful pimply teenagers that had lost their jobs manning glass candy caverns or robotic ticket punching. The word was that it was to become a chain book store and that they would keep the sign and the front the same, keep the feel, but rip out all the screens and old velveteen seats.

I walked dutifully on and had one of those ridiculous little conversations with no answer in my head.What was wrong with you? Were you so excited that you didn’t feel the ice? Were you wanting to make some one somewhere else feel lost because of you? Were you the only one actually wanting to disappear? To make that moment linger? I heard no answers back and the odd part is that on some level it was very pleasing even as I really wanted an answer.

After a while I just slowed down a bit. At first it was because I was lost, then it was because I thought I recognized someone, then it just felt right. There was the booted car on 3rd street that had been there all month, the orange metal bear trap on a tire now completely flat, the park where all the dogs would run in the summer now coated in early snow and soon in a few hours, ice. “There sometimes is simply nowhere farther to go” some forgotten professor of mine once said in some lost afternoon in some long wiped away crit. It tumbled out like a little lost orphan. It fell out of somewhere.

With no more streets to drift through and the time before freezing not too far off I turned the corner of my street toward home.

My wife had dinner on the table as I was late. My keys thudded dull and heavy in the basket by the door as I took off my coat. She had the heat on high to keep out the cold. As I walked to the kitchen table the light illuminated the tile we put in last year anew and pinpointed each of the cracks growing from the bad job I did with the adhesive. Dinner smelled wonderful, even I noticed that. She was sipping a glass of wine with that look in her eye that has grown to be part of the family lately, something between warm and cold like the house and so much else.

We sat to dinner and she asked about work. . I said fine. What would I tell her? I saw a frozen man dressed in a piss yellow suit ready for a dance in the Chicago winter cold..I just wandered around in the near freezing air on purpose.. I calmly over dinner described the details of my day, my train ride home when I slept awkwardly against the rattling window, my lunch , the meeting and something I read in the paper recently.
She passed me the bread in the neat little basket we got as a wedding present, the wood a little scuffed on the corner. The butter substitute was actually pretty tasty and melted off the steel of my knife onto the warm bread softly. I felt relaxed as she told me about her day teaching elementary school and the pipes wheezed a bit. After dinner we sat watching tv for a few hours then went to bed as a few isolated flurries blew in off the lake, the little flakes almost impossible to detect if not for the streetlights.

I waited until she had gone to sleep and got up and went to the bathroom. I then went to the kitchen and pulled some of those odd little stained and partially smeared papers from his hand mixed in accidentally with a pile of old ketchup and beer stained sketches from school from the bottom of the junk drawer where I tossed them, odd musty smells coming from somewhere in the pile. I laid them out on the table and started sorting through them at first, then rifling through then just trying to piece something together then just shifting them around as it got late.

The pieces of paper and cardboard were scattered everywhere. I spent a couple of hours trying to place them in some kind of order….chronological…..in some storyline…..by the type of ink or pencil…..It was impossible. It was impossible to tell.

I dumped out all the scraps from that man on the floor. A dead sea scroll of another's life..what was I expecting to find..can anyone find? A diary perhaps....maybe a way to actually at least kind of figure that frozen man out. I shuffled the pile for at least an hour and ….nothing.

I threw the little wrappers and scraps unceremoniously away in the soggy coffee rinds and dinner remnants in the kitchen trash like some anonymous burial at sea during war time.

I tried not to think about anything the next day. I went on the train like always, focused on tasks at hand, got it done, sucked it up. Enough walks and enough surprises. Enough faces and facing. At work the next day I selected the date for the meeting. It was to surely form curses under the polite replies all over again. There was one little scrap among my papers. Threw it away.

By the way...the last hard to read scrap somehow fused in some corner of my briefcase by the way was this:

well planned trips away with the young bride to the sunlit beaches of Florida for the weekend, Beer and pizza with the guys at a warm favorite bar to watch the game, dinners out with a new date in a candle lit restaurant with framed photos of nature scenes of mountains and groves of shade trees then dancing. distant flashes ...someone else’s lightning..just confetti..enough..going....tonight....hope to see ..(the last part after this was smeary and illegible)

The employees under me would surely reply in tersely written emails leaking politics and reeking of something more hidden away, maybe even clustered curse word and vitriolic poison phrases pointed my way before fingers discreetly hit erase..

Sun Jan 7. The letters glowed incandescent like little ugly lamps as my fingers guided the little pointer toward “send”. Meetings. No celebrations, no sun, nothing but the dull blizzard of white of a meeting room, dry erase boards, no windows to look at and see those bits of something far, far away.

Coffee, chairs and stasis for all.

It was my job,my choice.

choice, yes ….like breaking off something iced over. like running past the lake and not stopping...

I thought of a frozen man,At least he disappeared himself, he kept going...did that whatever it was ...I deleted the message instead. Gone. Each word a face lost in the snow. At least someone would find something, some afternoon , some moment from what I could erase, could create, at least for someone else, at least for once an action amidst this dull fog of day

That is not the end of that story, it is just where it ceased. She had written more lines it appears many times to white them out , all in pencil. The bottom of the page is torn clean off , not sure if this was her or in transit from Ohio to me years later.

Was it a great Picasso that I burned? No. Was it a valuable one? Name a Picasso that isn’t. It is that name. That man surely could have signed a diaper and it would now be worth a yacht. That thing had been one of the big draws to my collection when other art collector types came to dinner. The play was by Arthur Miller that also did and it was dreadful. There also was the sketch by Newton that I secretly already knew was not only dead wrong in the idea , his quickest of flicks of pencil, but was a fake. I had been duped by it for a lot of money. I came to swap them out sometimes for drawings my nephew did for me for a few bucks and a play I wrote when I was in college that was not even the same topic and was worth about the price of the paper; no one ever noticed.

Over the years I came to bring out works that my nephew made as poorly as possible by my instructions with attached names ever more the impossible and ludicrous, da vinci, tesla, Shakespeare.. I only once in a while caught the crooked eyebrow or two of some doubt among hundreds of guests and visitors over the decades. When I bored of this game and my nephew moved away I had to move to something else. I began to sell the fakes to these people. Then I felt a bit guilty and sold the lot, every last work I ever owned. Like shaving your head after years of being on a soap opera is some dramatic cartoonish fictional man to destroy something, erase it, wish it away into the cornfield.

I once got drunk and broke into my brother’s gallery and threw every item into a storage locker I parked behind in the alley. I filled it with fakes I paid art students to make that were pretty accurate but each had a tiny piece missing: a finger on a statue, a word on a text and image painting, etc. He noticed after 2 days and was furious. I brought them all back . A year later I filled his living room with police tape outlines on his expensive floor and the ugliest giant taxidermy bears and dogs I could find. He was such an arrogant self infatuated bastard, still is. My motive was never totally clear but it was exhilarating. We rarely speak and this is fine with me; he is the mirror of me and the other way around, at least I like to think so.

I first bought a painting that had been erased back when I still thought collecting fine things made me. It was expensive and was not by the one artist most famous for the idea. It struck me somehow very deeply though. There was nothing there and it had been taken away and would never be beautiful or grand, but hey, there it was. This led to buying an empty book written as an experiment by the son of a famous novelist, a horrid photo by the son of a great nature photographer and then more importantly an absolute crashing failure by a young writer that had been dumped by the publisher decades before I found it in a junk shop I searched for rare books once in a while. This was no rare book, worth about a slice of pizza when it came out and was dumped. Everything was wrong with it, but parts were not bad, in fact were rather good, the intro was brilliant, a flash of light for half a page even as it led to total dreck.

This one book was like fishing for diamonds in a pond full of forgotten sewage. There was grace in certain sentences and it was though I had to save it from oblivion, had the urge to tell someone about this forgotten, this “failed” thing. I paid people to help me find others. I bought a new bookshelf made of oak just for them. Another find was a book of short stories by some artist/theorist that attempted to connect to some big idea that failed into 3 great paragraphs, 2 pages of awkwardness but good ideas swimming for air in those sentences and 200 pages of crashing , hurtling obtuse to the point of bordering on gibberish pretention. This went on the top shelf on a little book holder that once held that Arthur miller play.

My great-grandfather helped my father with money and ideas. He worked in a mill until he broke his back and you will never find his name in any book. His son saw to that. His name he forced into newspaper articles a few times literally by gunpoint . His insecurities far outshone his great invention if you actually had to know the man. Soon no one living will. The stories will be the man, and many he threatened or pressured folks to make with him in the most flattering of light. Yes he invented that thing that we use like shoe laces; he also stole half of it from another man but that is neither here nor there anymore.

I collect failures, crashing ill conceived ones to the ideas never finished or simply abandoned over time. There is a strange grace in the glimmer left without completion and the work that has no overbearing provenance of some birth given famous name. To fail is subjective, a naming like that Picasso painting I burnt to a crisp, just the opposite. His name carried on shit is deemed as valid as long as his name holds that ballast. These things I dig for in boxes sent to me are sometimes simply the idea, the one solid metaphor or two or three, that one string of sentences or even a whole text. They may be the toenail clippings , what is shed in a life, but they also are that unencumbered. There is something to this to me, something that I have filled rooms with, would fight a man over till my old body failed in the effort, something so criminally underappreciated in this goddamn world.

These are artifacts. These names were cobbled affectionately by parents for that little hope filled ghost like mass within a mother before it is thrust into this place, not signed on napkins by some arrogant fraud or to a canvas by a name loaded with monetary value and some accumulated weight , the whole affair little different to me now than forgeries and theater make up. These items will forever be incomplete, nothing more than the grace of a sum of parts.

Nothing more. And this will never evaporate until these pages leave this earth in fire, flood or whatever takes us all.

happy to be co curating L.A Re.Play mobile art exhibition and panels

2011-12-04T18:37:00.000-08:00

L.A Re.Play
An Exhibition of Mobile Art
in conjunction with
Mobile Art: The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Place-making
College Arts Association Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, 22-25 February 2012
Co-curators:
Hana Iverson, Visiting Scholar, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey
Dr. Mimi Sheller, Director, Center for Mobilities Research and Policy, Drexel University
Jeremy Hight, independent artist and curator

Utilizing the thriving, diverse, artistically vibrant and architecturally unique city as a living medium, the exhibition L.A. Re.Play will showcase emergent forms of mobile art that turn the city of Los Angeles into not just an exhibition space, but also a game space and a performance space. Presented as a location-based mobile public art exhibition in February 2012, it will accompany the session presentation on Mobile Art: The Aesthetics of Mobile Network Culture in Placemaking, co-organized by Iverson and Sheller for the CAA 2012 conference.

vuk cosic

2011-08-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: VUK ĆOSIĆ
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_vuk_cosic /

Vuk Ćosić is one of the pioneers of web art practitioners using a new form of art called the net.art. Since 90’s, he is the one responsible for recognizing the potential and aesthetic aspect of the code and internet as both tool and subject. Ćosić is a “hacker of ideas” as he suggests in his interview on LEA New Media Exhibition: “Our duty is to look at adjacent possible worlds and thus expand human experience…”

Vuk Ćosić co-founded of Ljudmila –a digital media lab for artists in Slovenia and of the ASCII Art Ensemble, Nettime, Syndicate, 7-11, and Ljubljana Digital Media Lab. Pioneer in net art and new media art as well as hacktivism. Well known for running ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) variants of iconic film scenes thus transforming code, image and pixel into a collision and immediate commentary. Exhibitions include Venice Biennial; MIT Medialab and many other museums and festivals internationally.

jason nelson

2011-08-19T13:19:00.000-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: JASON NELSON
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_jason_nelson/

Jason Nelson creates supremely bizarre and unique flash interfaces that can be labeled as interactive poetry. LEA New Media Exhibition presents his discoveries of interactive art through odd fragments of writing, images, video, sound and the results are simply unlike anything else in the whole of the video game medium.

Born from the Oklahoma flatlands of farmers and spring thunderstorms, Jason Nelson somehow stumbled into creating awkward and wondrous digital poems and interactive stories of odd lives, building confounding art games and all manner of curious digital creatures. Currently he professes Net Art and Electronic Literature at Australia’s Griffith University in the Gold Coast’s contradictory shores. Aside from coaxing his students into breaking, playing and morphing their creativity with all manner of technologies, he exhibits widely in galleries and journals, with work featured around globe at FILE, ACM, LEA, ISEA, ACM, ELO and dozens of other acronyms. There are awards to list, organizational boards he frequents, and numerous other accolades, but in the web based realm where his work resides, Jason is most proud of the millions of visitors his artwork/digital poetryPORTAL attracts each year.

MISH MASH, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 17 Issue 1, August 2011

2011-08-10T19:27:00.000-07:00

MISH MASH, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 17 Issue 1, August 2011

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/entry/mish_mash1/

The first issue of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac (LEA) is published on line as a free PDF but will also be rolled out as Amazon Print on Demand and will be available on iTunes, iPad, Kindle and other e-publishing outlets. As the Mish Mash issue becomes available on the different platforms we will send out announcements via LEA’s mailing list and through LEA’s social networks.

CONTENTS

Transmediation as Betrayal: The Case of the Leonardo Electronic Almanac
Editorial by Lanfranco Aceti

Academic Vanitas: Michael Aurbach and Critical Theory
by Dorothy Joiner

Some Thoughts Connecting Deterministic Chaos, Neuronal Dynamics and Aesthetic Experience
by Andrea Ackerman

Hacking the Codes of Self-representation: An Interview with Lynn Hershman Leeson
by Tatiana Bazzichelli

Electronic Literature as a Sword of Lightning
by Davin Heckman

Profile: Darko Fritz
An Interview with Darko Fritz
by Lanfranco Aceti

Profile: Darko Fritz
Reflections on Archives in Progress by Darko Fritz
by Sasa Vojkovic

Profile: Darko Fritz
Error to Mistake > Notes on the Aesthetics of Failure
by Vesna Madzoski

Nexus of Art and Science: The Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at University of Sussex
by Christina Aicardi

Mish/Mash
by Paul Catanese

Sipping Espresso with Salmon
by Carey Bagdassarian

The Making of Empty Stages by Tim Etchells and Hugo Glendinning
by Gabriella Giannachi

Cognitive Labor, Crowdsourcing, and Cultural History of Human/Machine Assemblages
by Ayhan Aytes

Inverse Embodiment: An Interview with Stelarc
by Lanfranco Aceti

Order in Complexity
by Frieder Nake

Teaching Video Production in Virtual Reality
by Joseph Farbrook

Atomism: Residual Images within Silver
by Paul Thomas

Collaborating with the Enemy
by Shane Mecklenburger

Notes on Demonstration Exhibition: The Ammonite Order, or, Objectiles for an (Un)Natural History
by Vince Dziekan

The Contemporary Becomes Digital
by Bruce Wands

Leonardo Electronic Almanac: Historical Perspective
by Craig Harris

Ars Electronica 2010: Sidetrack or Crossroads?
by Erkki Huhtamo

KaI Syng Tan exhibition/interview now live at LEA

2011-08-04T19:56:00.000-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: KAI SYNG TAN

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_kai_syng_tan/

Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru Surek

Kai Syng Tan collects influences into ventures not only belonging to the genre of ‘locative media’, but also performance, essay/diary, collaborative digital (and non-digital) storytelling. Re-Drawing Boundaries online exhibition presents the artworks including her virtual avatar Kaidie that explore digital realities as well as ask important questions about the construction of identity. In the interview, she refers herself as the personal pronoun “we” which also embraces Kaidie as a product-manifestation of and response to the technological conditions of today.

Rolf Van Gelder and Carmin Karasic exhibition/interview now live on LEA

2011-08-04T19:50:00.000-07:00

EA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: ROLF VAN GELDER and CARMIN KARASIC

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_rolf_van_gelder_and_carmin_karasic/

Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru Surek

LEA New Media Exhibition presents established video and new media artists Carmin Karasic & Rolf van Gelder‏. The artworks offer provoking, multi-layered and intriguing invitation to new media that expand the understanding of the medium.

lea jeremy wood is live

2011-07-24T13:02:00.001-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: JEREMY WOOD
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru Surek

Jeremy Wood documents miles-long renderings by using Global Positioning System. These GPS drawings bind the arts and sciences by using languages of drawing and technology to present a topographic memory, by his words a “personal cartography”. Wood’s artworks in Re-Drawing Boundaries online exhibition introduce new approaches to travel, navigation and local awareness.

Jeremy Wood specializes in public artworks and commissions with an original approach to the reading and writing of places. His work is exhibited internationally and is in the permanent collection of the London Transport Museum, the V&A, and the University of the Arts in London. His art has also been featured book such as Else/Where Mapping, and Mapping London, and in publications such as the Cartographic Journal, New York Times, and Artforum. He has conducted numerous GPS drawing and mapping lectures and workshops in schools, museums and galleries and continues to make drawings and maps of his daily travels with GPS.
For over ten years he has been exploring GPS satellite technology as a tool for digital mark making on water, over land, and in the air. Recently he drew a map of the University of Warwick campus titled Traverse Me that included the cartouche and the scale amongst the intricate GPS tracks and gave a unique reading of the accessible landscape.He is currently based somewhere between his studios in Oxfordshire, England and Athens, Greece.

lea mez is live

2011-07-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: MEZ

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new-media_exhibition_interview_with_mez

Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru Surek

Mez creates fictional texts using a language she callsMezangelle, which involves inserting syllables, letters and symbols into words to dissect and recombine language. Re-Drawing Boundaries online exhibition presents codewurkswhich mixes English, ASCII art, fragments from programming language source code, markup languages, regular expressions and wildcard patterns, protocol code, IRC shorthands, emoticons, phonetic spelling and slang. Mez answers the interview questions in the language ofMezangelle

The impact of Mez‘s unique codewurks [constructed via her pioneering net.language “mezangelle”] has been equated with the work of Shakespeare, James Joyce, Emily Dickinson, and Larry Wall. Mez has exhibited extensively since the early 90s [eg Wollongong World Women Online 1995, ISEA Chicago + ARS Electronica 1997, The Metropolitan Museum Tokyo 1999, SIGGRAPH 1999 & 2000, _Under_Score_ @The Brooklyn Academy of Music 2001, +playengines+ Melbourne Australia 2003, p0es1s Berlin 2004, Dissention Convention @Postmaster Gallery New York 2004, Arte Nuevo InteractivA Mexico 2005, Radical Software @Turin Italy 2006, DIWO @ the HTTP Gallery London 2007, New Media Scotland 2008, the Laguna Art Museum California and Alternator Gallery Canada 2009, Federation Square Melbourne 2010 and Transmediale Berlin 2011].
Her awards include the 2001 VIF Prize [Germany], the JavaMuseum Artist Of The Year 2001 [Germany], 2002 Newcastle New Media Poetry Prize [Australia], winner of the 2006 Site Specific Index Page Competition [Italy] and Burton Wonderland Gallery Winner 2010 [judged by Tim Burton, Australia]. Mez was a Vilém Flusser Theory Award 2011 nominee for her article set ‘_Social Tesseracting_’ and is the Executive Editor of the “_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_” project, a Synthetic Ecology Strategist, Consultant and Game Theorist.

ISEA art market

2011-07-07T14:44:00.000-07:00

ISEA2011 ISTANBUL ART MARKET AND INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING EVENT

ISEA2011 is happy to announce two Bosphorus Networking Cruises as part of this years symposium. Istanbul Sehir Hatlari AS is generously providing a boat for ISEA delegates & attendees to cruise the Bosphorus. The boat will travel at dusk one day while on the other it will float across the reflections of the city lights for an evening cruise. If you want to network, show your portfolio, know "who is doing what", get to know new people or just have a great time out this is the event for you.

July 06, 2011 - Istanbul

ISEA2011 Istanbul Art Market and International Networking Event

Sponsored by Istanbul Sehir Hatlari AS and in collaboration with Elektra

ISEA2011 Istanbul will be sponsored in part by Sehir Hatlari, the famous and much loved sea transportation company in Istanbul that carries millions of people every day across the Bosphorus between the Asian and European sides.

Sehir Hatlari will provide ISEA2011 Istanbul with a ferry boat that for two days, Wednesday September 14th (5pm to 8pm) and Monday September 19th (8:30pm to 11:30pm), will cruise the Bosphorus with hundreds of ISEA2011 participants.

The networking part of the event, that will allow ISEA 2011 participants to mingle and network with artists, curators, academics and operators in the area of the creative industries, is organized by Alain Thibault of Elektra, Montreal, together with Lanfranco Aceti, the ISEA2011 Istanbul Artistic Director and Conference Chair.

“It is a great opportunity working with Sehir Hatlari and with Alain Thibault from Elektra. Alain’s approach to the art fair is efficient, structured and focused, allowing people to make contacts and develop projects together. This is the reason why we wanted to work together with him and his team that has over 15 years of experience in the sector,” says Aceti.

On the boat, selected international presenters will be able to show their recent work and projects and seek/develop partnerships with art dealers, curators and sponsors.

“It is a also a great chance for young artists and people interested in the industry to network and have feedback on their activities and portfolios,” explained Aceti. “With the ISEA Ticket at 18 euros per person it is possible not only to attend the conference but also to participate in the two boat events. For this reason the ticket is very popular in that it ensures that young artists are involved as well.”

http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/

2011-06-26T17:22:00.000-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: STANZA
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru SurekStanza explores the realms of interactivity and networked spaces by using real-time data from security tracking data –such as CCTV cameras. Stanza’s artworks in LEA New Media Exhibition are participatory digital works and installations that manipulate real-time information to create real time interpretations of social spaces.Stanza is an internationally recognized artist, who has been exhibiting worldwide since 1984. His artworks have won prestigious painting prizes and ten first prize art awards including: Vida Life 6.0 First Prize, SeNef Grand Prix, Videobrasil First Prize. Stanza’s art has also been rewarded with a prestigious Nesta Dreamtime Award, an Arts Humanities Creative Fellowship and a Clarks bursary award. His artworks have been exhibited globally with over fifty exhibitions in the last five years including:- Venice Biennale: Victoria Albert Museum: Tate Britain: Mundo Urbano Madrid, New Forest Pavilion Artsway, State Museum, Novorsibirsk. Biennale of Sydney, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo Mexico, Plymouth Arts Centre, ICA London, Sao Paulo Biennale. His mediums include painting, video, prints, generative artworks and installations. Stanza is an expert in arts technology, CCTV, online networks, touch screens, environmental sensors, and interactive artworks. Recurring themes throughout his career include the urban landscape, surveillance culture and alienation in the city.
http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_stanza/

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: LIZE MOGEL
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru SurekLize Mogel’s “cartographic art” projects uses maps and mappings to produce new understandings of social and political issues. Re-Drawing Boundaries online exhibition presents Mogel’s artworks which traverse the boundaries between art, cartography, geography and activism.Lize Mogel is an interdisciplinary artist who works with the interstices between art and cultural geography. She has mapped public parks in Los Angeles; cultural migration patterns in Idaho; and future territorial disputes in the Arctic. Her recent projects rethink popular representations of the world as it is shaped by global economies. Exhibitions include the Sharjah Biennial, Gwangju Biennal, and the Pittsburgh Biennial, PS1’s Greater New York, Casco (Utrecht), HMKV (Dortmund), and Experimental Geography (touring). She is co-editor of the book/map collection An Atlas of Radical Cartography and co-curator of the related exhibition An Atlas. She frequently collaborates, and has worked with Alexis Bhagat, the Temporary Travel Office and Sarah Ross, the Center for Land Use Interpretation, and the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest. She has presented her work internationally including at the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, the Carnegie-Mellon University, and the Royal Danish Art Academy (Copenhagen). She has received grants from the Jerome Foundation, the LEF Foundation, the Graham Foundation, the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Danish Arts Council for her work

.http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_lize_mogel/

re-drawing boundaries week 2 is live with Sarah Williams and Carlo Ratti

2011-06-11T16:34:00.000-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: Carlo Ratti
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru Surek

Carlo Ratti’s projects in the Re-Drawing Boundaries online exhibition aims to investigate and anticipate how digital technologies are changing the way people live and their implications at the urban scale. Projects focuses on redefining the perimeters of architecture as dynamic interfaces between humans and the built environment.

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_carlo_ratti/

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Focus On: Sarah Williams
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul
LEA Editorial Assistant: Ebru Surek

Sarah Williams contributes to the Re-Drawing Boundaries online exhibition with visual displays of spatial information about contemporary cities and events. Data about space –Global Positioning System information, maps, high- and low-resolution satellite imagery, analytic graphics, photographs and drawings- combined with narratives and images to design compelling visual presentations about our world today.

http://www.leoalmanac.org/index.php/lea/exhibition/lea_new_media_exhibition_interview_with_sarah_williams/

important exhibition has just launched

2011-04-27T14:37:00.000-07:00

LEA New Media Exhibition
Re-Drawing Boundaries
Curator: Jeremy Hight
Senior Curators: Lanfranco Aceti and Christiane Paul

This exhibition presents key innovators in Locative Media, New Media and Mapping in a show that works to display not only fields and works but more of cross pollinations, progressions, the need to move beyond labels just like the importance of reconsidering borders on maps, what space is and what pragmatic tools and previous forms can do.

The selected artists are:

Kate Armstrong, Alan Bigelow, Louisa Bufardeci, Laura Beloff, J.R Carpenter, Jonah Brucker Cohen, Vuk Cosic, Fallen Fruit, Luka Frelih, Buckminster Fuller, Rolf Van Gelder, Natalie Jeremijenko, Carmin Kurasic, Paula Levine, Mez, Lize Mogel, Jason Nelson, Christian Nold, Esther Polak, Proboscis, Kate Pullinger, Carlo Ratti, Douglas Repetto, Teri Rueb, Stanza, Jen Southern, Kai Syng Tan, Jeffrey Valance, Sarah Willams, Jeremy Wood, Tim Wright.

We are in an age of cartographic awareness that is arguably unprecedented, but is of a malleable map, of layered spaces, of maps in new contexts. Boundaries are not the only things that are being reconsidered on maps: mapping systems and our base sense of space. It is how we see and share information, communicate, react and remember. The sea change is occurring right now and it is being led by the ideas of works of these radical thinkers and others who are making the static map and our sense of space open up.

The range of works in this exhibit have not only shown in Biennials in some cases or started whole fields of work in others, but more importantly, show in them a connectivity of exploration and practice between many people and works in differently named fields. Data is not just cold measure; place is not static; function can be many fold and startlingly so by intention. Space and location are not simply to be marked or named. There are histories, tensions, conflicts, stories, many types of data and ways of measure.

This show will exhibit 2 new important artists/practitioners each week from several different fields.

We begin with locative pioneer, Teri Rueb, and cross platform provocateur, Jonah Brucker Cohen. Both look at space, data and why we should be more aware and inquisitive but in very different styles and aesthetics.

Exhibition Schedule

Week 1: Jonah Brucker Cohen, Teri Rueb
Week 2: Carlo Ratti, Sarah Willams
Week 3: Stanza, Lize Mogel
Week 4: Jeremy Wood, Mez
Week 5: Rolf Van Gelder, Carmin Kurasic, Kai Syng Tan
Week 6: Jason Nelson, Vuk Cosic
Week 7: Kate Pullinger, Tim Wright
Week 8: Douglas Repetto, Alan Bigelow
Week 9: Christian Nold, Esther Polak
Week 10: Laura Beloff, J.R Carpenter
Week 11: Proboscis, Kate Armstrong
Week 12: Jen Southern, Buckminster Fuller
Week 13: Jeffrey Valance, Natalie Jeremijenko
Week 14: Fallen Fruit, Louisa Bufardeci
Week 15: Luka Frelih, Paula Levine

Follow LEA on:

Facebook
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/pages/Leonardo-Electronic-Almanac/209156896252

Flickr
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lea_gallery

Twitter
http://twitter.com/LEA_twitts

YouTube
http://www.youtube.com/user/LEAbroadcast

Vimeo
http://www.vimeo.com/leagallery

For more information contact:
Ozden Sahin, ozden.sahin@leoalmanac.org

malleable world

2011-03-15T13:43:00.000-07:00

A new city has emerged. This may be a bit of an obtuse thing to say, but it is true. It is a city of portal, of data, of wireless and network; it is both a fulfillment of decades of promise and deeply problematic. Sometimes Utopic and Dystopic elements arise in tandem in periods of great transition and flux.

This may be the convergence of the many threads of augmentation, space, communication, human need for expression and the rising digi space; Utopic and Dystopic constructions and dilemmas must fall away and in their place arise a paradigm shift and cohesion. . The city now for many is a city of one.

We must also stop and consider where our current paradigms have progressed from and where they may be going. We must also stop and think about the pitfalls and dangers we are currently facing in our age of cartography, augmentation and smart phones. We need to look closely at trends and events of the present, to consider near future possibilities, and to look back.

There is an ongoing tradition, a whole sort of hieroglyphic, textual system of markings: where to find food, where dangers are, etc. Historically, markings have long been left for other travelers along trails, train paths, and in other spaces. There also are augmentations of experience and woe such as the poems carved into the walls of the Angel Island immigration detention center which paint vivid portraits of pain, confusion, anger and sadness of many individuals stuck there between 1910 and 1940. These two examples both show a progression and thread in time and a dichotomy. Augmentation historically been used pragmatically and expressively, often in tandem. Creativity and deep necessity have worked in tandem.

The desire and need to augment spaces is as old as cities themselves and beyond. The cave paintings of Lascaux and other places were pictographic annotations as well as stylized data recorded in a space.

Some historians see some such works as accounting methods of hunting and others more of a pictorial narrative of a people. Is this artistic innovation and aesthetics working for a needed documentation? Yes. Could it be a scene witnessed and held in a space as a reminder? Sure. Is this series of images and inherent symbolism something that not only now gives deeper information into these space and the people, patterns and life there? Yes. Cathartic expression? Measure ?

The ruins of many ancient civilizations such as ancient Rome and Greece have included graffiti tags of groups of youth as well as dissent. The thing about letterforms is that they alone are sculptures, abstractions, pure form and color, yet they hold voice within. It is almost like a room full of dull jars that when lined together phonetically spoke. This is true of all written and spoken language, it is pictographic, it is sculptural, and it is systematized for functions ranged from clipped, practical; deeply complex and urgent amongst chaos, pain or crisis. Text is still quite an esoteric concept when taken out of day to day context and usage. We also have an ability to convey and read symbolism with deep acuity in images: singular or in sequence. Road signs illustrate the deep and base power of metaphor within image or image and text or numerical measure. Some even argue that in sleep we defrag our daily data dump of recall, stress, incompletion, sensory stimuli, tasks completed or emergent through a sieve of metaphor: r.e.m state and dreams. So, we process and communicate through typographic and pictorial symbolism and readings and we have long used them to augment spaces as well as to guide though them and raise commentary about them and people and events therein; so we see an emergent thread of augmentation integrated into interactions in spaces.

The desire to augment spaces often in the past has simply arisen from a need to survive and place warnings for others.

The markings placed on the rails that formulated the hobo alphabet (also referred to as “hobo code” or hobo marks”) included notes/signs/symbols of danger, shelter, food and commentary that are a direct lineage to geotagging, and AR. Iconography quite similar to a system of hieroglyphs was marked by others near railroads as an added layer of information and icons as indicators of both options and hazards to consider before moving on from that place. It also clearly was a form of graffiti in the sense of being abstracted typographic forms as well as shaped with acknowledged and systemized symbolism/portent as well as being created at a grassroots level as communication and survival. Much like the world of graf art, hobo code to has come to be appreciated for its form and stylistic emergence from bare necessity. The pictorial;/typographic lineage back to cave paintings also arguably can be tied to the origins of written language itself as a system of augmentation and forms connoting ideas and components of meaning arising out of necessity and survival.

These notations were symbols that created an important dialogue and use of iconography and its inherent metaphorical portent borne out of necessity especially in the time when those riding the rails was at its highest during the great depression when it is estimated that as many as 1 to 2 million in America took this chance and needed these augmentations along the way.

We can take this even further back.

A practice used by some when riding by carriage at night on nights with moonlight was to pour colored sand or rocks behind to form a linear colored mapping along the trail to hopefully not get lost. This evocative practice allowed a form of mapping to align along one’s path and on the ground. Before streetlights became common, it was quite difficult and dangerous to travel at night. Augmentation was for some the path where there then were no roads.

The roots of AR can also be taken back another thread in history and time. Morton Helig unfortunately is another classic archetype in the history of technology and innovation; he did not get his due and his ideas were not fully appreciated in their time and are not as well known now as deserved. In his 1955 paper, “ The Cinema of the Future” and “experience theater , Helig laid out his innovative ideas of theater as immersive, multi media and mixed reality in space.

His invention in 1960/61 of Sensorama is referenced by some as a precedent to V.R, which is true, but also limiting. Sitting in a small partially open booth watching films with sensory augmentations (smells, air blasts, movement matching those in the film) also predates mixed reality and AR. The work left the person still aware of being in two places at once and mixed the physical and the immersive/virtual (seeing a film in a semi goggle section of the booth). The fact that the funding failed to materialize for this brilliant work both in theory and in prototype is tragic, but unfortunately far from isolated. The desire for fusing experience and data moves beyond the sitting VR model to the desire for mixed reality, for awareness in the physical world and movement and moving though another experiental form and/or datascape. This leads back strongly to what he was interested in. This work now also sits at that precipice of the static body in the physical while moving through an augmented other; the current dystopic thread we must address.

Myron Krueger in 1974 developed a space of VR and AR called “Videoplace” that allowed users in different rooms to interact with one another as digital “shadows”.

The use of video cameras, projections and interactions of mixed spaces and forms was a key precedent to the feedback system of head mounted displays (HDM) and mixed reality. Now we see the active person in a space with an interactive data scape correlated to them , their actions and the space, this experimental work is a key point in the progression and again illustrates the power of a dual awareness, data space, interactivity, physical/digital interface and active movement and spatial awareness.

At this point, the line splits….

The first line drawn in time leads to works such as Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s “Hole in Space”.

This work connected people and spaces in two cities simultaneously as well as connecting the physical space and an image augmenting a connected space. The work saw people in New York and Los Angeles “seeing” not themselves reflected in window glass ( Lincoln Center for Performing Arts in N.Y and a Broadway store in L.A), but an image of the crowd in the other space. This 1980 work was part of an area of works that explored spaces, image, expectation , telepresence and the real in relation to the virtual. Other works did similar tech savvy interruptions and collisions of the semiotic of spaces such as elevators, hallways, storefronts, windows, mirrors etc… This crucially also led to working with spaces, information and adding (or in some cases actually subtracting) by augmentation. The wonder at the time was of the “magic mirror” of perception , space and simultaneity as well as of connectivity; a pragmatic space and its understood base function had through technology been transformed and interactions in two physical spaces (through the interface and digital) were linked. This also is not of passivity, of the removal from the physical into the digital, nor of intrusiveness.

Let’s take the other end of this splitting line a bit further back. The mid 1950’s saw the emergence of System Dynamics.

This key development looked at feedback loops, data, function and processes over time. Jay Forrester helped develop key core concepts while at M.I.T starting in 1956. The input/output model of data, interaction and process theory can be traced back to the late 1920’s and earlier, but System Dynamics moves this into more complex aspects of data, feedback loops and analysis of multi-faceted information and processes. In the early 70’s this moved also into global socioeconomics and later to many disparate areas of data analysis, study and visualization needs in process, thus moving from more management focus to global feedback loops and modeling. This is extremely important to the development of AR as both it led work into feedback loops and their visualizations and a new way of “reading” data and processes beyond static and setting the stage for later works with ecological data, historical data etc and locations in both Locative Media and Augmented Reality. Also, the feedback loop is the basic line of functionality of geo-spatial augmentation (map based AR) as well as head gear and cam based AR seeing the visual field and looping back spatial placement of graphical objects and information. This also leads to the growing field of screen based AR. Also we see data presented in flow, connectivity, flux, problem solving and tensions beyond pie charts etc. The nature of data is not static. It only appears so when clipped, isolated. It also needs to be analyzed from multiple valences, points of entry, contexts and in the sense of dual spaces be it literally so or in the case of the image above, in contexts, and between the hypothetical (another data space even if in the human mind and our calculations and speculative pattern formations and analysis) and the present physical location.

Buckminster Fuller is best known for his work with Geodesic domes, related mathematics and the Dymaxion Car and Dymaxion House, but he laid a key notion in place for spatial or geo-spatial AR. In 1962 Bucky proposed the Geoscope. This idea is so revolutionary that teams are working on its concepts and possible permutations now. He had the incredible foresight to understand the need for not just real time data visualization but also geo spatial augmentation, global connectivity, malleable visualization and information design as a mode for critical problem solving. Fuller had already developed the dymaxion house and car as well as his most well known work, that of geodesic domes. He also had a profound understanding of elemental forms (triangles), tensile strength, the need for adaptable architecture shown in geodesic domes and a desire to find “simple” solutions for complex problems in the world.

Concept drawing for GeoscopeGeoscope conceptual test model

This was something he had been thinking of for many years. His proposal essentially was of a huge functional globe with what we today would call clustered servers or even hive computing running augmentations live on the surface of this globe. The notion was that it was a way to see interconnected data and information from local to global on a geo-spatial platform.

We are seeing Fuller’s moment. We are seeing the emergence of multi layered live and stored data laid across maps, we are seeing more and more apps that allow greater augmentation. This is arguably the greatest period of cartographic awareness in human history. The move toward geo spatial global connectivity is exploding. The speed of signal and data access is layering spaces and allowing geo spatial searches as well as smarter information mapping. This also is the time of growing pains that comes with periods like this; the gaping dystopic maw of “the city of one” of people losing the physical for the data space is screaming the need for radical new considerations in city planning, architecture, data architectures, augmentation in relation to physical world distraction of passivity. The same paradigm that ignited locative media as a move beyond the passivity of virtual reality ten years ago is upon us. Now it is more urgent and more multi faceted as things push quickly.

Spatialized AR is now exploding as so many people have mapping software on their cell phones and companies are seeing the huge potential of what many google maps hacks have long been doing as well as works of Locative Media, Experimental Mapping and spatially aware AR. The move now is into multiple layers of options on these maps, of interactive and even open source functionality (build layers of augmentation and upload as others do to build more data and also communities of those interested in this).

What has exploded in the last year is the middle ground between AR that requires HMD which has long been the cutting edge of AR and the digital lines shown behind hockey pucks. One could compare it to a goalpost forming as two poles stand apart from each other. The screen based AR does not need the extreme speed and memory of head mounted displays as the feedback loop is far less complex . It also takes the desire to tag spaces and moves it to representations of spaces as well as of spaces as trigger points on devices (GPS). The commercial explosion is exciting, but also a bit troubling as the hype centered massively initially on the danger zone of all new cutting edge technology, especially as it enters quickly into the culture at large, the gadget factor of dancing hallmark card characters held up to computer cameras in the face of the hundreds of other deeper elements and applications already existing and being developed. This myopic sense can stigmatize and worse, freeze a long progression and deeper possibilities into a false singularity, a “oh, that thing“ sense of one aspect alone.

The upside is that what has so many parts in decades of cutting edge research may indeed be finding its time. AR in all forms is now being recognized and from HMD’s becoming lighter and lighter and faster, screen based apps moving into greater layering of functionality and processing sophistication to the spectre arising of AI elements of relative intuition coming into the fore (smart searches, learning curves with use).

Texting and driving is now in many areas the number one cause of accidents. Reports are emerging of an increasing data withdrawal disorder for lack of a better word being compared to going cold turkey from drugs. Studies are evaluating rising issues of continual data engagement affecting socialization skills as well as modes of communication. Much of this is of course likely overstated, but there is a root core that must be considered especially in light of the deep and logical progression of augmentation and data visualization that has led to this point from those cave paintings, hieroglyphs, hobo marks etc.

We also must reconsider how we move in cities. We must reconsider how we build cities. We must reconsider how data is experienced. We need advanced AR now. We need data aware architecture and city planning on a scale and scope never seen before. We need these things now. The screen is, for many now, a primary space. Once at a panel at Cal Arts the philosopher Jalal Toufic interrupted the discussion on photography, space, collective and singular memory and spaces to point out the camera whirring beside him, shooting video. He shouted to turn the camera off immediately. Heads turned and many were taken aback by this obtuse turn and utterance. He then pointed out that the one video (this was 1996) the sculptural slab of plastic in that machine was already deemed to be the artifact, the recall of this event. This meant that it superseded all else, held precedence as the actual moment superseded this recording of it, this arguably secondary data.

The comments, questions, discussions, physical space and people in that moment were functioning for the tape. His logic then was not so obtuse. The link could be made to the classic concept of a man with a camera filming an animal in the wild and the animal being on some level aware of being filmed and thus making these moments veined in an unreality, a change in awareness and action. Also in time the video would be the one thing (along with its reproductions and any secondary quotations or documentation of it from there on out) of these moments in its tangibility and the semantic/semiotic sense of authority so often given to objects, artifacts, “evidence” [not quite sure what you mean].

Reports are emerging of an increasing number of events where a tragedy unfolds in a public space and no one does anything to help, but many shoot cell phone video. This includes auto deaths and celebrities collapsing on stage doing lectures. Is this not the point Toufic was making? If the recording holds precedence, then the event (and its participants, willing or not) are deemed secondary.

This is only a portion of the people of the world but it is troubling. Our sense of space never has stayed static. Our modes of communication and expression have progressed over time. . The time is for deeper AR. The time is to (re)consider how we move in cities in an increasing simultaneity of digital space and physical space at once. The time is for apps to use varied forms of media, for projection technology to facilitate a new second space between HDM/Goggle AR and screen based with such things as partial projections in the field of vision or onto surfaces not just of screen. The time is to see more sophisticated AR apps on screen that allow great multi tasking live on screen. This may also be the moment of Architecture utilizing physical and data as a fused architecture that those art works like “hole in space” in the late 70’s and 80’s touched upon in their avant garde explorations. This is the time of the digital skinned city, of the data city and physical in tandem , but must it be a city of one at the cost of digital distraction into a singularity at times dangerously unaware of the physical world that surrounds us?

isea conference co-director..new essay...quirky weather..

2011-02-27T13:51:00.000-08:00

Sorry for not posting in a while.

I am now a co director for ISEA 2011 Istanbul as well as an editor. Been working on this , the exhibition for LEA with buckminster fuller and the amazing group of artists, working on a new weather collaboration with Jason Nelson, writing new fiction and looking for teaching gigs. Been busy.

It snowed here yesterday! I am in Studio City/North Hollywood so that is very rare. It first hailed for several hours from small low clouds then turned to soft hail or graupel and then the last burst came as soft snow. Was amazing to see it gather on palm fronds.

Happy to report that my latest essay has been published by the wonderful folks at NEME.

Malleable World
http://www.neme.org/1246/malleable-world

This essay looks at the current problems with screen based apps and how more and more people are doing things like walking into traffic and texting while driving. This brings up a crucial need to look at where we are at with screen based AR and apps in relation to both the history to this point and what must now be considered.

happy to announce I am an editor for Isea 2011

2011-01-04T10:48:00.000-08:00

http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/

ISEA 2011 Istanbul - Portal

Sabanci University

September 14, 2011 – September 21, 2011

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSION EXTENDED

NEW DEADLINE JANUARY 15, 2011

ISEA2011 Istanbul is the international festival of new media, electronic and digital arts. The 17th International Symposium on Electronic Art, a leading world conference and exhibition event for art, media and technology, is scheduled for September 14 to 21, 2011 in Istanbul, Turkey. The ISEA2011 Istanbul exhibition will coincide with the Istanbul Biennial and will provide a fantastic opportunity to showcase contemporary new media arts.

We invite proposals for panels, artworks, papers and workshops from artists, scientists and academics interested in how the digital and electronic media are re-shaping contemporary society and behaviors.

ISEA2011 Istanbul will be open to proposals encompassing a large range of topics under the general theme of interdisciplinarity at the intersection of Art, Science and Technology.

It is our intention to appeal to the hard sciences and the humanities as well as the art community.

For this reason ISEA2011 Istanbul will host a large variety of thematic strands ranging from digital art to curatorial studies, from electronic media to digital architecture, from the intersection of art, science and technology to the concept of the digital city, from digital humanities to social media, from nanotechnology and art to urban ecologies, from transculturalism to mobile art, and more.

ISEA International is a nonprofit organisation fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science and technology. The main activity of ISEA International is the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art. The Headquarters of ISEA is based at the University of Brighton, United Kingdom.
www.isea-web.org

Announcements


ISEA2011 Istanbul - EXTENDED DEADLINE JANUARY 15, 2011
ISEA2011 ISTANBUL EXTENDED DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS JANUARY 15, 2011
Posted: 2010-11-27	More...

ERASMUS FUNDING FOR PRESENTATIONS, ART TALKS, WORKSHOPS AND PANELS
ERASMUS within THE LIFE-LONG LEARNING PROGRAMME offers the possibility to academic staff to have funding for presenting papers at conferences and for doing workshops. ISEA2011 Istanbul and Sabanci University encourage academics and artists within academic institutions to apply for this funding source at their home university. Sabanci University, the organizer of ISEA2011 Istanbul, is supportive of international engagements and looks forward to developing new international links. The Erasmus grants cover 80% of travel expenses and offer a per diem of over 1,000 Euros for seven days attendance. For more information http://isea2011.sabanciuniv.edu/erasmus.html
Posted: 2010-11-21

CALL FOR 20 MINUTE PAPER PROPOSALS FOR ISEA2011 ISTANBUL CONFERENCE
ISEA2011 ISTANBUL invites proposals for 20 minute papers.

started new projects...

2010-10-25T22:30:00.000-07:00

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hight-other.blogspot.com /

Jeremy Hight Photography

http://hightphoto.blogspot.com/

hightphoto.blogspot.com/

ThisMeansNothing

hight-nothing.blogspot.com /

first is my photos and text on what is lost, forgetting, erasure and yet presence

second is photos

third is a playful new journal looking for images and writings on nothing, incompletion or design that is unfinished or misses the mark

otherwise will be publishing 2 new essays soon on the geo spatial internet

also will be in a book on my baby, locative narrative

and happy that my photos are the cover art and picture disk for a japanese experimental band

more detailed info soon

lost story from derelict blog drifting on the internet...

2010-10-18T19:01:00.000-07:00

freeblogs.com found this site left on the server derelict. Will be deleted as has not been updated in over 24 months. This document of the content of said site called “ Jameson's writing corner” is being sent to you in this text as a last warning before deletion.

Jan 7, 2004 11:42 p.m

Alrighty. Here it is. Hello to whoever is passing by. I am Jameson Hanson and this is my little attempt at a writing blog for my stuff. I hope this place will be a site for updates, inspiration and some good feedback. Sorry if this is short , but not really sure what you say on one of these things.

Jan 11, 2004 7:36 p.m

Got some progress on the thing..story I want to call it...but not now..not yet. Will post soon. Have about 3 pages so far. Not sure about a title. What the hell is a “blog” anyway? Sounds like the name of that thing that ate the hot dogs in ghost busters or something that dams up bogs in Ireland with fungus. Got curious and looked at how many “blogs” are out there. Millions? Does anyone read these then? If I wave am I waving at myself or will it be at others out there too? Is a blog an echo chamber or a branch? Enough rambling...will see how this goes, the cocktail of nerves and excitement here is surely up there with “like a knife through butter” and “aim for the fences kid” in the musty sweat sock smelling hall o' cliche's

Jan 14, 2004 11:47 p.m

wow...just wrote another chunk...not sure where it fits yet...

here is in the start of it in the third version as of tonight...would love some comments

the drizzle fell in drops light on the slight breeze as if an army of spider eggs . The odd thing about it was there also in the dark late night outside the window was what seemed a faint muttering,chattering as though of children playing some game. Ethan rose from bed and opened his window further and he heard it rising and Harris heard the rain falling a little lighter. It was late on a school night and heavy tropical showers had kept him up as they rolled across the valley.
The rain was a swirling drizzle when he heard an odd noise. It was of kids playing a game. Who would be out at 2 in the morning playing hide and go seek? It so distressed him and was so strange and out of place.His history homework was not done but he was too tired and had just laid down, eyes closed, waiting.lling in volume , all the while ever so slight How can that be? Who lets their kids play at 1 in the morning? What horrible parent would let that be?
The muttering was light, distant but he almost swore he heard the words “can” and “kick”.
Harris put his shoes on and his striped pajamas racing as lightly as he could down the stairs and to the front door. He opened it slowly as to not wake his father who was a light sleeper or his mother who sometimes was awakened by noises . He headed down the front yard on the hill , the door quickly but gingerly closed but not locked behind him and felt the drizzle swirl along his face. He began sprinting down the street and could not believe what he heard It is not getting any quieter.....or louder.!......those voices.....they...are everywhere...but so faint...how can … It hit him. Kick the can. That was a game he saw in old movies. No one played It anymore.

The drizzle began to turn to a cold rain, real rain, fat drops as he sprinted to the next block, then the next, and the next, and then as faintly as it started , the voices stopped, almost like they lifted back up into the clouds. Ethan went back home and after locking the door , went and changed and then went back to sleep while a heavy rain poured outside, a tropical downpour that the evening news had not predicted or mentioned at all.

Ethan went to the library at lunchtime and looked up any books or news reports on one of th school computers. For most of his 20 minutes spent passing on his sandwich and chips in his backpack nothing came up. Just lots of random sites and bad searches. Then he found 2 accounts. One very old.
One not old at all.

In Accounts of the unexplained , a book published in 1945 with a drawing on the cover of a cloud and a magnifying glass yellowed by the years he found this from the Aug,15,1942 Salina Gazzete:

that is all I have so far...I deleted the newspaper report I wrote tonight....it just feels too much...

Jan 23,2004 9:14 p.m

Work has been hectic lately. O.k that is a lie. I just have had no urge to write. Wow, hello old friend on that. So here I am posting here, one hand clapping or maybe someone else is reading these words here. What is a story if no one reads it? If no one writes it? Does it still have some shape, some blurry daydream, a fart in the mind of some stranger like me? Starting this story is like jogging from starting blocks made of solid ice, or some other amazing phrase that sparkles with diamonds (sarcasm).

Feb 18,2004 4:13 a.m

Got something on the line...the rusty fishing line made here I guess of zeroes and ones...
3 pages in one night. YES. Not wood chip or chum quality either. It is a story now to me, just need to flesh the sucker out. It looks at the idea of if storms pick up air and water and little bits of broken leaves and insects and rains them down why not conversations? Weird I know , but hang on (Ed, you one person out there who posted a comment last week..thank you). What if it floated for years in the air and one day sometimes echoed back to earth in the rain? What would that say about history and what we forget and don't know? Yeah, well makes sense to me, insert loudspeaker at restaurant voice..

clarity, party of one.

Feb 20,2004 3:17 a:m

up to 7 pages now. Words . Yes. Does not suck. Still grappling with the whole arc but it is coming along. Will take a break for a bit.

Saw a kid today standing in a empty field staring up at the clouds all by himself. I was walking back from mailing a letter and getting some exercise so I went up to him and asked him what he was looking at and waiting for (mind you..the “clouds” were a string of tiny dots..puny...miniscule.. like milk bottles thrown skyward)

he answered without looking at me

“rain”

odd kid

we haven't had rain in months

March 4, 2004 8:01 p.m

stuck again. sigh. Feels like I just made a place to break it here. The thing feels like a bunch of parts that do not go together...who wants to read that? What patchwork quilt or rag doll in the garage told a great story or at least a complete one? The idea seemed so good...still has some tiny lightning in its belly but just do not what to make of it now...to make it “whole” whatever that means

7pages of scraps makes good mulch, good kindling, amazing confetti waiting to be thrown when__________(insert sports team) wins the (big/great/good/first) game

still feel like there is potential to it.....

saw that kid again.....he was waiting for the bus in the rain as I left for work....(not that this has anything to do with his odd moments of hope in that field...I mean cmon' months have gone by....even a soup bone can have a drop in it )

March 15, 2004 10:12 p.m

can't ...seem....to..find...it...

March 16, 2004 2:27 a.m

So I wrote this story. Ok, it wasn't exactly a story but it had potential. It was a good 7 pages long I think. That is a good few steps down the road right? I mean how long a walk in the snow does it take before you can say you walked to school in a snowstorm years later in candlelight at some dinner or to some person next to you on a plane as you both tense up near a thunderstorm at 20 thousand feet? Is there a map for these things? Should there be? I wrote a story. It didn't write itself in little hands standing on tiny feet. It didn't punch a clock somewhere in the ether and work in shifts with a little locker to place its coat. I spent 4 months on it. I easily spent at least 2 nights till the sun came up just on the intro as I recall. I came to know those errors and little bright spots like they lived on my couch and ate my cereal while I slept. And now I still can't find it

Can a shlub kill an idea? Can a lost file be the death of something? Can something flee the worse fate of a mediocre mind and poor decisions like the man stopping as the car whooses through the red light to never go to that restaurant then or ever again...that street even.....saved.......as that place falls away to them like it never was on a map or a brick ? Is this evidence as such for this invisible crime or is it just late ..

March 16, 2004 6:45 p.m

Maybe the story decided it had enough of me , my indecision, my overuse of the word “converge” , perhaps it was due to gradual decline in attention. I admit wholeheartedly that if it was a fish it would have been near floating at the top of the bowl; I got stuck more and more, lost in what to do next. If there was a place all those socks went in dryers over the years then surely this text is having a drink on my tab at a table with striped gym socks , laughing it up with the left of the pair my dad drew a skull and crossbones on half jokingly when I had really bad athletes foot in 9th grade. Insert painting of sad clown at a piano … cliché of the day : “humor is the best medicine”

may it be true...

March 17, 2004 8:42 p.m

Dumped by a word file. Ouch. So the file is nowhere to be found. I checked everywhere, every nook and cranny from the common areas to the dumb named folders I made even to that mystery swamp of the cache (just a morass of cookies and stupid pictures I thought at some point were funny when I should have been writing..oh god...there it is again...writing ..oof..) I could have sworn that I saved it in 2 places. The panic is fading now. It is weird. It feels more like a sense of some pathetic calm, like a full bodied shoulder shrug. Eh oh well. But that is just part of the story. Man I wish it was that simple. Had a dream that a boat sank and I found it as the water turned to clear glass.

March 19, 2004 1:11 a.m

Surely was a work of genius. Well..So the story was going to be good. Seemed like a good start...was not a waste of paper. Oh hell I don't even know. I know that at 16 I would not have written it. I know at 18 it would have been grander and have a lot of clouds and maybe a unicorn for some rim shot irony. At 22 it would have been really poetic and about life like I actually really knew anything. But no one ever does, if they did we would just all attend their seminar and sit around globally scratching ourselves all day. Not happening. I have parts of it still in my head, will see if I can ever pluck them out.

I read once in a newspaper of a man named Joe Burg being on a ship that sank off of Alaska in 1960. Thing is he finally forgot about it and had a new wife talk him into a cruise in 1975. The tickets got messed up and were misprints and they were held up in line and forced to go back to reschedule. The Jamiaca trips were sold out. He ended up one morning out on the deck watching the waters bob and ebb along when it began to sink. It not only was almost in the same area as before but he found a pile of papers in the corner of the rescue boat and one had been an article looking back at the wreck before. He was in the picture.

March 25, 2004 6:18 p.m

I think the story that I lost is now some kind of weird artifact. I don't know. It has been 4 days now and the emotions are finally not on some stupid circus wheel any more in me. It is not like it had some great truth in its teeth, it did not even have a clear p.o.v and lost steam mid way in its tiny little body of seven “pages”. There is no police outline in the shape of a digital document floating out on the net or in this dusty cat hair covered lap top. There is no burial and there is no clear thing gone. The paragraphs at times weren't bad though. Like coaches say of chubby boys who strike out often on baseball teams under their breath (like mine did anyway) “well ..some potential there somewhere..must be or why the uniform all this time?” I watched distant storms while balls passed by me like dumb suburban comets. There was no potential except that I was big for my age and thus could simply hit far. Often they either would be foul balls or caught but when it was a homer..that rare time..it was gone. Sometimes though in that moment of some tiny glory it would go foul. Sometimes I crossed the plate and was called out. Then it was lost. Nothing. And hitting hard was all I could do. Erased.

Funny thing is this: if you threw a tape into a field and waited for years for someone to find it and let's say they did...and they played the odd half interesting music for a few friends who made a copy of this curiosity and then another friend made a few of this odd story he heard second hand and then months later it got into the hands or a blog peeople actually read...a music journalist and he or she writes of this odd curio. This artifact. This incomplete thing...lost ? Found? Authorless? And gave it praise....

would the story make the music better than it ever was as the mystery clouded the missed notes...

April 1, 2004 7:39 p.m

I found part of the story in another file. I emailed it to myself at 3 in the morning to save it. Funny that such a good idea only came to that text that once.

The old farmhouse of a Jim Fleet saw a thunderstorm rise up that night something fierce. It hit the high plains of Kansas with lightning by the armload and 6 inches of rain in 2 hours time. This reporter was there visiting the man doing a 3 part story on farming during war time and how the last few years had been for the best hog man in the state. I was staying in the back room when the storm hit at about midnight. It rained horses and steer that night, but that isn't why I am writing this. It is what happened next

The rain stopped all at once. The wind too. But the clouds out the window looked more stirred than before. A sound came in from the west, a low , quiet rumble, but not of thunder, but of almost a muttering. It sounded frail and weary and it as it passed overhead there was one flash of lightning, no rain and I swear I heard the words “ Civil War” and then a lot of sounds like a crowd and then it passed like that rain. Jim swears he heard it too. I offer no explanation. I just offer this question at the risk of my job at this fine paper? Are we alone on this?

The book said sadly no one replied to that question. The reporter kept his job, but was ridiculed for a few years by some in town. He never wrote of or spoke of that night again. Ethan sat at the computer, #14 at a little corner of a room built sometime in the 50's , a cavernous space to students, a tiny sanctuary to the 2 librarians when empty, a secret stockroom for one person that no one yet was aware of ,and now, at this moment, a constricting jumble of colors and words around one young man now trying to see some logic and connection to things.

Ethan stared at the aging computer's glowing face for a few moments more, then logged out and packed his things.

April 11, 2004 8:07 a.m
Here is another chunk I found a few hours ago in my junk folder..missed it somehow..not exactly sure where I was going ...will stick it here for now

By noon the first rain showers broke over the hills of New Mexico.
The desert sun hit the morning air drfting north from Mexico and a few tiny clouds puffed in the hills where at sunrise had been clear sky and a few thin mid level clouds lit rose red then yellow then away.
In New York it had rained all night with carriages passing puddles.

In what would become Los Angeles a freak storm dropped flooding summer rains.

In the Gulf of Mexico a ship was sinking in a soon to be tropical storm, its sails fraying, the wooden craft gulping water on its deck as if a thirst had overcome it during the morning hours amidst the gales.
The crew abandoned ship and one uttered these words “ this is not my fate, it will not be”.

This was August 24, 1855. Late morning. These times and moments were not recorded, not written of, not passed on in any oral tradition. They happened, and then were gone.

The part about the ships I am guessing was some bright idea of mine to take the reader to a point in time in a ship's log, some incidental moment and let it float in rain back .confuses me now though and that ain't a good sign. This is just confusing. The idea of a log of something never written is cool but makes no sense. I guess this was when I had that bad fish and when the cat had gas. I remember rushing things a lot. Had to. I honestly wish I had not found this.

April 15, 2004 9:33 p.m

This next one somehow stuck to the end of an email sent to my aunt about her dog being sick..must have somehow hit paste by accident when the phone rang or something (notice how the writing quality and focus trails off here....think this was about to edited about..yeah..pretty sure..hope so anyway)

Ethan rushed to class taking a few bites of his sandwich. As he arrived late his 5th period teacher talking about math equations and the coming quiz.
“ glad you are joining us mr onton ., so..back to chapter 9 and statistic calculations....look at the graph on page 147 …. we see that the pattern begins to emerge within the...”
The lecture went on and Ethan half paid attention, distracted, tired. The quiz was easy and ended the class for him on a sort of waking from a dream after spending so much time at lunch in his own head and what he read.
Ethan walked to his 6th period English class in the crushing crowds and hot late spring sun in a clear day. The rain may as well have never happened. The late season storm left no traces, especially on this hot boring afternoon as rote as any Wednesday, as droning as the arc to class the before. The hallway had the same fliers fading a bit from earlier bake sales, car washes , football games and other events that to Ethan meant about as much as a flood in South Africa, the price of gum in 1925 or gossip about some actor, nothing at all.

Wow not even the same font. Good one sloppy joe. I don't even remember that part at all.
The character shifts name too I see , nice. Ethan. Eesh. Sounds like a kid who would always have better clothes than you, would wear nice sweaters and have hair that was just perfect even in the awkward years. That character name would steal your girl and take her in his convertible in some flashy color and that would be it for you with her. Harris on the other hand sounds like a kid in a 50's tv show to me (yeah, I know , I wrote it, but it was him, that me a few months ago, lazy bum, what a mess).
Wow I sure thought I was a poet in that last crumb eh? Mr wordsmith fancypants mctypy the third in a beret and monocle. Writer in all capital letters.

The piece of the story is no gem either. The voice gets too fancy and full of its own purple prose.the kid gets lost in generic hallways and rooms with quirky , angry teachers just to make some point.
It rode in the bowels of a polite breezy note about dogs and how nice the last family gathering was.
So. here I am. Writing about a lost story and now I kind of shot myself in the old foot didn't I? Found bits of that stinky thing and there they are. Cut and paste. I actually thought I had an idea again. Let's write about losing something as writing. Now I have pieces of some failure stinking up my file and a dead end again. Peachy.

Remember when they found Al Capone's Vault? A bunch of wet paper and mud....

Mar 18, 2004 3:07 a.m

So when I was 14 I wrote little poems in my dream journal. The thing was a gift from some relative's new girlfriend that heard I was that weird kid. It had a quill pen. Yep. A quill pen. Sentiment was nice but man. I at first just killed june bugs and spiders with it (it was heavy for a little thing). That summer I thought oh what the hell. Scrawled little doodles while listening to music and little cartoons of teachers, then a weird dream once in a while to tell my friends and not forget. Then a little poem. Then another. They seemed so urgent unlike the doodles. Had to come out. I wanted to be a scientist then. Stare at clouds all day. The world made one when I learned about war atrocities in 4th period. A girl made one when she threw my candygram on valentines in the trash. Another plopped out when I first saw a funnel cloud in a storm. They are long gone. The writing was well...14 cmon. Bad. But it came.

At 18 I was in college and decided to be a writer. My family took the news basically as well as if I said I wanted to be a historian at the Jack the Ripper Museum (is there one?) or a drummer in a styx cover band. Not well. I told my family at christmas at Grandma's right when we all were eating pie.
It seemed like a good strategy.

Grandma seemed to move in slow motion that Christmas as her hot cocoa flew out of her hands and she muttered over her shawl (was chilly-ish) “noooooooooooooooo!” like in a horror movie or buddy cop movie as bullets fly or axes, whatever. I had people tell me give up or that romance novels were great on the toilet or on airplanes (uh,ok, thanks?). My other grandma kept clipping out ads in newspapers for refrigerator repairmen gigs and beekeepers. A real subtle hint there. I wrote poems on a creaky old typewriter, not for effect but as it was all we had. I first had to shake the dead bugs out of it. The keys would stick like a smushed spider all the time and it smeared. I thought I knew what I was doing. Ha. At least I was trying. My dad looked at me clicking on it sometimes like I was in heels doing a flashdance recital or wrestling the dog. The look pretty much said...oh man....

Writer. When can someone safely call themselves that? It rings with so much pretension that it makes me want to make myself eat a cake made in the shape of berets with chocolate monocles on top until my mind spins to how the last bites were just jaws and teeth. Yep

March 22, 2004 4:45 a.m
My grandmother passed away when I was in my mid twenties and had moved back to go to school to be a writer again. This time was for creative writing only and not papers.
was sitting at the kitchen table one dull hot evening when my dad came by, stone faced, and dropped off a wrinkled manila envelope , hugged me slightly and left. My room mates were all in night class and it was so quiet. I poured the contents out, the bent fake brass little arm of the clasp falling off as out came 4 photos, a songbook from 1929 that sat always on top of her piano and a small book. The book was the first story I published in a little school journal. It was about death. Signed love Jameson (me) in smeary blue pen. I wrote it at 20. Like I knew.
It came back to me in a bag. All I knew was just this thud, this dumb little naïve thud. The air was so quiet. I read a few lines and had to stop. A photo came out. It was her sitting in some fold out plastic chair in some crowd in some moment back when. Her smile was wide and her dress was humble and sweet in a simple light blue. By her collar she had pinned a simple fabric flower. It was slightly crooked, a light red and it was her. I saw right then and there 5 years of my writing blip away in my head, not literally but just in how meaningless it all was, over reaching, crushed , as it should into powder, by the line of one edge of that little bloom. I knew nothing.

Those things were more than I will ever be. That moment probably lost a third of its mass and weight in this thin attempt at retelling

June, 23, 2004 5:14 p.m
So here I am again. There you are. I do not have those dumb ambitions anymore. I am not dead inside either. I don't dream into a journal and I don't shut down. The story I lost and now kind of found again and kind of did not is the first in many years. I finished school ten years ago. It is hot and my cat is asleep snoring like a biker that once sat next to me on a bus for 12 hours. Loud and thick. My television is blipping on about a power outage. Not here . Not now. Hit save. Why? Whatever.

August 9, 2004 4:55 am

Why does anyone write things down? Am I popping a zit of some old arrogance by even trying?

Jan 1, 2005
So this little shack is still here. Windows are intact but nobody home. The one comment back when turned out to be a spammer. Tossing coins into wormholes=”blogs” and writing it is now so clear. No wonder this site was free. Why pay to piss letters down a hole? The rent on crashed things should be low too. You ever seen those places out in the desert? Those shacks next to the place with rusting airplanes? You. Funny. One stop back here in a bad stretch and right back to that. Here's to you spambot that posted a nice comment that was actually a link to some site selling fake jewels. So kind ed really , you shouldn't have. History is for the dead: bums and failures and all the goldfish from county fairs in bags for a coin toss. rain will fall , always did and will, and will only wash things away.

Nothing more. Story over.

Our records show that client then logged in 67 times after last date but posted and deleted all
end record

now new media curator for leonardo online and about to show unseen works of Buckminster Fuller and works of 31 other innovators

2010-08-30T14:16:00.000-07:00

Alumnus Jeremy Hight Joins MIT Press as new media curator for lea and editor

from interview:

24700: Tell us about the upcoming exhibition you’re curating, (RE)Drawing Boundaries.

JH: Yes. I have developed it since early June and it now has 32 innovators in new media art, locative media art, mapping art and experimental cartography. It has the heads of Visualization labs in experimental mapping at Columbia and MIT as well as pioneers and leading figures in art. The idea of the show is to both show where we have come and where we are heading in terms of space, and measure creatively, especially in this age of GPS and Google Maps, etc. and how the borders between fields of art are problematic and can be limiting.

24700: You mentioned that there are a few CalArtians featured in the exhibit. Who are they and what works have they contributed?

JH: Yes! Very happy to see amazing work from people I went to school with. Laura Belloff (Critical Studies & Integrated Media MFA 98) is contributing her works with wearable sculptures with environmental awareness and semi-Dada commentary on social media. Lize Mogel (MFA 98) is contributing some of her amazing mapping work that raises key global issues. Douglas Repetto (Music MFA 97) has several pieces from his work running a lab at Columbia that show his range in building and in creating commentary in terms of place and measure.

cartoon series I am making by messing with demo..please watch..absurd funny break from serious

2010-05-16T15:06:00.000-07:00

short image and text work just made of shots of salton sea and its complex face in time

2010-05-03T00:27:00.000-07:00

great interview with me by Greg Smith in Serial Consign

2010-04-25T22:54:00.000-07:00

snip of great interview with me at Serial Consign

http://serialconsign.com/2010/04/jeremy-hight-interview

Greg J. Smith: As a point of entry into this discussion, could you briefly describe your background with locative media — how did you start working within and considering this field?

Jeremy Hight: I came to it both as a writer, designer and an almost Meteorologist. It is a funky combo but let me explain. I was going to be a research Meteorologist working with making immersive and interactive 3D models of hypothetical weather events. That was the dream from about 11 or 12 till my last year of high school. I read every book I could find on any aspects of meteorology, climatology, related stories, historical accounts and pattern recognition in data over time from different contexts. The weather amazed me as a little kid (still does ) both for moments of detail, excitement or beauty and for its sheer complexity and amazing sort of physical narratives. It could be a single tiny cloud on a spring day or a thunderstorm being the one every few summers to survive the trip across all the deserts from an afternoon in western Arizona to arrive in the early morning hours here in Los Angeles. The high based thunderstorms were veined with lighting amidst the darkness of night, sometimes with the first hues of morning beginning on the eastern horizon; they also were stories to me, architectures. They moved across locations on the weather map as well as into experiences like the one of this boy (me) sitting in a front yard as everyone slept watching their slow, quietly majestic approach.

I had the PhD application for the University of Colorado at Boulder in my drawer at 14. I would take it out, almost pet it like a cat, someday… someday… I began publishing poems in school magazines at 15 or so and more than that surface blip of tiny recognition, I always was equally passionate about writing stories and the origins of language. I even wrote stories as a kid about some fantastic storm to hide away for some future me to find in some corner as an artifact during some dull clear day. It is funny now, but then it was wonderful and pushed me in elementary school on to write fiction and poetry more and more (how to capture some piece of those storms, those places…)

After graduating high school, I studied Literature and Creative writing and began teaching myself design and studying more and more art. I kept wondering how you could push narrative in interesting ways spatially and in new forms that tied to something else, something of science or history or something not in the canon. I was 19 or so when I when I walked across a parking lot after a fiction class stressing out about how to be experimental and still have those elements of "traditional" writing, a way to push text and space on the page (or off somehow) and still maintain a depth of narrative or layers.

It seemed absolutely impossible. I started doing things like running pages of old magazines from my grandmother's house as paper in my typewriter and working on new fonts. This was fun and exciting and began to make me wonder about what more this could do. I looked into writing on hills before storms, of making a novel that was just drawers of objects in a dresser, a sort of physical novel with "chapters" in the drawers but no text, just photos, buttons, ephemera. I started sketching stories as being made in museums from their signage linked throughout the building with directional arrows to take those utilitarian texts and reconstitute them as one moved.I planned how to write something and then leave it in the ghost town buildings near Route 66. I started writing poems that used multiple layers of parenthesis and brackets to form multiple readings kind of like code around that time too. It felt closer but not quite where I wanted to go.

In grad school at Cal Arts I made a web magazine that was triggered by storm images being rolled over with the mouse but needed more submissions to run it as I wanted. That was intriguing though. I started work on a book I am still working on off an on that analyzes language and text through the lens of meteorology, flux, patterns and shifts in time as independent study. My thesis project was what seemed to be a large painting in a black frame. I had read a lot of Roland Barthes and had my mind blown by his concept of the "Death of the Author" as I had been writing about something similar for a while and could not pin it down. The "painting" was a boy standing by a tractor with clouds behind him in the desert with some text. It was designed to be an illusion. The images were first shot in the desert on video, edited into frames in director and then printed on clear plastic with the backs painted with semi opaque white paint to give the illusion of brush strokes. When someone approached it there was a sign next to it that said to open it. The frame was actually hinged like a window and as you lifted it up you lifted the boy (the main part of the image and anchor of its asymmetrical composition) away. At that point, the text began moving behind the clouds; it was a short short of me watching storms as a boy and was being triggered by a simple motor hidden inside. When the person was done experiencing it/agitating it into being they closed the hinge at it stopped at some random point in the text (it rolled like the music on old player pianos) and appeared to be a painting. Experience was the interface and the work was never to be linear or "complete". Now I felt like I was getting closer.

In my last year of Cal Arts I started making notes of possible narratives that took hypertext and pushed it also into videos in hidden rooms in a text, of audio subtexts within a certain word if rolled over and of these being within floor plans and then rooms, of spatializing narrative. After I graduated, Jeff Knowlton called me and said he had an idea for a project looking at the similarities between GPS and railroads in early cities. This was late 2000, around Christmas and I knew there was something there. As we began researching the history of Los Angeles I first realized that with GPS you could write with the physical world. I then realized that it was much more important that with GPS and location specific information places could "speak" finally; lost histories and areas of study otherwise elsewhere in books could be right there. This to me was something really wild that I knew needed to be explored. As we were developing the project I began thinking more and more also about interface, maps and what else might be possible.

34 North 118 West

GJS: …and this of course set the stage for your 34 North 118 West project (pictured above). You've described this piece as addressing "the early history of the telecommunications and transportation industries" as told by 6 voices in what might be described as a GPS novel. How did this project inform your research and thinking about space and narrative?

JH: I did things in developing it like laying out the historical narratives on a map and moving them around to see the experiential interface, to see not any line or traditional sequence like when I work as an editor, especially at a literary magazine. This was really interesting as I worked for months to see how to leave it open and imagine all the paths people might take and lengths of time they might spend. This was really exciting as I saw back to Barthes and Milorad Pavić and mostly saw the place tellings its stories so to speak with this.

One bit that we recorded but unfortunately were not able to place in the streets, map and project was a bit that to me told so much about this possible locative narrative. The analogy was of putting a needle on a record, but at random. The needle is a point, a place and it moves and the record is also a place and it moves, yet both can be held still. When you drop that needle and that random sound emerges it was recorded at a specific time, and of a certain moment, people playing etc, but it also defies time as long as it can be heard, or triggered really. So… a place is the same, and any place has many such moments, people, places, events and they can be also be subtle, humble, quiet, and yet important. We used to talk to people about 34 North… as also a story of the quiet moments, lost moments and their resonance and how it could even be the hidden ones, suppressed ones, or what what was not seen as "history" by the media or the sexy semiotic of celebrity and big events. What about local people ? What about jobs no one remembers? What of the Latina women in the 1940s who helped build a city and no one remembers them now? A city can have a botoxed face, the past can often be obscured or lost. I walked out of the Downtown library one afternoon dazed after hours of looking at microfiche of newspaper articles from the early 20th century. It hit me finally with full force that this was not only a new kind of writing (progressing from many other forms of course… not out of the blue) but more so it was to give places a voice. It was an odd feeling seeing something so big and knowing that it does not exist yet and how grandiose it would sound to call it such.

GJS: One of the most exciting passages in Writing Within the Map sketches out the history of iconography and mark making as a spatial discourse that allows travellers to share insights about the same site across time. Making trails, leaving warnings, scrawling graffiti or even creating cave paintings all bundle together as means by which humans annotate their experiences with places. How would you contextualize emerging augmented reality (AR) tools and applications given this extended history of location-specific mark making?

JH: Ah, great question. Well, we are seeing a new period just emerging of location awareness and annotation/augmentation, but also of the map and of augmentation both of spaces and the map itself. It is very exciting and I have waited 11 years for this to happen. Will see how it all plays out. We now are seeing many people annotate maps with photos online as a few years ago we saw this in locations with GPS. We are seeing the hikers that marked trails on signs translate more and more to ways to notate things like good bike trails in the hills both to follow in real space and increasingly on maps as well to see at home and then follow. Communities are building along such things. We are now seeing streams of live data on maps and bundling of multiple online activities at once. This is beginning to move into a deeper and more immersive interface and into the rich possibilities of multiple annotations, simultaneous and dynamic annotations and archiving that is to be geospatial. The tantalizing big what if may end up being a spatial Internet altogether, no longer of inaccurate spider programs like a google search but an intuitive interface that learns as you use it and can lay out answers to your queries on maps as well as with related video streams, images, etc. The possibilities are astounding. We also are seeing what really excites me as a writer and researcher which is new ways to write and publish within maps and their augmentations, so not just locative narrative but even as I mention in the essay, a literary journal in the augmentation where Route 66 once ran or inside an immersive visualization of an abandoned building that is placed on its space in the map. These are wild new places and very exciting.

Pranav Mistry - Sixth Sense

GJS: Could you identify and contextualize some contemporary AR applications or mapping projects that you consider particularly rich - what do you consider to be some exciting contemporary projects?

JH: It is a very exciting time right now. You are seeing apps popping up all over the place that were only speculative theory a year ago.

Layar is huge as it opens a thousand doors and is a massive step into the wilder areas becoming inter-connected and growing. ARwave is another giant door opening and it will allow publication within maps and layers as opposed to the popular concept of augmentation as being an added layer (i.e. single layer only). Sixth Sense [pictured above] and its use of a projector is one of those so complex it is simple works that show how great leaps come often with older concepts and tech as inspiration for new interface.

Imawik(imagewiki) is the visual search I have been writing about for several years come to fruition. The ImageWiki is a visual search tool for mobile devices – it creates the ability to turn images into physical hyperlinks.

I really love your image from Kosmograd [photo-collages by Sergei Larenkov], I also really dig Phantom City. That is the idea that is so key to layers in history as a database and multiple layers in a place. Places have histories, stories, people, local communities, layers of architecture over time etc etc… this is a place being given voice as in locative narrative, but now the technology can soon tell many stories, make a place its own database of its rich information and we can then visually search from this sort of map as internet. Also a place can be layered with artworks and stories as well as layers of past history and architecture. This is fascinating and very important. These ideas and projects will become even more rich and nuanced and in multiple layers. The more works that are made and the more voices of place we are able to build and "read".

GJS: Another provocative soundbite from Writing Within the Map reads as follow: "The newsstand is to also be within that red dot. You are here." As a symbol the red dot (and perhaps "x marks the spot") is universally understood but I'm wondering if you can unpack the significances of the newsstand and describe how it relates to the intersection of location and narrative.

JH: Absolutely. The newsstand is both a location, archive and interface. It was a place to go to (still is ) to get the news, to be entertained, to look for something in different areas of interest that is text or text and image. The newsstand also is a point on a street, in a city or town where many come by choice for the experience, ease and particular selections and availability. The map soon must be this. My earlier paper Immersive Sight looked at locative narrative and augmented reality as needing to see the pre-existing model of the eye to cerebral cortex as a strong example of interface, multi-layered data, interaction, fast processing speed and archive as active.

The same is true for something that is complex and endangered by current buzz and hype (which can also be poisons if over-saturating into backlash and sending a myopic dumbed down sense of what is possible at the same time) like AR and mapping as interface and archive. The newsstand is a great example of something that seems simple but is much more layered based on your interaction and shows that these new things are not out of the ether and hopefully will help show that they are not sent to kill the old like the fears historically of so many new technologies, tools and forms

Everyblock - Interface

[Everyblock Los Angles - interface ]

GJS: It is kind of odd to start reconsidering simple sites like the newspaper box, or corner newsstand in light of mobile technology and "pins on a map" because these were venues that accommodated very specific distribution and social function for decades - and they were definitely taken for granted. Now they seem quaint, not unlike the image of newsboy hollering headlines on a street corner to hawk papers at the beginning of the 20th century. If we start to consider the newsstand as an object that is manifested within the granular, red dot on a map or the infinitely customizable RSS reader on a phone (a moving target), where do traditional models of print media fit into your vision of the near future?

JH: Yes, that very oddness is to me an important point. What seemed odd before was to compare AR and processor speed issues, massive data sets, multi-tiered immersion and complex issues of semiotics and movement with a look at the quaint old eyeball but it is a succinct model of what is needed, a metaphor and cross reference at once. The news stand at one time was a node, an archive (albeit current info), a stream of possible avenues of data if one perused and an augmented spot often within a larger architecture of a store front or just in front of it, a "hot spot" in a crude sense. Data needs to be more dynamic, maps need to be more dynamic, data streams in locations need to be options with user end adaptability and choice. The near future will increasingly see map points streaming data like plumes and they will be ribboned on to places and maps as desired, as channels of overlay with almost infinite range.

That quaint little news stand had a range and was a spot full of data. Now imagine this being overlaid over landscapes and your internet is not a google search but an increasingly intuitive search that learns as you use it and lays out active data and icons as you wish.

This also has a crucial function as I laid out in another essay Rhizomatic Cartography in crises like the recent massive quakes and Hurricane Katrina. The news as we know it is slow and blogs and twitter feeds are increasingly the fast and crucial streams of information during such events. Doesn't it make sense to place these spatially so people can know what is happening and where, even down to a street by street (live) level as happened in the flooding parishes in New Orleans; wouldn't this also lead to faster, more accurate and localized assistance?

GJS: You just participated in the "The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences" at the O'Reilly Where 2.0 conference and presented the ARWave project (with Tish Shute, Joe Lamantia, Sophia Parafina, and Anselm Hook). How was this conversation?

JH: It was very interesting. We each come at AR ( and maps and real time and layered information) from very different places. It is a confluence and nexus which to me makes a lot of sense. Tish comes from a background in motion graphics initially and graphic effects, Anselm comes from art as well as gaming, Sophia comes from coding, science, GIS and geography and Joe comes from information architecture, design and tech consulting. We have all been interested in AR for a while.

The format was such that we had a quick discourse (5 min each), but the sense of passion in each speech and the manner in which these components come together was exciting. AR is exploding now and as someone who has known its huge potential for over ten years it is a wild time but also one to watch with caution.

The rush to monetize must not create a sense of one dimension as being what is on the table. The need also is to see that there is not a backlash as people see this one common conception of AR and see the other threads and developments as hype. I saw this happen to a degree in VR and then in Locative Media. Locative Media is now so much more than providing information while fishing or driving directions in a car, it also is ubiquitous. When we did 34 North 118 West it was one of a few experiments; this is happening now in AR too even while many see things like Hallmark cards you hold up to your computer camera. The future is wide open. It also, like in so many moments in the past (motion pictures, radio, television, cable television, the net itself…), is one where we are to see those wild experiments grow roots, cojoin, fuse and eventually lead to things far beyond what at the time seemed even possible. It is all a progression. It always is, always will be.

Where 2.0, MIT,AR

2010-04-04T12:13:00.000-07:00

Had a good time at Where 2.0. It was interesting to see so many start ups building on what we folks in Locative Media have been up to since around 2002/2003. The question will be if we see Ar and mapping augmentations move past the single layer apps and social media into where it gets really interesting and layered.

If you think about it, we are seeing a historical (potential)confluence of cloud computing, social networking, AR, GIS,GPS and mapping tools and their augmentations and interface design.

It is a funny feeling though, sitting here 3 days later, mentally digesting it all. What will come of the potential massive nexus and confluence? Will it pass by as has happened in other such watershed moments in technology? Will the buzz and hype congeal into some mad singularity of animations on birthday cards and one off gimmicks by magazines on a sort of digital hula hoop party while the now 3 primary nodes of AR (base augmentations of ads and data in sporting events, experimental graphic goggle interface mixed reality and the new player on map augmentations) move on beneath? Or will it push this all into increasing layers and towards a, dare I say it, web 3.0????

Time will tell.

This is a historic moment though. There is no question.

It also is a crossroads....

At any rate, AR is out of the shed and getting its due finally.

I am happy to announce that as a contributing editor for MIT press' LEA , we will be doing a special issue on AR and its potential in terms of history,sociology,commentary, modulation of the map etc.... more soon

Writing Within the Map

2010-03-04T20:49:00.000-08:00

Why not be able to search a place for its stories, its poetry, and its metaphors and why not be able to select what you desire as well as be able to create such things specifically for this place itself?

http://www.neme.org/main/1111/writing-within-the-map

Publication has historically been a distribution system of printing press, audience and release of finished works. This has led to many variant developments in the past that have attempted to move this system into new paradigms,tributaries, or complete erasures into new modes. It is important to avoid the “rise, rise young lions” notion of how the new must topple the old and the construct that one must progress through radical means to “solve” the older functionalities. It is not this; it is that, as new possibilities emerge that can enhance and newer tools come into being that allow deeper levels; it is logical to explore them and to open those new tributaries. The book is not dead, nor should it be. The library does not need to be shuttered as a relic, a museum piece or traces in aging photographs. The internet too, as shiny as it may seem in comparison in these times, will someday be seen as a veritable steam ship in relation to what will come in some future present.

To “read” a place is no longer about placing a singular narrative upon it, triggered from a map, nor is this notion of “reading” only to have a singular, unalterable experience or interpretation. To “publish” has long been a general association of taking a work and finding a print or web space for it to be presented as more than just a work in progress. This has also long been problematic as well as a gross oversimplification. To “publish” is also self publication and distribution in communities or like minded groups without the hard read of publication or rejection. Well, aren’t cities the same? Aren’t all places to be interpreted as such? Doesn’t this give rise to a need for a more malleable , variant, multi-tiered sense of presentation of texts and narratives?

will be on panel at Where 2.0 The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences

2010-02-05T15:57:00.000-08:00

The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences
Tish Shute (Ugotrade), whurley * (whurleyvision llc), Jeremy Hight (Mission College, CA), Joe Lamantia (Media Catalyst), Thomas Wrobel (Lost Again)
3:15pm Thursday, 04/01/2010
Mobile
Location: Ballroom IV

This panel will discuss shared augmented realities, considering some of the essential possibilities and challenges inherent in this new class of social augmented experiences. The format is presentation of a small set of scenarios (defined in advance, with audience input) describing likely future forms of shared augmented realities at differing scales of social engagement for discussion by a panel of leading practitioners in technology, experience design, networked urbanism, interface design, game design, and augmented reality.

Current augmented reality experiences put who you are, where you are, what you are doing, and what is around you at center stage. But we can already look beyond the first stage of interactions assuming a single user seeing simple arrows and tags indicating POIs, and begin to explore shared (multiuser/multisource) augmented realities.

These social augmented experiences will allow not only mashups, & multisource data flows, but dynamic overlays (not limited to 3d), created by distributed groups of users, linked to location/place/time, and syndicated to people who wish to engage with the experience by viewing and co-creating elements for their own goals and benefit.

Some examples of scenarios could include:

- historical and environmental overlays showing how a city used to be/and how this vision may be constructed differently by different communities

- proposed buildings in communities showing future changes to a structure/neighborhood, and the negotiations of this future

- sensors, both mobile and static can contribute environmental data into city overlays making this kind of data “not back story but fore story,” right where we are, right where it happens, as well as having it available for analysis.

- skinning the world with interactive fantasies

- real time augmentation building

- geo-spatial real time news dissemination from points in a city with time demarcation for information and emergency services

Having invisible aspects of the world made visible will create ways to improve sustainability, social equity, urban management, energy efficiency, public health, and allow communities to understand and become active participants in the ecosystems and infrastructure of their neighborhoods.

A distributed, open framework for AR can enable these layers, datasets, and open interchanges via shared augmented realities to create an interconnected experience of AR that fuses augmentation, data overlays, and varied media with immediate geo-spatial access and, perhaps most importantly, social & collaborative capabilities. Looking ahead, an open framework would allow end users to extend the reach and increase the value of augmented social channels over time.

The challenge of shared augmented realities is not just a matter of shipping bits around, but also of how it we will understand and use these new channels and layers to create and negotiate different perspectives, understand a shared core, or express dissent, in order to build eventual consensus.

There are endless possibilities for distributed, open AR, and the connection of place into an active field of information with end user control…and open options for new layers will have impact across all social scales, from direct conversations, to small-scale collaboration (a product design & build team or a neighborhood fixing potholes), to global a community mobilizing for a cause.

While shared augmented realities in immersive 3D may still be a ways off, new webs of protocol for real time communication like Wave are demonstrating that we can use existing infrastructure and protocols for distributed augmented realities that can allow people to collaborate together on the same world overlay in real time – creating dynamic overlays, animated by time, conditions (see AR Wave ).

The integration of augmented reality with sensor networks, the internet, and the world wide web will create a new opportunities to for us to engage collectively with the complex and often invisible ecosystems that make up our world.

eg.

- interacting/responding/enhancing environmental data - new connections/understandings between humans that share our world – fish, plants, waterways - “reading” of places and their data otherwise unseen with shared data allowing greater analysis and awareness in real time and in data analysis

Perhaps one of the most interesting features in Wave is (and will be in AR Wave) the ability to playback overlay data from a previous time in context (for example, environmental data from a year ago) – see writing as real time performance

We will set up a participatory web site to accompany the panel called, “What would you add to the world?” Conference attendees will be asked to augment some real world photos and other media. People would have to send ideas as png images‬ with transparent backgrounds and the ‪website will be set up so everyone’s layer-submissions can be toggled on/off. ‬ We will also set up “How would you edit layers?” for people to participate collaboratively live in Google Wave.

Panel Members:

Jeremy Hight – modulated mapping – locative narratives-channels of augmentation-end user adjustable interface controls-communal AR development and social networking tools fused to AR and geo spatial augmentation- AI as interface and geo spatial news, user channels and back end AI

Joe Lamantia – UX: the experience of creating and interacting with social augmented experiences – concepts and models for understanding and contributing to shared augmented experiences, such as the social scales for interaction

Tish Shute – AR and networked urbanism, connecting people to environments through games and social interaction, making the invisible visible – AR and new public infrastrucures, AR & ubicomp – citi-sensing and citizen sensing

Thomas Wrobel – creating distributed multiuser AR using current infrastructures and protocols (Wave enabled AR)
Photo of Tish Shute
Tish Shute
Ugotrade

Tish Shute, founder of Ugotrade -

My career in new media and technology began with work in motion control, robotics, and special effects for film, television, theme parks and aerospace. I continue my interest in innovation and paradigm shifts as an entrepreneur and writer interested in sustainable living,ubiquitous computing, augmented reality, and virtual realities in world 2.0. I have an M.Phil., “Culture and Media,” from NYU, Dept. of Anthropology, where I pursued my interest in the uptake of new technology from a more academic POV.

whurley *
whurleyvision llc

Named a Master Inventor by IBM, whurley has received numerous awards, including an IBM Pervasive Computing Award and an Apple Computer Design Award. In 2008, he was named one of the “Top Leaders in Open-Source Business” by LinuxWorld magazine. He’s a frequent interviewee (BusinessWeek, Wired, Science Channel, New Scientist Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, Computerworld, LinuxWorld, eWeek, InfoWorld, CBS News, the Associate Press), charismatic public speaker, and contributor to BusinessWeek.

Jeremy Hight

have shown work in locative media, new media, sound art, text and image art and text art at galleries and museums internationally.

author of “Modulated Mapping” (http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/02/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf)

essay on research and development of intuitive open source mapping/ web 3.0

author of “Immersive Event Time” (/piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/01/)

essay on new ways to measure events in time…and time itself…..looks at ar, immersive graphic visualizations and game interface recreations of historical events with ai

Author of “Immersive Sight in the Third Space” (neme.org/main/645/immersive-sight) Essay on how to combine augmented reality,virtual reality, aspects of locative media in exhibition spaces to create architectural analysis integrated spatial graphic design and interactive augmentation

author of “Narrative Archaeology”

I have published 20+ essays in various fields connected to art and technology, science and art and language,semiotics and creative writing. I am currently co-editing an issue of the leading journal in art, science and technology as well as a book. I curate on line exhibitions and advise festivals. I have been a professor (english, multimedia, design theory art history) for 9 years and love it.

Joe Lamantia
Media Catalyst

A veteran architect, consultant, and designer, Joe Lamantia has been an active member and leader in the user experience community since 1996. Joe has crafted successful user experience strategies and created innovative solutions for clients in a wide variety of industries and settings, ranging from Fortune 100 enterprises to local non-profit organizations, digital product companies, and social media. Joe is the creator of the leading freely available tool for card sorting, a frequent writer and speaker on future directions in user experience, and creator of the Building Blocks for Portals design framework.

Joe is currently based in Amsterdam, working as a user experience strategy consultant for a global media agency. He blogs regularly at www.joelamantia.com.

Thomas Wrobel
Lost Again

a web developer working for a small, brand-new company called Lost Again, which mostly works on ARGs (That is, the alternate reality games, not the augmented reality games, although there’s probably going to be big overlap there in the future). We developed two educational ARG games for the Netherlands with a company called Res-Nova.

moving words ...call for submissions

2010-01-06T10:56:00.000-08:00

MOVING WORDS
(edited by Camille Bacos, Jeremy Hight, & Carol Novack)

We are looking for narratives, fictions, word and language games and plays, all sorts of poetic forms, in fragments and entireties. We are looking for visually stimulating presentations, with or without custom-made audio elements, but preferably with. Surprise and delight us! Here are some samples of moving words we love: artport.whitney.org/gatepages/artists/nakatani/new_index.html; slippingglimpse.org/; www.yorku.ca/caitlin/waves/; nmartproject.net/agricola/mpc/volume6/encoded.html. A comprehensive article about what’s broadly referred to as “electronic literature” may be accessed at eliterature.org/pad/elp.html.

Submit up to two works, and please prepare your file/s as follows: QuickTime movies, h.264, "Fast Start," 640 x 480 or 720X480 , for 16:9 use max. 720X480 with letter box , Data Rate 2000 kbits/sec. Audio AAC, Stereo, 16 bit, 44.100 kHz, duration no longer than 12 minutes. We accept flash & window media player formats.

Please submit your works directly to our server. For FTP info please send an email to movingwords@madhattersreview.com (with "Moving Words Submission" in the subject line) and include the following information (feel free to cut and paste):

1. YOUR name; email address; bio - max 250 words.

2. Name AND exact file name of pieces to be uploaded: i.e. Lucy in the Sky, lucysky2.mov

3. Permission to publish email address in Issue 12. YES ___ NO ___

4. Do you wish to include a bio pic? YES ___ NO ___

short story "A few lost pages" has been published!

2009-11-12T09:56:00.000-08:00

Yay! Been working on this short story for 15 years.

"A Few Lost Pages".

http://www.unlikelystories.org/hight1109.shtml

The site is called "Unlikely Stories " and has a great range of work. They published some of my artwork and music a few years ago too so it is like coming home.

Leonardo launches lea special edition on immersive visualization

2009-10-18T01:20:00.000-07:00

http://www.leonardo.info/LEA/CreativeData/CreativeData.html

--The *Creative Data* special issue of *Leonardo Electronic Almanac
(LEA)*
features
papers and artworks that deal with the emerging practice of data
visualization as an immersive experience. Data has long been the property
and domain of screen-based collection, archiving, processing and
interaction. The emergence of new processes, functionality and ways of
interacting with information is opening up several new areas of great
possibility in which the data allows newfound thematic and engaging forms of
immersion, as well as innovative and perception-reshaping interaction. Guest
edited by Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight and Erik Champion.

Jack Ox, Jeremy Hight, and Erik Champion, Creative Data: Visualisation,
Augmentation, Telepresence and
Immersion
Trish Adams, "Machina
Carnis"

Joe Faith, "Interactive Data Exploration with Targeted Projection
Pursuit"
Joanna Griffin, "Satellite Stories: Immersion in the Large-Scale Projection
of Google Earth and Public
Storytelling"
Cindy Keefer, "'Raumlichtmusik' - Early 20th Century Abstract Cinema
Immersive Environments"
Carol LaFayette, "Atta,
Palindrome"
Luther Thie, "LA Interchange: A Real-Time
Memorial"
Klaus Wassermann, "lifeClipper - Commonality in
Images"
Ruth West, et al., "Algorithmic Object as Natural Specimen: Meta Shape
Grammar Objects from Atlas in
Silico"

snippet of new interview in ugotrade about near future of Augmented Reality and my work in the last few years

2009-10-16T23:10:00.000-07:00

Modulated Mapping: Talking with Jeremy Hight about Layers, Channels and Social Augmented Experiences

http://www.ugotrade.com/

Tish Shute: I know you have been involved in locative media from its early days. Perhaps we can talk about how AR continues the locative media journey?

Blair MacIntyre gave me this distinction, recently: “AR is about systems that put media out in the world, and immerse you in a mixed space. Even the current “not really registered” mobile phone AR systems are still “sort of” AR (e.g., Layar, etc).

Locative media/ubicomp/etc are very different, in that they tend to display media on a device (phone screen) that is relevant to your context, but does not attempt to merge it with the world.
The difference is significant, and making it clear helps people think about what they do and what they want to do, with their work. The locative media space though points toward future AR systems (when the technology catches up!).”

Jeremy Hight: The need is to finish the arc that locative media and early AR have started and to now truly return to the map itself, but as an internet of data, interactivity, channels of data , end user options like analog machines once were but in high end tools, a smart AI-ish ability for it to cull data for the user, and to allow social networking to be in real world places on the map both in building augmentation and in using and appreciating it..not hacks..which have their place…but a rhizome, a branched system with shared root,end user adjustable and variable..this is the key.

This takes AR and mapping and makes a possible world of channels in space and this eventually can be a kind of net we see in our field of vision with a selected percentage of visual field and placement so a geo-spatial net, a local to world wide fusion of lm into a tool and educational tool

VR[virtual reality] has greatly advanced, but in nodes as it has limitations…LM [locative media] is the same…AR [augmented reality] is the way.. it now has locative elements and aspects of VR integrated into its functionality and nodes…it is the best option with all of these elements, greater hybridity and data level potential a well as end user and community sourcing potential

I wrote an essay for Archis’ Volume, the architecture magazine on a near future sense of some of this….a visual net on the lens like ar but with smart objects and social networking and dissent.

I also wrote of these things for immersive graphic design, spatially aware museum augmentation, education through ar and lm and nod to the base interface of eye to cerebral cortex in layered and malleable augmentation in my essay “Immersive Sight” a few years back
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image [above] is simple illustration of a possible example on a screen or in front of eye where in a mondrian show..the graphic design of information actually builds as one moves

(key is calibrated spatial intervals and related layers of further augmentation which is logical due to location and proximity)

from immersive sight on immersive graphic design: “The design can work with this in a way that creates an interactive supplemental set of information that is malleable, shifts based on location, builds and peels away as one moves closer to a work and plays with the forms of the works and the elements of the space itself. The sequence can contain many different elements and their interplay (both in the field of vision and in terms of context and layers of information). This is the model of sections of augmentation turning on and off at key points as individual spatial and concepts moments and nodes.

Another interesting possibility is that individual points of augmentation don’t turn off, but instead are designed to build as one moves in a direction toward a specific part of the exhibit. The design can work in a sequence both content wise and visually in terms of a delay powered compositional development and style in which each discreet layer of text and image does not fade out, but builds on each other into a final composition. This can form paintings similar to Mondrian perhaps if it is a show of similar works of that era or it can form something much more metaphorical and open interpretation of the space and content but utilizing a sense of emergence spatially in terms of the composition (pieces laid bare until final approach for effect).

Each section will be well designed, but they build in layers as one moves until finally forming the final composition both visually and in terms of scope of information or building immediacy. The effect can be akin to taking a painting and slicing it into onion skin layers laid out in the air at intervals, each the same dimensions, but only one section compositionally of the greater whole. This has many semiotic applications beyond its potential aesthetically and as spatialized information possessing a sense of inter-relationship as one moves.“

Tish Shute: One of the things I found very inspiring when I read your papers was that your ideas are not all dependent on a model of AR that would necessarily require goggles, back packs and lots of CPU/GPU – not that that wouldn’t be nice, but that even using “magic lens” AR of the kind smart phones has enabled in an open distributed framework would open up a lot of new possibilities for what you call modulated mapping wouldn’t it? What kind of social augmented realities might be enabled by a distributed infrastructure like this [AR Wave]?

Jeremy Hight: right….I see that as wayyy down the road…most important is the one you talk about as it is more immediate and thus more essential and needed. Eventually the goggles will be like a contact lens and a deep immersive ar version of this will come, that to me is certain, but a ways down the road. An incredible amount is possible now, and this is a more pragmatic move as opposed to the more theoretical of what is a few steps from here. Thus it is more important and essential now. Tools like Google Wave are taking what even 2 years ago was more theoretical discussions of what may be and instead introducing key elements to a more immediate, powerful, flexible level of augmentation. What have been hacks and isolated elements are to be integrated and social networking, task completion, shared tools and graphics building and geo-location.

Tish Shute: I think some people question what augmented reality has to bring to the continuum of location based experiences that other forms of interface/mapping do not?

Jeremy Hight: right….and the schism between its commercial flat self and tests with physics etc and in between …there are a lot of unfortunate assumptions it seems as to where ar and lm cross and how ar can be many things beyond deep immersion or the opposite pole of a hockey puck having a magic purple line etc….like lm is seen as either car directions or situationist experiments with deep data…..the progression to me is deeply organic….and now augmentation can be more malleable, variable and end user controlled.

Tish Shute: Yes, it is really exciting time for AR. Historically AR research has gone after the hard problems of image recognition, tracking and registration because we have had available to us these dynamic, real time, large scale architectures like Wave available (until now!), so less work has been done on exploring the possibilities for distributed AR fully integrated with the internet and WWW hasn’t it?

A distributed augmented reality framework such as we have envisaged on Wave would allow people to see many layers from many different people at the same time. ‬And this kind of model has been part of your thinking and fundamental to your work for a while, hasn’t it? But it is a very new idea to most people to think about collaboratively editing layers on the world, and to be able to view augmented space through channels and networked communities? Could you explain some of the ways you have explored these ideas and how they could be explored further now to create meaningful experiences for people?

Jeremy Hight: right..exactly…modulated mapping to me can be an amazing tool for students…back end searching data visualizations and augmentations based on their needs…while they do something else on their computer or iphone…that can be amazing..and not deep immersive..The map can be active, malleable, open source fed, and even, in a sense, intelligent and able to adapt. The possibility also exists for this map to have a function that based on key words will search databases on-line to find maps, animations, histories and stories etc to place within it for your study and engagement. The map is thus a platform and yet is active. Community is possible as people can communicate graphically in works placed on the map and in building mode in the tool. All the tropes of locative media are to be in a mapping system of channels of augmentation and a spatial net. The software by design will allow development on the map and communication like programs such as second life but in mapping itself.

I wrote an essay a few years ago for the Sarai reader questioning the traditional map and its semiotics and need to reconsider – then did work looking into it and what those dynamics were and they got into 2 group shows in museums in Russia…so it actually was my arc toward modulated mapping…an interesting way to it! But yes the map itself..this is a huge area of potential and non screen based alone navigation etc. I see now that my 2 dozen or so essays in lm,ar, interface design and augmentation have all also been leading in this direction for about 10 years now

Tish Shute: I love immersive visualization but can we “return to the map – the internet of data” as you mentioned earlier and produce interesting augmentation experiences that go beyond locative media’s device display mode without having the goggles, for example, through the magic lens of or smart phones?

Jeremy Hight: yes, absolutely. the map in the older paradigm is an artifice born often of war and border dispute and not of the earth itself and its processes…the new mapping like google maps is malleable, can be open source, can read spaces and can be layers of info in the related space not plucked from it as in the past..this is amazing. the old map also was born of false semiotics/semantics like “discovery of new lands” or ” pioneer” while the places were there already and names often were of empire…now this is no longer the case

Tish Shute: one of the great disappointments in VR has been its isolation from networked computing and also, up to now, augmented reality – to achieve an immersive experience with tight registration of media/graphics have to create separate system isolated from the internet and power of the web.

Jeremy Hight: yes….this will change. vr is to me an island but ar takes a part of it and shifts the paradigm and new things open this way. Do you know the project “life clipper”? friends of mine..doing interesting things..they are a clear bridge betwen lm and ar….and from vr

in ar augmentation and what is being augmented become fused or in collision or in complex interactions as a means to a larger contextualization and exploration of what is being augmented..this is true in immersive or non ar….huge potential

vr is a space, now can be surgery which is amazing. but not layered interaction, thus an island and graphic iconography on a location can use symbolic icons which opens up even more layers (graphic designer/information designer in me talking there I suppose..)

Tish Shute: Yes ! talk to me more about layers and channels I think this is one of the most interesting questions for me in augmented reality at the moment – what can we do with layers and channels and the new possibilities on connections between people and environments that these can create?

The ability for anyone to post something is critical to the distributed idea but one of the reasons I am so excited by Google Wave is I am fascinated by the playback function. How do you think this will enable new forms of collaborative locative narratives (nice post on Wave playback here ).

Jeremy Hight: We are in an age of cartographic awareness unseen in hundreds of years. When was the last time that new mapping tools were sold in chain stores and installed in most vehicles? When was the last time that also the augmentation of maps was done by millions (Google map hacks, etc)? The ubiquitous gps maps run in automobiles while people post pictures and graphic pins to denote specific places on on-line maps.

The need is for a tool that combines all of these new elements into an open source, intuitive layered and rhizomatic map that is porous (like pumice, organic in form yet with “breathing room” ),ventilated (i.e: adjustable, a flow in and out), and open (open source,open access,open spatialized dialog).

I wrote of this in my essay “Revising the Map: Modulated Mapping and the Spatial Interface .”( http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/02/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf )

Tish Shute: One mapping project I really like is Mannahatta. How could distributed AR contribute to a project like Mannahatta?

Jeremy Hight: that is a good example..imagine taking manhattan and having channels of options to overlay, that being an excellent option, and imagine being able to even run a few at once with deliniating icons..you can augment a space with history, data, erasure, narrative, scientific analysis, time line of architecture, infrastructure, archaeological record etc….endless possibilities, and this agitates place and place on a map into an active field of information with end user control…and open options for new layers

Tish Shute: and do you think we could do interesting things with AR on a project like Mannahatta even with the current mediating devices we have available – i.e. our smart phones as obviously the rich pc experience of Mannhatta has built for it’s web interface would not be available as AR at this point?

Jeremy Hight: yes….k.i.s.s right? these projects do not have to only be immersive and graphic intensive……take how people upload photos onto google maps….just make that on a menu of options, there are some pretty cool hacks already..
…options is key, a space can have a community as well, building on it in software, and others navigating it, i see it near future and down the road..always have with ar really

Jeremy Hight: Modulated Mapping is a tool that will allow channels to be run along the map itself. This will allow one to view different icons and augmentations both as systems on the map and in deeper layers of information (photos, videos, animations, visualizations, etc) that can be turned on and off as desired. The different layers of icons and data may be history, dissent, artworks, spatialized narratives, and annotations developed that are communally based on shared interests, placed spatially and far beyond. The use of chat functionality in text or audio will be open in building mode and in mapping navigation/usage as desired. This also allows a community to develop or augment in the spaces on the earth. These nodes can be larger and open or small and set by groups in their channel. The end result is an open source sense of mapping that will also have a needed sense of user control as one can select which layers of augmentation they wish to see and interact with at any time. It also will incorporate all the functionality of locative media in mapping software and mapping. In building mode and in map mode, icons will be coded to represent within channels (remember that the person using it has selected channels of augmentation from many based on their current interests and needs). Icons will be coded as active to show work in progress in cities and the globe to both invite participation and to further agitate the map from the sense of the static as action is visible even with its icons as people are working and community is formed in common interest/need .

Tish Shute: did you see the discussion on search in the AR Framework doc? AR search will be a massively important thing that will take a lot of intelligence and all sorts of algorithm development won’t it?

Jeremy Hight:It also has one area of key functionality that moves into more intuitive software. Upon continued usage, the mapping software will “learn” and search based on key words used and spheres of interest the user is mapping or observing as mapped and will integrate deeper data and types of animations, etc. into the map or will have them waiting to be integrated upon user approval as desired. Over time the level of sophistication of additions and of search intuition will increase dramatically. The search can also, if the user wishes, run in the back end while working in the mapping program, or in off time as selected while doing other tasks. It also can never be used if one is not interested. One of the key elements of this mapping is that it is not composed of a closed set or needs user hacks to augment, but instead is to evolve and deepen by user controls and desired as designed. Pre-existing data,visualizations and augmentations can be integrated with relative ease.

Tish Shute: One of the things that Joe Lamantia points out about social augmented experiences is that they will operate across a number of different scales – conversation > product design & build team > neighborhood / town fixing potholes > global community for causes. How do designs for channels and layers change across these different social scales?

I had two moments yesterday that totally fit what we talked about. I went to west hollywood book fair and traditional directions off of mapping for driving directions were wrong and we got lost…our friend could only get a wireless signal to map on itouch and we had to roam neighborhoods then we called a friend who google mapped it and we found we were a block away….so a fast geomapping overlay with an icon for the book fair on some optional grid service or community would have made it immediate. Then at the book fair talked to a small press publisher who is trying to map works about los angeles by los angeles authors on a map..she was stunned when I told her it could be a kind of google map feature option

it also has great potential to publish and place writing and art in places..both for commentary and access. imagine reading joyce in chapters where it was written about and then another similar experience but with writers who published on a service into their city.

Tish Shute: The challenge of shared augmented realities is not just a matter of shipping bits around, but also of how it we will use channels and layars – to create and negotiate different, distributed perspectives, understand a shared common core/or expressions of dissent (this came up in an email conversation with Simon St Laurent).

Jeremy Hight: well my example earlier could have been communal in a way too..a tribe sort of augmentation channeling ….like subscribing to list servs back in the day but of augmentation communities/channels, and for folks to build and use in shared live form, coordinating too

Tish Shute: one good thing though about building an open AR Framework is that as bandwidth/CPU/hardware gets better shared high def immersive experiences could be supported by the same framework..

Jeremy Hight: excellent

Tish Shute: were you thinking of the image recognition and tracking with this example?

Jeremy Hight: yeah….like scanning across a multi channeled google map augmentation with diff icons and their connected data…and poss social networking and fle sharing even in that mode…and rastering etc….could be cool with google wave - on the map..then zooming in a la powers of ten..(eames film).

-I have pictured variations of this for a few years now in my head like the example of my friends and I yesterday…we could have correlated a destination by icons in diff channels..one being lit events within lit channel in l.a map…maybe things streaming on it too…remote info and video etc… that would be awesome

Tish Shute: So many of the ideas in you paper on modulated mapping (see here) are brilliant use cases for shared augmented realities. Perhaps you could talk more your ideas about locative narrative because this is something I think is at the core of the kinds of experiences that a distributed AR Framework would make possible?

Jeremy Hight: on the project “34 north 118 west” we mapped out a 4 block area for augmentation of sound files triggered by latitude and longitude on the gps grid and map and the map on the screen had pink rectangles that were the “hot spots” where the augmentation had been placed.
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image of interactive map with map based augmentation connected to audio augmentation on site for 34north 118west (Spellman/Hight/Knowlton)

We researched the history of the area and placed moments in time of what had been there at specific locations ….I called this “narrative archaeology” as it allowed places to be “read” by their augmentations…info that was of the place beyond the immediate experience (diff types of info) that otherwise would be lost or only found in books or web sites elsewhere. there now are locative narratives around the world but they need to be linked. from humble origins “narrative archaeology” went on to be recently named of the 4 primary texts in locative media which is pretty amazing to me…but it is growing

- the limitations then were what I called the “bowling alley connundrum” – the specifc data had to reset like pins…..and was isolated….this led me to think about ar back then and up to now. How these could lead to much more from that point, data that would be more layered, variable , fluid..yet still augmented place and sense of place and social networking within data and software

lifeclipper to me is a bridge

Tish Shute: But Life Clipper is isolated from the internet currently is it?

Jeremy Hight: yes…ours was too.. that is what google wave makes possible.. our project only ran on our gear..in 4 blocks…with additional auxiliary info online, and not malleable..but hey 2001 and all..

Tish Shute: so the sites for 34 north 118 west are still active though?

Jeremy Hight: oh yeah!

Tish Shute: nice I really like sound augmentation – have you seen Soundwalk?

Jeremy Hight: yes, very cool.. we chose sound only as it fought the power of image..instead caused a person to be in a sense of two places and times at once

Tish Shute: and in 2001 that was definitely a visionary project!

You must be very excited that finally the pieces are coming together to make this stuff scale!

Jeremy Hight: I can’t even tell you!! it is funny..i have known that this would come..just waited and waited…

..knew it needed the right people and tools..

..so the bowling alley connundrum led me to develop my project shortlisted for the iss (international space station) as I thought a lot about how points and works are not to be isolated…but connected and should be flowing in diff parts of a map….to open up perspective and connected augmentations , but also to think about the map again…not as a base only. then moved into my work with new ways to visualize time and it all really began to gell. The ideas first were published as an essay (http://www.fylkingen.se/hz/n8/hight.html) and later my project blog (http://floatingpointsspace.blogspot.com/)

Tish Shute: One thing I noticed when I was reading your paper is how you have been exploring non-euclidian geometries. Could you explain how this is part of your idea of modulated mapping?

Jeremy Hight: Yes, this first came to me when my wife was reading to me from a book on the Poincare Conjecture and I was hit with a new way to measure events in time and after months of sketches, schematics and research came to see how it could also be connected to a geo-spatial web of projects and augmentations. It was published in the inaugural issue of Parsons School of Design’s Journal of Information Mapping which was an exciting fit. I call it “Immersive Event Time”(http://piim.newschool.edu/journal/issues/2009/01/pdfs/ParsonsJournalForInformationMapping_Hight-Jeremy.pdf)

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so the last 3 years I have been working on how it could all work as channels of augmentation, and building and navigation as open and community in a sense as well as ai capability that was the time work especially. how time as experienced within an event is not a time “line” but points on and within a form….and how this model is better for visualizing events in time and documenting them. it actually sprang form reading a book on the poincare conjecture, popped a bunch of other stuff together so one could visualize an event in time as like being in the belly of a whale..with time as the ribs..and our measure of time as the skin…and moving within it….hoping this will be used as educational tool

and this also can be tied to ar and map again…how documentation of important events can be kept within icons on a google map..then download varying visualizations based on bandwidth and desired format

Tish Shute: I have been thinking about is the new forms of social interaction/agency that these kinds of augmentations of space/place/time will create. it seems there are two poles – one is the area Natalie Jeremijenko explores of shifting social relations from institutions/statistics to real time/location based/interactions and new forms of social agency. The other pole completely is more like the cloud based AI and perhaps crowd sourced machine learning.

Your ideas explore the possibilities of both these poles. And certainly one of the big deals of distributed AR integrated with would be the possibilities it opened up both for new forms of networked social relationships and for new ways to draw on network effects.

Jeremy Hight: and cross pollinations within …that is what my mind goes to

Tish Shute: The other night I met Assaf Biderman, MIT, from the Trash Track team. Trash Track doesn’t utilize AR but I could see that there are possibilites there.
What do you think?

Jeremy Hight: yes, absolutely, there can sort of skins on locations that user end selection can yield …like channels of place….and can range from pragmatic core to art and play and places between….how this recalibrates the semiotics of map…more than just augmentation as seen as a kind of piggy back on map..map becomes interface and defanged platform if you wil, interestingly my more poetic/philosophic writing led me here too

Tish Shute: I know they are at very different poles of the system but I do wonder how AR can bring some of the level of social agency/interaction that Natalie Jeremijenko works on into a productive interaction with the kind of innovations in Machine learning that Dolores Lab style machine learning!!and others are pioneering?

Jeremy Hight: Natalie’s genius to me is in practical functional tech that also opens deeper questions and even new openings of what is needed..amazing layers in her work that way.. succint yet deep..very deep

Tish Shute: Yes – I a just writing a post about her work – I find it deeply moving the way she has delved into the possibilities to using technology to open us up to our world. One of the reasons I find distributed AR so interesting is because it will make it possible for all kinds of people to create and use augmentation in their lives and communities.

So to return to how a distributed AR framework could contribute to a project like Trash Track?

Jeremy Hight: what about using it for community, dissent and awareness raising then? like Natalie’s work but building like a communal work of multiple points, like the old adage of the elephant and the blind men sorry..metaphor – like one of my points in immersive sight was how one could take augmentation as multiple works sort of turning the faces of a thing or place…and how this would make a larger work even in such a flow so people moving in a space could also build..

what of ar traces left as people move calibrated to user traffic and trash as estimated in an urban space…like it goes back to chris burden in the 70’s making you know that as you turn the turnstyle you are drilling into the foundation and may be the one that collapses the building?

so their movements leave trash. Natalie is all about raising awareness to cause and effect and data , space and ecology. love that. so maybe …
a feedback loop , artifact and user end responsibility can leave traces …trash…

.. cybernetics vs ecology and human waste

Tish Shute: could you elaborate?

Jeremy Hight: brain fart…that the mass of trash people leave is a piece at a tiime….and how like the space shuttle mission when it was argued first true cybernaut occured….one cord to air for astronaut..one for computer on their back to fix broken bay arm…if there is a way to build on that and in relation to the topic…..how this can go further, that machines do not waste as much…as ar is a means to cybernetic raise awareness..eh..In a sense it is like the space shuttle mission when arguably the first true cybernaut occurred….one cord to air for astronaut..one for computer on their back to fix broken bay arm…if there is a way to build on that and in relation to the topic…..how this can go further, that machines do not waste as much…as ar is a means to cybernetic raise awareness..eh.. hmmm... sensors etc…wearables too – could be eco awareness with data and machine and human

what about a cloud computing system with a slight ai in the sense of intuitive word cloud and interest scans…..so as one moves through say new york they can be offered new ai data and services as they move ? could also be of eco interests? concerns about urban farming, eco waste, air pollution etc….perhaps with (jeremijenko element here) sensors placed in locations and these also giving data reads in public areas with no input but hard data itself……hmm..could be interesting

it can also give info of the carbon footprints (estimated prob unless data is public record somehow) of chain businesses and data on which are more eco friendly as well as an iconography color coded and icon coded to the best places to go to support greening and eco friendly business? and the companies could promote themselves on this service to attract eco aware customers who would be seeing them as kindred spirits and helping the
larger effort?

kind of eco mapping..and ar on mobile app

what about sensors that read air pollution levels, levels of solar radiation (to aid with skin protection in shifting light values in a city space..ie put on some skin cream now…), light sensors that detect density and over density in public spaces…to use the old trope in art of reading crowds in a space..but instead could indicate overcrowding, failing infrastructure in public spaces (which is a congestion that leads to greater pollution levels as well as flaws in city planning over time..), and perhaps a tie in to wearables……worn sensors on smart clothes….this could form a node network of people in the crowds ….and also send data within moving in a space…

here is a kooky thought… what of taking the computing power and data of people moving in a space..and not only get eco data and make available to them levels of
data..but make possibly a roving super computer…crunching the deeper data of people open to this……a hive crunching deeper analysis of the space, scan properties from sensors, and even a game theory esque algorithm of meta data if say 40 people out of 50 hit on a certain spike or reading…and even their input…..I worked in game theory for paleontology in this manner for a time as a teen….a private project…… the reading can lead to a sort of meta read by what hits most consistently..as well as in their input..text of what they experienced, observed,postulated,analyzed even…. this could be really interesting…even if just the last part from collected data and not from any complex branching of servers..

I thought at 19 or so that the flaw in paleontology was in how so many larger theories were shifting exhibitions and larger senses of things like were there pre-historic birds that were mistaken for amphibean and then back again….so why not make a computer program and feed all the papers published into it and see what hits were counted in terms of an emerging meta theory…and landscape of key points being agreed upon…this data would be in a sense both algorithmic and a sort of unspoken dialogue …came from a lot of study of game theory one summer…

hope this makes some sense…I forgot to mention that I originally planned to be a research meteorologist and my plan in middle school or so was to get a phd and develop new software to have a global map and then run models of hypothetical storms across it in real time animations of cloud forms, radar and wind analysis/fields, barometric pressure spaghetti charts etc….and to also do 3d cut away models of storm architectures…so been into visualizations of complex data and mapping for a long time!

Tish Shute: Wow let me think about this one!

(updated with final sound edits) just finished text and image sound piece on these times

2009-08-23T02:09:00.001-07:00

here is the download link as its storage until it gets into a show somewhere

http://www.sendspace.com/file/o34j0y

a story in the air

My interview in ART SLANT is out...on my work and RE DRAWING BOUNDARIES EXHIBITION

LEA RE DRAWING BOUNDARIES TIM WRIGHT INTERVIEW AND EXHIBITION

lea RE:drawing boundaries presents Kate Pullinger

novella/story collection ..

happy to be co curating L.A Re.Play mobile art exhibition and panels

vuk cosic

jason nelson

MISH MASH, Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Volume 17 Issue 1, August 2011

KaI Syng Tan exhibition/interview now live at LEA

Rolf Van Gelder and Carmin Karasic exhibition/interview now live on LEA

lea jeremy wood is live

lea mez is live

ISEA art market

ISEA2011 ISTANBUL ART MARKET AND INTERNATIONAL NETWORKING EVENT

re-drawing boundaries week 2 is live with Sarah Williams and Carlo Ratti

important exhibition has just launched

malleable world

isea conference co-director..new essay...quirky weather..

happy to announce I am an editor for Isea 2011

ISEA 2011 Istanbul - Portal

Sabanci University

September 14, 2011 – September 21, 2011

Announcements

ISEA2011 Istanbul - EXTENDED DEADLINE JANUARY 15, 2011

ERASMUS FUNDING FOR PRESENTATIONS, ART TALKS, WORKSHOPS AND PANELS

CALL FOR 20 MINUTE PAPER PROPOSALS FOR ISEA2011 ISTANBUL CONFERENCE

started new projects...

lost story from derelict blog drifting on the internet...

now new media curator for leonardo online and about to show unseen works of Buckminster Fuller and works of 31 other innovators

cartoon series I am making by messing with demo..please watch..absurd funny break from serious

short image and text work just made of shots of salton sea and its complex face in time

great interview with me by Greg Smith in Serial Consign

Where 2.0, MIT,AR

Writing Within the Map

will be on panel at Where 2.0 The Next Wave of AR: Exploring Social Augmented Experiences

moving words ...call for submissions

short story "A few lost pages" has been published!

Leonardo launches lea special edition on immersive visualization

snippet of new interview in ugotrade about near future of Augmented Reality and my work in the last few years

(updated with final sound edits) just finished text and image sound piece on these times