books

Swept off the Map: Surviving Resettlement and Eviction in Bawana JJ Colony by Kalyani Menon Sen and Gautam Bhan is a documentary look at the demoliton of "the Yamuna Pushta ‘jhuggi-jhonpdi’ colony, a string of settlements home to around 35,000 working class families - more than 150,000 people – some of whom had lived here for over three decades" to make way for a "riverside promenade with parks and fountains" by the Yamuna river, marketed to the tourists who visit Delhi.

this should be an interesting read, as I read about similar demolitions whilst I was in Delhi - it even happened to businesses; even large well built shopping centres. the book is available @ Yoda Press in India.

TechGnosis maillist website
“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
-Philip K. Dick-
VISIT TECHGNOSIS AT: http://techgnosis.info
SUBSCRIBE to TechGnosis List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/TechGnosis/join

http://www.maybelogic.org
http://www.maybelogic.net

http://edge.org/

http://www.techgnosis.com - Erik Davis' site

http://www.undergrowth.org

http://www.barrelfullofmonkeys.org

http://www.entheo.net/ - entheogenesis Australia 2007 conference

http://www.docquan.com/lib_dead.html - an online collection / library of interesting books

I'm having to look up almost every second word to decipher VALIS, the book for the next few week's PKD course. so, some reading notes & research below ...

VALIS - by Philip K Dick

preface of the book
VALIS (acronym of Vast Active Living Intel-
ligence System, from an American film): A
perturbation in the reality field in which a
spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex
is formed, tending progressively to subsume
and incorporate its environment into arrange-
ments of information. Characterized by quasi-
consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth
and an armillary coherence.
-Great Soviet Dictionary
Sixth Edition, 1992

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALIS

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Author_surrogate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

There is a line in the I Ching reading, "Always ill but never dies." (pg 10)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnosticism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logos

"Philip K. Dick’s Divine Interference." by Erik Davis
http://tinyurl.com/2xa3gf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Albemuth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

The Religious Experience of Philip K. Dick by R. Crumb
http://www.philipkdickfans.com/weirdo/weirdo1.htm

PLATO AND THE SOPHISTS
http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Nonfiction/Philosophy/Pater_Plato/Pate...

nous, or noos (Greek philosophy)
http://www.britannica.com/eb/topic-420882/nous

Adherents.com: Religious Groups in Literature
http://www.adherents.com/lit/Na/Na_367.html
Platonism California: Oakland 1971 Dick, Philip K. Valis. New York: Bantam (1981); pg. 17.

"Yet, in all fairness, I have to admit that God--or someone calling himself God, a distinction of mere semantics--had fired precious information at Horselover Fat's head by which their son Christopher's life had been saved. Some people God cures and some he slays. Fat denies that God slays anyone. Fat says, God never harms anyone. Illness, pain and undeserved suffering arise not from God but from elsewhere, to which I say, How did this elsewhere arise? Are there two gods? Or is part of the universe out from under God's control? Fat used to quote Plato. In Plato's cosmology, noos or Mind is persuading ananke or blind necessity--or blind chance, according to some experts--into submission. Noos happened to come along and to its surprise discovered blind chance: chaos, in other words, onto which noos imposes order (although how this 'persuading' is done Plato nowhere says.) " [Also pg. 32, 220.]

week 5 VALIS
http://www.maybelogic.net/pkd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

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Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference - by Erik Davis (originally posted on nettime)
http://www.maybelogic.net/pkd/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

In the excepts of the Exegesis reworked into the "Tractates Crytptica Scriptura" that close the novel VALIS, Dick expresses the MIT computer scientist Edward Fredkin's view that the universe is composed of information. The world we experience is a hologram, "a hypostasis of information" that we, as nodes in the true Mind, process. "We hypostasize information into objects. Rearrangement of objects is change in the content of information. This is the language we have lost the ability to read."[4] With this Adamic code scrambled, both ourselves and the world as we know it are "occluded," cut off from the brimming "Matrix" of cosmic information. Instead, we are under the sway of the "Black Iron Prison," Dick's terms for the demiurgic worldly forces of political tyranny and oppressive social control. Rome is the eternal paragon of this "Empire," whose archetypal lineaments the feverish Dick recognized in the Nixon administration.

I'm starting an online course tomorrow called " The Crazy Wisdom of Philip K. Dick". I'm not sure how I'm going to go, but I enjoy his books so it'll be interesting to find out more. the lecturer is Erk Davis who's well known for his studies on the author. I've just logged into the course page and read the intro and it sounds really interesting. I have a feeling I'm going to need to take it twice!

there's another one by Douglas Rushkoff which sounds interesting also - he sent the note about his course via his blog mail list, so that's how I came across the PKD one. there's others by R.U. Sirius of Mondo 2000 fame which I wouldn't mind checking out also. some of the others on the site seem a bit out there! but it's interesting to find out about things I don't know much about.

I've just bought this book so I can read it when I get back to Aus for holidays. the World Changing site has heaps of useful articles so I'm hoping the book will too!

http://www.worldchanging.com/book/

the blurb from the site:

[quote]
"Worldchanging: A Users Guide for the 21st Century is a groundbreaking compendium of the most innovative solutions, ideas and inventions emerging today for building a sustainable, livable, prosperous future."

"From consumer consciousness to a new vision for industry; non-toxic homes to refugee shelters; microfinance to effective philanthropy; socially responsible investing to starting a green business; citizen media to human rights; ecological economics to climate change, this is the most comprehensive, cutting-edge overview to date of what's possible in the near future -- if we decide to make it so."
[/quote]

last year I was asked (albeit last minute!) if I'd like to contribute to a book tentatively called Videoblogging Hacks so I wrote up the following rather quickly and sent it off. I'd been playing with creating html links and href tracks previously and I think I'd mentioned it on the videoblogging yahoogroups list. anyway, the book was published and is now available from various online stores.

the book is called Videoblogging and the authors names are Jay Dedman, Joshua Paul. I received a copy and had a quick look through it on my last trip home to Sydney - it's a very throrough book! so grab a copy if you get the chance.

my section was cut/edited quite a bit. I was surprised it made it all. so below is what I sent through - I need to find the images and post/links them also. it's a useful reference for me also, but most of the info below is already available on the internet.

I did find it hard to locate information at the time, so this was a way of bringing it altogether in one place as a reference.

attached are the doc and rtf versions - hopefully the images show up in them. I can't see them here on the mac but perhaps I don't have the correct viewer installed.

there's a couple of other good books on videoblogging also along with the one mentioned above :

Videoblogging by Jay Dedman, Joshua Paul

Secrets of Videoblogging by Michael Verdi, Ryanne Hodson, Diana Weynand, and Shirley Craig
( this one's available on safari techbooks online if you have a login there )

Videobloggin g for Dummies by Stephanie Cottrell Bryant

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Creating Clickable Hyperlinks in QuickTime video movies.
-- Kath O'Donnell

Everybody knows that html links, or hyperlinks make the internet go 'round. Wouldn't it be cool to include clickable links in the video files you create and publish also. Think of the possibilities! Depending on what your video content is, the links could enhance the viewers experience whilst watching your video and allow them to gain more information or visit your homepage once they've finished watching your video. Clickable links turn your video file into an interactive video.

Including hyperlinks in your video using Quicktime is a simple step involving adding a text track and HREF codes or adding a HREFTrack, but surprisingly few people use this feature. More advanced options include being able to display the clicked link into specified html frames or windows, or even sending JavaScript code or parameters to JavaScript scripts on your website. SMIL movie files can also be used to create links, though if you decide to use this method, you need to be aware of the different ways SMIL files can be played on a computer ie it may be played in a non-QuickTime Player so could behave differently to what you expect. For this reason, this guide concentrates on creating clickable links using text tracks in QuickTime PRO.

I've been thinking about different publishing & distribution methods and as it often happens the conversation appears on a site or mail list around the same time. early in feb, the node-l (node-London) promo emails starting making the rounds of the net lists. it sounds like a great collective of grassroots, funded & professional new media organisations based in London. (read through the list of projects on their site!) initially I was thinking this would be great to have internationally or at least in Australia / New Zealand as well - node-b (brisbane), node-s (sydney), node-m (melbourne), node-a (auckland) or node-au (australia) & node-nz (new zealand). another section of their promo which caught my eye was the POD - print on demand. I followed the links and discovered the mute site is based on CiviCRM which is an offshoot of Drupal (basically it's Drupal with a nice installer and some extra custom themes). Drupal's my favourite CMS as anyone who knows me would know - this site is done in drupal. (finally upgraded to latest version, but haven't had time to add more features yet). anyway, the POD concept is quite cool. people could make their own custom pdfs. researchers could pdf their reference articles for research. endless possibilities. I might try out the 'save to pdf' feature. on the Stealth message board I frequent, Mark was talking about new concepts & suggestions for Stealth mag, so I posted the below message. there's heaps of other options but not sure if he's wanting to go the online publishing method. I think it would work well in conjunction with the print mag and he seems quite busy these days & it sounds like he has to do most of the work which would be quite a lot of work.