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nettime archive finds : DJ Spooky interview by Erik Davis+ new science & new minds thoughts

whilst looking for the original posting and thread of Erik Davis' nettime-l posting on "Philip K. Dick's Divine Interference", I came across an interview by Erik with DJ Spooky from 2003. the closest I came to the PKD post was a later reply to the thread - I can't seem to find the original post though. maybe it had a different title. anyway, the DJ Spooky article is interesting - he speaks about some of his projects, the artist's relationship to working whilst on psychedelics (& how he doesn't do this), the culture he grew up with, his multi-faceted collection of projects : music and DJing, sound art, installation, sculpture, painting, video remixing and the mixology of images, but he mostly identifies as being a writer. he also speaks about his style of writing, creative commons, artificial scarcity amongst other things.

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Erik Davis : "You first got on the map doing music and DJing. You've done sound
art, installation, sculpture, painting. You've been working lately
with video remixing and getting into the mixology of images. But in
many ways you still define yourself primarily as a writer. Why is it
important for you to stay tied to the world of writing?"

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Vast Active Living Intelligence System (VALIS) - reading notes

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.

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Century of the Self - video documentary

For the MLA Rushkoff course Technologies of Persuasion last week we had to read a couple of articles and watch a BBC video called Century of the Self. I've watched part 1 so far. it goes into Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays and his prolific Public Relations career. from the 1920s, where he convinced women to smoke cigarettes by creating a media spectacle using female debutantes in a parade and the slogan "Torches of Freedom", which was previously only a man's habit. then later contributed towards the rise of commercialism both prior to and following the stock market crash in 1929. he worked on many campaigns over the duration of his career and advised & created PR campaigns for numerous corporations, business leaders and government officials, in order to control the masses. he didn't think in single person terms - he thought in thousands of people.

he wrote a few books, one called Propaganda, in 1928 - this is his most important book. Bernays argued that the manipulation of public opinion was a necessary part of democracy:

Philip K Dick - further reading on the net

I've been learning heaps at the Philip K Dick course taught by Erik Davis. I've done a few web searches and as well as a few of the links posted by Erik & other classmates, I've started making a list. many of them are on the Total Dick Head blog which has heaps of great info & links to follow up on. the discussions have been great. I've been learning about some different religions and belief systems (eg Gnosticism)

We've been reading The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch so far so a lot of the links below relate to that. this week we're watching Blade Runner (one of my favourite films). I'll try add some links as I come across them.

(not in any particular order & some aren't strictly PKD)

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Issa / Jane Siberry and her Music Self Determined Pricing Policy

I remember reading about Jane Siberry in Mondo 2000 sometime in the mid 90s and bought her albums "When I was a Boy" and "Maria" as well as the soundtrack for "Until the End of the World" which has a track of hers on it. I used to play "When I Was a Boy" on Sunday mornings whilst having brunch when I lived in Auchenflower. when I moved from that apartment my neighbour asked what was the beautiful music that I used to play on sundays, so I put him onto her sounds. around that time also, I was listening to a lot of Brian Eno, David Sylvian, Ryuichi Sakamoto and Laurie Anderson and others.

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jerusalem wireless

the internet connection in the flat where I'm staying is driving me crazy!! it works for about half an hour a couple of times a week. the landlords are looking into it. so I've been going to cafes. and now the cafes connection is not working also. and being a holiday (& shabbath/saturdays also) most of the stores are closed. so now I'm sitting on a bench in Hillel St - there's a few open wireless networks in this street. I'm using a cafe one at the moment - the cafe is closed for the holiday. I tried out kismac but couldn't login from home - it was taking forever to collect enough packets to even attempt to work. so maybe I'm doing something wrong - or perhaps I need a different wireless adaptor.

but I did notice a cool feature where it can make sounds for the different wireless networks. so here's a couple of screenshots and sounds.

Jerusalem wireless - Shamai01

Jerusalem wireless - Shamai02

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Why Johnny Can't Program audio lecture - week one

mind map (so far) of week 1 of Technologies of Persuasion online course.

Why Johnny Can't Program audio lecture - mind map notes. most of these notes are what the speaker, Douglas Rushkoff mentioned in the lecture - I've paraphrased some of it whilst taking notes.

files attached. remove the .txt from .html.txt files (drupal upload seems to be adding the .txt)

one of the other class members, monster (Caroline Jack) has transcribed the audio lecture!, so this would be a more complete / accurate account of it.

bookmark @ 24:54

Expand - Collapse

Technologies of Persuasion online course with Douglas Rushkoff @ Maybe Logic Academy

I'm doing the Technologies of Persuasion online course with Douglas Rushkoff @ Maybe Logic Academy. it started today. there's already a few discussions happening in the course forums - they're moving so fast!

Clan of the Cave Bear

Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M Auel was one of my favourite books when I was growing up.

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automatic writing, aroma coffee and palmer eldritch

today I read an article about automatic writing.

[quote]
" Sit at a table with pen and paper; put yourself in a 'receptive' frame of mind, and start writing. Continue writing without thinking of what is appearing beneath your pen. Write as fast as you can. If, for some reason, the flow stops, leave a space and immediately begin again by writing down the first letter of the next sentence. Choose this letter at random before you begin, for instance, a 't', and always begin this new sentence with a 't'. "
[/quote]

this is pretty much how I write all the time. occasionally I go back and re-read it and correct any obvious spelling / grammatical errors, but sometimes I don't even do that.

The Crazy Wisdom of Philip K. Dick - online course

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.

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chucK - live coding music tutorials & results

I'm trying out making music using live coding techniques, with 2 pre-requisites - that it's easy and fast to do & learn - probably not the right pre-requisites (might upset real musicians :), but it's where I'm at for the moment.

so, I'm trying chucK. this is the first chucK tutorial. I used the miniAudicle IDE instead of command line interface. it was very easy to load the songs into the IDE (miniAudicle) and play them. I had separate files for each module and adjusted some of the parameters to change the sounds, then clicked the 'replace shred' to 'take' the change and add this file's sounds to the output audio.

this it meets my criteria - easy and fast to use. now I just have to make it sound musical instead of a collection of random sounds & tones :) (the hard part)

chucK documentation
chucK community / mail lists
chucK miniAudicle documentation
chucK wiki
chucK projects - some people are hooking up chucK apps and Processing for java based visuals, plus there's many examples of laptop instruments, as well as a Max patch and more

listen to the audio :
chucK_tutorial01.mp3
loscha_com_tambura01.mp3 - from the loscha.comchucK tutorials ( Loscha is in the Australian band Toydeath - a circuit bending performance experience ) - this piece reminds me of the original samples of the bridges in the Jodie Rose Singing Bridges project and cd.

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bboys in jerusalem & youtube boty finds

I've been watching the bboys in the Ben Yehuda mall in Jerusalem. some of them have some good moves. they break on the stone large chess board. these reminded me of the break circles in Hanover during the weekend of Battle of the Year 2000. I found some videos on youtube from then and other years.

the Battle of the Year website has details of past year's winners

Flying Steps - Battle of the Year 2000 (winners)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUhq96JayhQ

Battle Squad show - BOTY 1991
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZDHbSQrvKg

tuffkid & benny 1999
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzTd-_pMJGc

bboy Benny (from Flying Steps)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8b69Dc6qjRQ

my breakdancing favourites list on youtube

boty 2000 photos on flickr

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a simple knitted Ada Deitz polynomial equation

Dan sent me an invite to the Open Source Embroidery facebook group. their website is www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk. I haven't tried embroidery since I was a child, and I don't remember being that good at it, but it sounds like a good project. so I thought I'd post info / photos my knitted polynomial bag. (even though it's not as nice / perfect as some of the other online examples!!) when I was a child I used to do lots of crafts and was always making things. I had a resurgence of this about a year ago. it feels good to make things with your hands, especially little presents for people. so I've been (very slowly) working on hand made things. I find it's better than buying something, though it does tend to take me longer to finish things these days!

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vlog europe 2007 - streaming online

Vlog Europe is on this weekend, but they've just posted a link to the site where they'll be streaming some of it live - video of course! and a chat channel. the schedule looks good. they're going to talk about software, personal media, videoblogging and it's effects on big media, videoblogging and making content not money

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