Leveraging The System

The philosopher Jacques Ellul said that the 'sacred' came from nature. But then technology replaced nature, and so the 'sacred' is now misplaced - we worship technology. 

Well, I think it's time to correct this. It's time technology served us so that we may dance in the fields, eat from the orchard and return the divine. With the vision of an 80's bedroom programmer, let me show you how.

You see, I read artists on Spotify make between $0.006 to $0.0084 per single play of a track. So, I shall release one song. That song will be cut into tiny pieces, 2 seconds long.

Doing the maths (avert your eyes if genius sums makes you nauseous)

- 2 second track = 7,200 plays an hour.
- 7,200 x $0.006 = THOUSANDS of dollars an hour 

or $43.20 an hour if I use a calculator instead of enthusiasm.

All I then need to do is boot up spotify, select 'loop', hit play and leave the room. System leveraged.

I open the front door, feel the soft wind diffuse the kafkian air by my terminal. I leave the keys on the table. Adieu, ladies and gentlemen. I have a basket of divinity I need to return. 

Mul-Åland Drive

Between the mainlands of Sweden and Finland lies the Åland Islands. Before christmas I cascaded through the plane-bus-bus-ferry cleansing ritual that Åland guides you through before arriving upon her shores.

I spent a few days in this wonderful place. Philosophically and geo-politically, opportunities to ponder the relationship of 'belonging' and 'independence' arose and I lost them all under the rug of my yawn and some belly scratching. 

You see, when you arrive in the upper hemisphere during the winter solstice, your orientation is gently disintegrated.

The sun takes a relaxed attitude to rising. Here it is kissing the horizon yet you're facing neither east or west. It's midday. Your nose is pointing south and your stomach is anticipating breakfast and supper all at once.

My colleague and host heard it resembled the setting of David Lynch's 'Twin Peaks' and I think it does, albeit without peaks - Åland is insistently flat.

This serene and beautiful pancake is built on pinkish-red granite, quietude, armies of trees and the possibility of infinite reflection.

Wait, infinite reflection?! Bah, we unloaded it into wheelbarrows and built a fire to watch it burn deeply through the night (it really did burn a long time. Infinite reflection is a tenacious fuel).

In the morning (and in the fantasy of my mind) I tried to engage my host in a bike race which he reacted to by barely acknowledging me and casually accelerating off. 

Non-chalant overtaking

Photo shoot for 'Rapid Yee-ha Pedal Monthly'

As I snapped out of my fantasy, I noted my host is setting up an impressive studio on Åland - a printing press. It is a project 'in process' as he takes on the stewardship of some industrial printing presses. I am not posting any photos of the studio space (it's not finished!) but we did have some fun making postcards with the little hand-press.   

Brace yourself, I will momentarily enter a hippy state.

There's a poetic bond between being on an island and making postcards. This isn't an ethereal assertion. The desire to communicate is funnelled through a self-reflection (which ultimately proved inexhaustible by fire) offered by the island.

The postcard seems the right format. Concise in its volume and therefore perfect for the distilled pondering gathered on bike rides or from gazing on the shoreline, squinting at the fuzzed out sun, still wondering if it's breakfast or supper time.   

Stockholm

holm = island

Stockholm = Island of Stock

Navigating by street names may be tricky but I believe my map has a faithful je ne sais quoi, as the situationists would say.

Being on a train is a microcosm of the private/public blur. Not only is the carriage leaking out business and living room phone calls but it's being instagrammed, emailed and tweeted from - a carriage of documention. I looked down the aisle once to see a guy sat with his smartphone square in my direction. I don't think he was taking photos, but the psychological panopticon effect had already snapped my posture into david bowie's "Heroes" pose (in reality, I hopped on to the next seat. Away from the line of sight and my rock star photo shoot).

The Earth as a Filing Cabinet

"I hired a surveyor, who furnished the Machiguengas with a precise map of their homeland... ...The topographic map that he furnished was, he explained, in certain ways incorrect. It did not correspond to the truth because it did not take into account the curvature of the earth. In such a little piece of land? I asked, losing patience. Of course, he said angrily, and pushed his water glass toward me. Even with a glass of water, you have to be clear about it, what we’re dealing with is not an even surface. You should see the curvature of the earth as you would see it on an ocean or a lake. If you were really able to perceive it exactly as it is—but you are too simple-minded—you would see the earth curve. I will never forget this harsh lesson." 

- Werner Herzog

That account was from Herzog trying to establish land entitlement for the Machiguengas of Peru as part of his deal for filming them (You can read more as he opens a discourse between Reality and Truth). In order to establish land entitlement, he needed;

1. A map delineating the land in question

2. Documents to prove land entitlement

It's catch 22. The Machigeungas only claim to the land was through their grandparents, word of mouth, their own existence. But land doesn't produce documents. We do. 

Set of Fitzcarraldo with Machigeungas

Placing a system of bureaucracy on Earth is bound to be fallible because, like the Projections post I put up earlier, it doesn't correlate at all to what's there. You take the 3 Dimensional thing and treat it like it's 2 Dimensional. After a while you start to believe that's how the world is, a static 2 dimensional thing and when reality pokes it heads up, it makes a mess of your 2 Dimensional map. 

Yet we insist our world fit into this 2 Dimensional map! We insist the world fit the view of a bureaucratic filing cabinet. Observe the island disputes between the UK and Argentina, China and Japan, do you know what they're doing? They're 'back dating claims' to land. Yes, that's right, the very same thing you would do if you applied for unemployment benefits or go through tax payments. Except this isn't money (our own construct), this is land and it's often forgotten there are people living on that land. Bureaucratic things work better in regards to things produced from bureaucratic procedures. It does not work well when you apply it to a living system. Living systems are not bureaucratic procedures; 

- they don't compartmentalise very well

- they use a different language

- they are not balanced (T-Rex isn't here, now we are. Go figure)

- they handle conflict differently

- they don't sit still. This last point retroactively applies to all of the criteria just mentioned, bureaucracy can't deal with the effects of time.  

Land (this earth), things upon it, above and below it is a living 'system'. I use the word system at arms length, perhaps living fabrics, or mesh, or layered ecologies are a few more ways to actively describe it. How we describe the world affects how we see it and I'm all for re-describing it. Something honest that isn't relentlessly squeezing our expectations from it, but can accept it (as much as we are able to) for what is. As Herzog says, to get to The Truth. 

Saying that, if T-Rex came back from the dead with documents claiming ownership of England I would be the first to offer my friends as a meal of approval to his/her leadership.

Automated Coincidence

Today it's a cool 20c. Not suicide weather.

Or should I say, if you did commit suicide there would be no paradigm shift. The trees & flowers would remain the same. Flying insects, with the freedom to take position anywhere in the vast cubic dimensions of space, will still opt for landing in your eye. People will still hide behind their ineptitude for driving with self righteous announcements of stupidity, "use the cycle lane!" (because the throne of stupidity in one part of their brain discussed it with the council of stupidity in the other part of their brain and concluded it to be so. Laws of the real world get in the way of this ageless system). Meanwhile the council in the real world would guarantee the cycle lane rode like someone repeatedly hitting you up the arse with a baseball bat. 

Conversely, there will always be a junction with a cyclist stranded in no man's land, perfectly placed where s/he can't see a traffic light and waiting directly in the path of an oncoming car. Perhaps it's a challenge to the consistent mechanics of the world, "Vehicles can't always follow the same trajectory in a system with defined lanes!" - the rebellious voice of the urban lemming.

God knows why the earth is so finely tuned in this manner. 

It's a consistent mantra that great numbers of people living in the countryside shuffled over to the city in the past 100 years and the easy conclusion is we're all teething together. All impulses, and impulses breed similar impulses. After all, the spontaneous meeting of people in public/open space operates under a fine window of time, so the cordial nod to a passer-by or barking frustrated curse can be reciprocated in the same time it takes to check your watch (because waiting in a public space seems to bring these urgent performances, "I'm waiting so I'll check my watch. That's what people do when they're waiting, I've seen it on a music video". Have you ever waited for someone in the countryside? If its dry, you can lie down - and imagine insects crawling up your shirt). 

God knows why the earth is so finely tuned in this manner. With so many people close together it's not necessarily so that we have to process each other this quickly. In some cultures (which I have just made up) speed is not a currency. 

I will conclude this post with a picture of a pub I used to frequent over a decade ago.  

Still there.

Now you see it, now you...

The Lived Experience

The outdoor place can be a wonderful thing. I enjoy the sense of 'now', a process which wisemen of the east could gift to you through the insight of tales. Tales of mountains, zen masters and a hungover student in the backseat asking, "are we there yet?" over and over again.  

I hold no such insight, for my most frequent reaction to facing a new environment is this

...

Do you see it? 

That was an attempt to convey the 'blank sensation'. 

As I pass through new territory, I'd like to believe that under my gormless facade sits a brain threading together the unfolding arrangement of landscape features, distance and weather into a delicious casserole, one that releases steaming calculus into the air when you cut into it! But it's blank. Therefore, I'm grateful for the supplements found in documentaries, pictures and yes, writing!

The Reflected Experience

However, sometimes reading about places can leave one in the following stations;

1. The information station

2. The haunted territory station

The information station reminds me of a scene from The Trip, a TV show featuring Coogan and Brydon.

(if this link doesn't work, it features Coogan looking over a beautiful landscape yet having a passer by ruin it by regurgitating information of the geological process) 

No one wants to be ear beaten or feel like they're reading through a manual (for the record, I believe manuals can be written and laid out very well! I also believe most of those have been stolen by giants). However, I love finding out how things work!  

The haunted territory station is one where a description of 'now' contains information of what came before it. This is a mind boggling world as one is constantly re-clarifying the links of now and then whilst being juggled around in the author's psyche. Most of what I'm reading is in this latter category. However, it's not only in words that landscapes have turned into ghosts, but in images too. I was hoping to take a photo of this sign, located in essex. 

Yesterday I found it was gone. Now I hold it here as a piece of digital archeology.

Essex is moving up in the world. 

Radio On and the scales of change

"Why do the english always want to live by the sea?"

"It's the last resort"

"huh?"

"They always think it's gonna be better than it is"


Wie gehts holmeslice! Ahem, Radio On follows a trip from London to Bristol. Like a lot of road movies there's a vague ambience to the journey which is interestingly contrasted in a technical and precise delivery. 

A car pulls over so we can get down to some bladder alleviation. In the same shot, the passenger opens the door, 

...exits and takes a leak with the door performing some wonderful groin censorship. Remember, this choreography is just for a guy having a piss - I told you it was technical.


Thoughtfully shot, beautiful photography and a soundtrack we could proudly send to aliens as a declaration of our sensual ingenuity.

But this is not a review or recommendation of the film (though for those curious, I would recommend it on a day when nothing needs to happen. It's also available via a certain daily motion website. You didn't hear it from me, tigerbalm)

Shot in 1979, I couldn't help but compare artifacts. In general, small things can be susceptible to rapid change;

Cassette tapes

Vinyl

Television (if you can stack amps, you can stack tellys)

At the living room scale, we start to slow down. The TV might be the give away but the bauhaus style lamp is still available to purchase at a retail centre near you.

 And bigger scales, what about nature?

Take away the lens and its quite familiar. Slow rates of change to landscape but it is certain change (middle picture is a quarry). Even looking at gardens now you will find fewer variations in styles than compared to houses. Especially in the UK, we're pretty conservative, that's how we roll.

There's an interesting remark in the film about the phrase, "pylons spoil the countryside". I don't hear that anymore, it's been usurped by wind turbines. 

Pylons are just so 1979.

Nighty night pixel readers!

The Supermarket Trolley

The Ancients say it extended from the hand, morphed into a basket and leaped on to some wheels. Each step seemed like autonomy from god yet it was always in god's service. 

That's one way to look at it.

Another view; Sure, the trolley accepts its nature, always to be god's hand but if we map out its shape, its shifting form, there's a progression towards independence.

Another view; By becoming mobile there's an effort to reflect our own mobility, to mimic us. 

Cyborg Trolley (source)

It wants to be us but this is as simple and cheap a solution as we give it. If we lived on water perhaps we'd have an elegant solution, a floating wicker basket to hold Moses along the river reeds. But plastic bottles rafting a wheelie bin would be more likely. 

This is not a story of us and them, technology verus people. In the same way as Science is mistaken as a singular all agreeing collective, the Us (the god earthlings) are built of many groups. Which one of us the trolley serves is clarified at the border line.

"Please note trolley will stop beyond this point"
Trolley disabled at the border line (source)

"...the logic of identity is, always and everywhere, entangled in the logic of hierarchy." - David Graeber, The First 5000 Years of Debt

A13, Trunk Road to the Sea

Have you ever wondered what the following places look like;

 Wapping, Barking, Dagenham, Grays Thurrock, Basildon, Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-on-Sea, Chalkwell, Prittlewell and Shoeburyness?

If so, you've most likely heard Billy Bragg's "A13, Trunk Road to the Sea". 

Coming from England, the song was written because Bragg couldn't visualise the American towns on the classic "Route 66" which led to him penning his own version. 

However, I'm from the UK and I've only been to a handful of places mentioned in the song. So I thought it would be cool to sequence some glimpses of this journey.

I punched the co-ordinates in Google Maps

Which gave me this route

Hit play


and its off we go!

Starts down in Wapping

By-pass Barking

Straight through Dagenham

Down to Grays Thurrock (to the right)

Basildon on your left

Pitsea

Thundersley

Hadleigh

Leigh-on-Sea

Chalkwell?
(By mistake, I dropped the google street dude in an old clock shop  that offered a 360 panaromic walk around.)

(I tried to find the kitchen - cup of tea hunt - but ended back on the street mesmerised by the ghost cars. AHEM, back to the song...)

Chalkwell

Prittlewell

Shoeburyness

Phew!

Well, it's one way to synchronise a 2 hour journey to a 2 minute song.

Friends 1

"Imagine what the physical gathering... would be like if every participant wore a badge proclaiming how many friends they had in that room?"

Quote from an interview with Ben Grosser, creator of Facebook Demetricator, a browser add on that filters (and questions) the numerical influence of interactions on social media.

It's Around 'Ere Somewhere!

Salut!

I love this article about a disappearing island, Île de Sable in the pacific (owned by La France). The island doesn't exist, or isn't where it's supposed to be.

One theory is it was a cartographic trap, intentional mistakes used by clever people to outsmart copycats. If so, openstreet map win the original work award (or maybe they just updated in time)

Google Maps (now you see it)

WikiMiniAtlas (now you see it)

OpenStreetMap (vamoosh!)

The intriguing thing is this, as the ruler of many islands, are you upset your island's gone? Is it akin to being told your volvo/rose bed/leopard skin pill box hat went missing and not realising you had one? Whether in this instance you throw chairs around or return indifferently to your cavier and shotgun, here's the extended hypothetical scenario; a year from now your butler informs you they found your island a mile south from its old spot.

In the words of the great philosopher, Donnie Brasco, "fuggetabout it"

Escalator Replacement for Tube

A small band of architects and engineers here at Team Cakelettes have worked over night to produce this energy efficient replacement for the Underground escalator.