Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
     "Curators" are illegal and even war-criminals, but if nobody
can enforce the former laws, it becomes a realm of Machiavellian
maneuver among the super-rich.  If you're a veteran of the New York
real estate biz, the law is a series of suggestions.  New York real
estate has been around a long time.  It's older than the USA.

       So modern "curators" are more like privateering warlords than
spies or political operatives, but a basic geopolitical problem
arises when they try to legitimize their activities and hold on to
whatever they stole.  Nobody has set up any system to allow that
yet, and privatized global marauding goes against the Westphalian
Order.  Even if you conquer Ukraine, you can't get named "Lord
Conqueror Duke of Ukraine."  Embarrassingly, you have to fake it
indefinitely.
  

    

      At the moment there's a big to-do in Libya as rival warlords
are backed by the Turks and the Russians.  In theory, this ought to
lead to de-facto offshore Ottoman and Czarist colonies in Africa, a
source of oil and cheap labor, or whatever they imagine they are
getting there.
The Libyans are so screwed-up by their Curse of Oil that they'd
probably be better off as colonial slaves of the rapacious Turks and
cruel Russians; at least they could get to the grocery store without
being shot by snipers, and they could probably get some potatoes.

     However, even though Libya's getting sectioned off and
colonized by curators -- apparently -- the UN, NATO, the usual
power-payers, China even, they all say nothing about it.   Putin and
Erdogan confer privately about it, while everybody else looks in the
other direction.  Nobody else wants to risk conquering and pacifying
Libya.  They all figure, probably correctly, that it's a quagmire.  

   So in MMXX, poor Libya is supposed to get pacified through the
actions of curator warlords, packs of hired mercenaries, and fleets
of killer drones.  Okay: assuming that somehow works, what will
Libya use for postage stamps?  What kind of money will they have? 
What passports? Will Amazon do deliveries?   Are they stateless
Somalia with better-equipped white-guy marauders? What gives with
that?  It's so interesting.
  

    

    Also, "curators" don't have to be huge; they can be a fast,
dinky two-man operation.  Carlos Ghosn, who is just a mere common
automobile millionaire, hired an ex Green-Beret and a Lebanese
militiaman to escape the Japanese rule of law and smuggle him off to
Lebanon.  And that worked -- he got smuggled away in a pirate chest,
yo-ho-ho.  

     Millionaires didn't used to do brazen stuff like that, because
they were afraid of the international order.  No big reason to fret
about that now.
  

    
In this new reality of "all power to the billionaire oligarchs,"
Donald Trump's ascendance seems to fit, but he's got a problem.

You can see that he's a wild bull, because he's so intimate with
bullshit, but his supporters LIKE having a wild bull tearing through
the house. The didn't like the decor, they wanted an excuse to
redecorate. Tear it apart, and we'll rebuild it.

But what happens when he's wrecked the refrigerator, uprooted the
plumbing, torn through the walls, broken all the windows? He's
taking out the decor you didn't like, but he's tearing through
everything else. He's destroying the stuff you still want and need.
You can look the other way, but sooner or later the food's spoiling
and the rain's getting in. 

To hold power, a boss bull like Trump has to do one thing: he has to
make his people feel safe.  The problem with this wild bull is that
he's goring everone and everything in sight.  He demands loyalty but
he's never loyal. 

Sooner or later, he's gonna be Lonesome Rhodes. It just seems
inevitable. The best teflon coating wears away, sooner or later. 
(See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Face_in_the_Crowd_(film) if you
don't get that reference.)
  

    
Lonesome Rhodes needed that one person willing to turn the
microphone up. I don't know if anyone around Trump is willing to be
that person.
  

    
The microphone has been turned up plenty of times around Trump, see
the infamous Access Hollywood tape. The problem is it's never been
turned up on anything that was a deal-breaker for his base.
Although, I've grown so cynical and morbidly impressed with his
base's ability to resolve their cognitive dissonance around the man
that I truly think Trump could get hot-mic'ed saying that he's
secretly handing America over to communist antifa Muslim atheists
and his followers would applaud this brilliant 4-D chess move that
owns the libs, somehow...
  

    
I'm sure there's a line, even for his followers. But the real
question is what it will take for the Senate and Justice Department,
currently in his pocket, to say enough is enough.
  

    
Meanwhile, we should yank the trunk of the elephant in the room:
climate change.

"Is it wrong to be hopeful about climate change?" 
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200109-is-it-wrong-to-be-hopeful-about-cl
imate-change

"No individual will bend the emissions curve alone. No writer,
modeling team, no forest firefighter, no environmental lawyer will
carry the day. But if you’re looking for hope, there might be a
space in constructing something together – in responsive hope. No
single coral restoration programme will heal the wounds inflicted on
reefs around the world, but perhaps networks offer a way forward.
That collective goal, and the space of uncertainty in that
'perhaps,' is our hope."  
  

    
When it comes to climate, we're all Lilliputians, but together we can lasso
Gulliver.
  

    

Via email from Brian Slesinksy:

"I'm wondering if anyone wants to comment on the state of the Maker
community? We might have had the last bay area Maker Faire last
year, though I stopped going a while ago since it seemed like I was
seeing the same stuff."

This subject of the Maker Movement is of keen interest to me
personally, because I was a columnist for MAKE magazine and curator
of the "Casa Jasmina" maker house-of-the-future in Turin.
  

    

"Movements," as opposed to institutions, tend to go somewhere, and
then they stop.  So "Making" was an eclectic tumbleweed of a lot of
moving novelties that I enjoyed learning about, such as Web 2.0,
open source hard ware, 3Dprinting, artisanal electronics,
shareables, fabrication labs, public hacker events, sneaking weird
cyberpunk DIY personal projects into dead Italian factories, and
even more!  

I'm happy I was involved with that.  It was truly illuminating, and
worth every minute.  Thanks to Making, I'm much more at ease with
topics and activities that would likely have been forever closed to
me as a career novelist.   I know a lot more about material culture
now, and I'm even far more personally handy than I once was.

    However, fifteen years is a rather long time for any "movement."
Nobody talks about "Web 2.0" any more; the Internet was famously
"built with O'Reilly books," but Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon,
Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent, those vast post-Internet
entities are not built with O'Reilly books, and O'Reilly was the
source of Make, the way Whole Earth was the source of the WELL.   
  

    

      Even the Maker Movement had to meet some bills,  it couldn't
run just on raw joy and sweat equity.  For Make that was the
magazine, selling some tools and tie-ins, and throwing big,
profitable public events quietly underwritten by tech companies. 
Eventually they suffered a cash crunch when their discreet alliance
with the corporations broke down.

      In MMXX, if you're a tech company enamored with making, you
just build your own fab-lab in the basement and give it to the
engineers as a playroom/R&D lab.  You don't need hand-holding from
MAKE magazine columnists.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/this-monogram-appliance-began-as-a-b
right-idea-in-a-makerspace

      These big-time sponsors figured out that they could have
trained professionals tinkering.  They don't need a massive popular
movement of random tinkerers tinkering -- that doesn't convey to
them any genuine research and development benefit.  Nobody tinkers
up a functional and legal mass-market stove or refrigerator.  
Makers are hobbyists and popular-mechanics people, they mostly make
toys, games, collectibles, costumes, and Burner-style FX
knick-knacks that approach technology-art, device art, and machine
art.  Activities dear to my heart, but they're not heavy industry
and they rarely scale.
  

    

      Then there's the experience of the "Makers" themselves -- as
in, what are accomplishing here, what is your own end goal?  Is this
something you do on the weekends, like building ships in a bottle, 
or are you a designer/engineer light-manufacturer who is at it all
day?  If you're a professional craftsperson, you'll need to
manufacture instead of tinkering --- because"real artists ship." 
You want inventory, patrons, a customer base, maybe a brick and
mortar shop -- maybe you use some digital tools, but you're a
self-employed skilled laborer, and good luck with it. 

     If you don't ship any product, and you're a professional
tinkerer, then you're actually into "Makertainment" rather than
making.  You want to record and sell your process as a form of
monetizable performance-art.
  

    

     Maker-entertainment is quite a different animal than the "Maker
Movement," because there's a lot more money and fame in it.  This is
Adam Savage pulling down Starbucks sponsorship money for harnessing
an aeolopile gizmo with liquid nitrogen.

https://youtu.be/aNTq7qOAFeg
 
     Okay, that monetizable Youtube stunt is super-entertaining if
you ask me, but it's not "making," even though Adam shows you
exactly how he makes it.  It's a paid commercial for Starbucks by
other means, and also, if you yourself screw around with liquid
nitrogen, you're gonna get frostbite scars.  Adam, by contrast, is a
globe-trotting veteran TV star with numerous employees.

      Here in MMXX, this is the post-Maker state of the art here: 
Adam Savage, pro entertainer and special FX dude. I have to say I
learn a lot from him, and I actually pay money to be a member of
"Tested."

It doesn't much surprise me that the show-biz aspects of Making
would turn into show-biz.  That was always the most Californian
thing about it.
  

    

     As for our  own"Maker House of the Future" in Turin, man, that
was super.  So much fun.   You would not believe the free, adulatory
publicity we reaped for that, especially my spouse,  "The Jasmina of
Casa Jasmina," the feminist maven of the "Internet of Women Things."
Jasmina became famous in Turin,  almost a mythical figure, because
she was the hostess of this avant-garde local house "Casa Jasmina." 

      That house was the only aspect of the Via Egeo ex-factory
complex that was much frequented by Italian women.  We had female
astronauts and female museum curators in there.  The female mayor
dropped by.  Some great parties, too.  All of the Torino Great and
Good were trying to sit on our squeaky plywood furniture.  It went
on for years!

    Today that factory complex is civilizing, normalizing, almost
gentrifying.  Via Egeo 16 used to be more or less a squat that
everybody ignored, but it got extensively renovated and is earning
money, so it makes no legal sense to have a place that is basically
a weird hotel room inside the middle of a design-office space.  The
legal contradictions of trying to do too much at once got in our
way, and also, Turin is getting rather sensitive about the
out-of-control AirBnB thing.  So, in Jan 15, Casa Jasmina ceases to
exist.

     A clean exit is never that bad a fate for any act of futurism. 
Casa Jasmina was becoming a showplace of aging Maker gizmos from
five years ago.  Also, Via Egeo still has a so-called "Fab Lab" down
in its basement, but I'm not sure why they need that MIT
nomenclature in 2020.  They could just buy the robots, routers,
laser-cutters, 3DPrinters, for they've become pretty standard.
  

    

    At "Casa Jasmina" we never made any profit, because we also had
a covert alliance with a corporation.  In our case, it was the
open-source hardware outfit "Arduino," with CEO Massimo Banzi as our
maestro, theorist and gray eminence.  Like a lot of hobby startups
Arduino had some rough times, but they've pulled through, and at CES
in Vegas this year, out came the first mainstream industrial Arduino
product, the "Arduino Portenta."

https://blog.arduino.cc/2020/01/07/arduino-goes-pro-at-ces-2020/

The "Portenta" is not a maker-style "innovation platform," it's an
open-source heavy-duty industrial device, and why not?  I dunno if
it'll sell, but in terms of where the maker movement went as it
developed with the years, that makes sense to me.  You "innovate,"
and you either write down the experiment and close the lab, or else
it turns into something commonplace that is no longer "innovative." 
That's what the calendar is all about. Don't cry if it's gone,
rejoice that it was ever there.
  

    
"Casa Jasmina" is over, but in the meantime, Internet-of-Things
industry booster Stacey Higginbotham says today that the entire idea
of a "smart home" has to be abandoned.  If they're run in the
surveillance-marketing fashion that they are today, no sane person
ought to trust one.

https://mailchi.mp/iotpodcast/stacey-on-iot-ces-madness?e=10392a4747

*Sometimes it's better to pleasantly waste some time on cool Maker
hobbies than it is to toss billions of dollars in VC money out the
window.
  

    
I was never a committed maker, though I had connections to Make
Magazine and was part of an installation, at the first Austin Maker
Faire, on the "DIY house of the future." Mostly smoke and mirrors,
that installation had nothing to do with the Internet of Things
smart home/wired home mythology. It was focused more on making than
information systems: with advances in building technologies and
materials, we could have user-configurable homes, flexible modular
structures. Art generated from resident brainwaves. Consoles for
user-configured electronic murals and music.  Movable walls and
configurable rooms.

But I was more drawn to the culture than to the practice of making,
which had its beginnings with Whole Earth ("access to tools and
ideas"). The Whole Earth project was my most compelling influence as
an adult. It brought me here, to the WELL, and it encouraged my
eclectic, generalist mindset. I miss the Whole Earth/Point
Foundation organization and its many outputs, but I see the "tools"
aspect reflected in maker culture. We need a project to manifest,
again, the spirit of self-directed experimentation and adventure. A
framework for the curious, discarding passive consumerism for active
tinkering.

Bruce also mentioned Stacey Higginbotham's piece rightly
acknowledging that much of the "Internet of Things" framework has
been out of whack. What was missing - a strategic understanding of
what users would want in a smart home, vs a bunch of gadgets wired
together without a clear overriding concept of the value of that
integration. I like that I can control my thermostat from my smart
phone, but I don't need my thermostat to talk to my refrigerator or
my stove. It would be more useful if my home could gather data about
the environment and manage energy use based on some set of
user-guided parameters, and do that with complete security and
trust.  Also Pliny Fisk and I were talking years ago about building
just that kind of home, and networking it with the neighborhood, so
that there would be cooperative targeting of energy goals, and forms
of sharing so far undefined.  There could be a gamification aspect,
as well. As a by-product, you would have a more robust relationship
with your neighbors.  I don't see that happening anywhere, at least
not yet.

My last post mentioned climate change, and I'll repeat part of the
bit I quoted from a BBC article: "... if you’re looking for hope,
there might be a
space in constructing something together – in responsive hope. No
single coral restoration programme will heal the wounds inflicted on
reefs around the world, but perhaps networks offer a way forward."
Maybe we could deploy maker energy and IoT innovation, and build
popular networks of response to the crisis. I say popular as
distinct from government: it's clear that world governments are
failing to respond, so it's up to the rest of us to address the
problem.
  

    
Hi Folks,  Some newish things coming up in the last couple of weeks:
The Americans know who you are. The Americans listen to what you
say.  The Americans know where you are.  The Americans can smite you
from afar with no warning.  These are characteristics that only used
to be ascribed to the gods.  The Americans are doing these things
(for good or ill) on a regular basis in this last decade and pretty
much no one else in the world can put the combination together. 
But, like the gods of old, the leadership doesn't seem to have the
best outcomes for mankind as the central goal.  
  And the Iranians, trusting in their god, shot off what must have
been the entire year's budget for ballistic missiles in one go, with
a 26% failure rate and managed to not actually hurt anyone.  So some
anti-aircraft unit got "buck fever" and took out an airliner (oh
praise allah).  These nitwits, warned buy their generals to shut
down civil aviation for the hostilities went for the money and kept
the airport open.  I don't like or support Mr. T but it is clear
there are dimmer bulbs in the leadership of the world.
  So I wonder, will the next general of the Quds force want to be
out and about rallying the militias of the middle east when he knows
the Americans know who he is, listen to his every radiated
conversation, know his location, and can center punch his moving car
with a 50 Kg missile pulling the trigger half the world away?
  

    
Speaking of artists who can make unlikely contraptions in their
garage, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art is having a
retrospective show of the technology art work of Rafael
Lozano-Hemmer.

He is definitely one of the most advanced and capable tech-artists
of this century. If you ever want to light up an entire city with
interactive lasers, Rafael is your guy.

https://www.wired.com/beyond-the-beyond/2020/01/rafael-lozano-hemmer-san-franc
isco-moma/

He's also the only artist I know who is Mexican-Canadian, which
seems like a really cool thing to be when you think about it.
  

    
Here’s a nice retrospective of “Electronic Dance Music” in the last
decade.  You’ll note that EDM has some inherent youth appeal because
your Boomer parents don’t like it, but also it’s the only form of 
pop music production that seems to be technically advancing. 
Nobody’s done anything new or remarkable with electric guitars in
quite a while — they have become as stable as the theremin, which,
in the year MMXX, is one hundred years old.  Mankind has had an
entire ecentury of electronic music….

https://pitchfork.com/features/article/2010s-reverberations-of-edm-skrillex-ze
dd/

EDM has got new methods of democratized production, with YouTube
tutorials, Ableton plug-ins, and sample packs you can buy on line. 
And then, if you’re a big draw and you’ve gotten to the arena stage,
you can wire up a bunch of LED billboards and put on a garish
multimedia show that’s basically a traveling theme-park.  And that’s
monetizable!  Wow!

“Whatever happens to musicians will happen to everybody,” and
really, the ruthless punishment these artists absorb, while
continuing somehow to survive and emit more or less coherent noises,
it just astonishes me.  Symphony orchestras and opera still somehow
exist in our world, next to these musical EDM entrepreneurs who
squeak by like self-employed circuit-bending crafts people from the
Maker Movement.
  

    
*Okay, maybe it was a bit cruel of me to claim that the guitar is as
stable as the theremin, because of course you can plug grandpa's
electric guitar into an FX box that is basically an EDM rig.

https://neuraldsp.com/quad-cortex

*Lookah all the knobs and buttons on that! "Quad Cortex is the most
powerful floor modeler on the planet. With 2GHz of dedicated DSP
from its Quad-Core SHARC® architecture, this ludicrous amount of
processing capacity provides limitless sound design possibilities."
  

    <scribbled by bruces Sun 12 Jan 20 03:08>
  

    
<70> If I may pause for a moment on the San Francisco connection
here – it makes sense that SF MOMA is presenting this, rather than,
say, San Jose Museum of Art, now that the two cities have made an
historic handshake: Silicon Valley keeps the hardware, San Francisco
explores the software. It's a leap to say that rock&roll lightshows
of the '60s have evolved and transformed, but the fact is light is
becoming an element in public spaces here.  

No flying billboards yet, as from out of Blade Runner. It's still
all noncommercial and arty. Salesforce Tower has a different "movie"
that plays in its peak every night, barely recognizable images taken
from daily life transformed into shifting shapes and color form. The
Bay Bridge is also a nightly lightshow of sorts – thanks to an
outfit called Illuminate.org.     

Their latest, in Grace Cathedral, sold out for 2019 the moment it
was announced: a projector of 300,000 lumens has been hoisted up and
fastened into the flying buttresses to create a 100-foot curtain of
shifting light and color, in a space beside the interfaith chapel,
where the labyrinth sits, in a 15-minute composition of music and
light.

https://gracecathedral.org/events/grace-light/
  

    
This talk about lightshows and projections makes me think of Luke
Savisky's "Eye of Texas" projection on New Year's Eve 2006 in
Austin: https://www.austinchronicle.com/arts/2008-02-08/589099/ Luke
(https://lukesavisky.com/) has always been an ambitious and creative
video artist. Ahead of his time - he was doing this sort of thing
back in the 90s. The projections just kept getting larger.

Also around 2005-2006, while working with the Digital Convergence
Initiative here in Austin, I was engaged in speculative converations
with Kim Smith, who was looking ahead of the curve with flat screen
development. Kim saw the potential to have flat screens everywhere,
including massive displays. Prescient - I see screens everywhere,
some scaled to immensity.

Diverse shadows on our 21st century cave walls... What will the
2020s bring? More light, less shadow?