THE SHOW SO FAR

maples, Cortes Island, B.C.

Autumn has settled onto this mossy island and the massive maples have taken on the golden hue of the mythical Mallorn-trees of Tolkein’s Lothlorein. But as in Middle Earth, the calm of the forest in which I find myself has an unsettled, internecine quality, as the distant thrumming of the massing, apocalyptic armies becomes ever more palpable. Activists, astrologers, political pundits, climatologists and zoologists all seem to agree that we are at some sort of historical cusp, with the bifurcation point being the upcoming American election.

Of course, like everyone else, I have been engrossed in the minutiae of “the debates” and wondering whether Bush has finally been completely transformed into one of the supermarionetic Thunderbirds I so loved watching as a child. The theories around Bush’s “wire” have been all over the net lately, but for me the penny dropped when he appeared halfway through his first campaign with a large Band-Aid on his cheek and suddenly started speaking more coherently, albeit with an unsettling kind of parsed pacing, as if he had to wait for a download between phrases. Some sort of audio transducer implanted into his maxillary bone seems to make the most sense to me. Since then, my question has always been: “Why *wouldn’t* Bush be wired?” I mean, could the plutocrats at the helm of the world’s only superpower actually leave the operation of Bush’s mouth to chance? Not likely. In fact, Bush is the perfect subject for this kind of augmentation; his naturally dazed and hypnotic expression and apparent absence of intellectual capacity would make his brain/mouth connection a pretty easy hack.

I’ve been outside a lot lately, since returning from New York, stratifying the seeds of the exquisite Davidia involucrata or Dove Tree and the Caucasian Wingnut, which I collected at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens. Far overhead, across the great blue vault of oceanic sky, skeins of wild geese stream southward just beneath the endlessly forming and disintegrating grid of contrails left by the trans-Pacific jetliners, ferrying their cargos of bleary-eyed passengers back and forth across the date line. An idyllic autumnal image to be sure, but NASA has reported that contrails contribute noticeably to global warming, by increasing the amount of cirrus clouds in the upper atmosphere. Even the beloved croaking of tree frogs that (for now) still echoes through these damp woods is no longer to be taken for granted. Global amphibian populations are in free fall and nobody seems to have a clue as to why. There are the usual perplexed mutterings about “the canaries in the coal mine” but frogs are going extinct, even in protected areas, which have up till now been thought to be relatively pristine. Maybe frogs can look into the future and are burrowing towards the centre of the earth because they see what’s coming. They can, after all, predict the weather. . . Scientists are similarly bewildered by what the Guardian calls an “unexplained and unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere two years running”, which may mean that instead of having decades to bring global warming under control, we have only a few more years. The nightmare scenario is that this is the first sign of the breakdown in the Earth’s natural systems for absorbing CO2, leading to the dreaded “runaway greenhouse effect” and total climate meltdown.

Creatures everywhere seem to be scurrying for cover, even ones that haven’t been discovered yet. There has recently been a spate of reporting on sightings of new humanoids, which although long existing in the realms of myth and crypto-zoology, are now proving to be scientifically plausible. The BBC reports on a new species of two-metre tall great ape sighted in the north of the Democratic Republic of Congo, which according to local villagers is “ferocious, and even capable of killing lions.” It clearly doesn’t want to be found. In Sumatra, there is fresh evidence supporting claims of the existence of the orang pendek, another as yet undiscovered species of hominid ape (or person?), said by the islanders to “walk like a man.” Whether or not these mysterious apes, yetis and sasquatches ever are proven to be walking this earth in our time, there is something sad about the fact that under the present onslaught of massive deforestation and climate change, the habitat that it would take to support them, will soon no longer exist. Much of the magic in these creatures lies in the fact that they haven’t been found by us and, real or imagined, the fact that they might exist, implies that somewhere there is still a nature big enough for them to hide in.

Perhaps these fleeting glimpses of hairy bipeds are really manifestations of our own deep longing for an ecological innocence that we have long ago lost, -a kinder, simpler more feral version of ourselves, reminiscent of the mysterious, mediaeval, heraldic figure of the “green man”, still living invisibly somewhere in the wildernesses of our own minds, gazing incredulously out at the carnage wrought by his future self.

Yet within this maelstrom of ecological destruction there are signs of hope. In Australia, hundreds of people are queuing up to view the putrid flower of the suggestively named Amorphophallus titanum, or titan arum, which at full bloom is said to smell like a large rotting corpse. Hooray! Anomophilia is alive and well, at least in the Antipodes. The Guardian is reporting that Chernobyl’s now flourishing ecosystems have prompted the UN to suggest that the area be developed as a nature reserve and ecotourism destination -albeit one with an unpredictable future, as experiments using fruit flies exposed to the blast have shown the problems of genetic mutation don’t emerge until the 26th generation. Maybe one day tourists to the site will thrill to the sight Cerberus-like wolves howling at a sallow Ukranian moon with multiple heads, or perhaps bio-luminescent wild boars rooting through the verdant new Elysian fields blanketing the ruins of Chernobyl’s now picturesque sarcophagus. Down in Mexico, the olive ridley is bucking the trend of world-wide sea turtle extinction, thanks to the armed guards now stationed on its nesting beaches -no doubt delighting the rich white tourists who flock there to commune with ‘authentic’ nature.

As an escape from the psychogeography of despair, and to address an overwhelming urge I’ve always had to fix stuff, I have, over the past decades, engaged in what could arguably be called a kind of ecological Situationism. The folks over at Flickr have made it possible for me to start putting the documentation of some of these ‘botanical interventions’ on-line, in a simple accessible format. So far, I’ve uploaded slide shows of my “Healing the Cut – Bridging the Gap” land art project as well as a history of Cottonwood Gardens, of which I was a founder and designer. Documentation of my recent “Means of Production” project can still be found here, on my plone site, but I will set up a Flickr slide show of this shortly.

Oh, and I am *so* pleased to see Laura Trippi as well as William Gibson blogging again, both after a long hiatus. Says Gibson, quoting the Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno

— “At times, to be silent is to lie.”

bunnies, Victoria B.C.

dam(n), near Castlegar, B.C.

Back in Nuevo York

Loisida Ambassador

Mosaic Man was here

Dropped from the Sky:
Once again, I find myself on a flight hurtling toward old New York. The plane casts a fleeting shadow across the silver, flocculent tops of billowing thunderheads. They float like gargantuan jellyfish above the parched prairie below, raking the vast continental airscapes with flashing tentacles of lightning.
As the roiling autumnal sky slowly succumbs to the oncoming Atlantic evening, the number of twinkling lights on the ground inexorably increases until pure blackness almost disappears, replaced now by the great blinding orange galaxy of the North-eastern megalopolis of which New York City is the luminous, seething hub.
Descending through the swirling night into JFK, I become saturated with the feeling that America, that great doughy and demanding child of the Enlightenment, has become senescent. Its baby flesh has degenerated into sheets of yellow fat and dimpled cellulite. Manhattan, the nation’s inverted belly button, is sticking out into the air again, newly hopeful yet still frighteningly vulnerable to another errant bolt from the blue.
And that would be a shame. On my journeys here since 9/11, I have found that New York has managed to retain its ebullience and unstoppable proteanism. It continues to be an engine of surprise and delight; constantly reinventing itself by absorbing talent into its vast sucking eye, iconic yet aloof to the parochial and inbred American hinterland that at once adores it and despises it.
But 9/11 was indeed a serious blow. Without the looming machine-like Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre, the Manhattan skyline seems deeply diminished–knocked back to an earlier architectural epoch–a sort of fossilized reef of outdated early 20th century ideas. The stone and steel towers of the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building look so old now, mute monuments to the forgotten captains of industry who once glowered down from them at the hopeful masses boiling through still innocent streets. But too much time has passed. It feels as if Manhattan’s skyscraper capitalism has entered its Cretaceous era–mutated, corrupted and riddled by its own history, ready to be laid waste by the first errant asteroid to be nudged from its orbit.
The super shuttle ride into Manhattan from JFK was (as usual) exhaustingly epic. I was sandwiched into the back of the van with some boisterous Australian ladies and a deeply demented family of logorrheic Dutch people that found it necessary to opine loudly on all matter of banality, including the ubiquitous Duayne Reade Drugstore chain; “Look a Dvane Arreed Droog stor, open tventifor Hooours !” The ride seemed like an eternity, a punishment for an unforgivable sin I might have committed in a past life. Due to the oversupply of passengers and luggage, my head was jammed against the window as if I was an insect specimen mounted under museum glass. At the same time my spine was being pummeled by a seemingly endless array of arrhythmically placed potholes, unmediated by the slightest hint of a suspension system, which would have concussed me against the van’s ceiling, had I not ratcheted up my seatbelt. Despite my crankiness, the rest of the overcrowded van’s passengers (first time visitors to New York) were obviously enthralled by the spectacle of driving into Manhattan’s magnificent, electrified maw at night. They gasped at their first glimpses of the skyline’s iconic buildings and the network of massive, light festooned suspension bridges that funnel the endless streams of traffic into the city core. Times Square’s hyperbolic lightscapes elicited squeals of delight, as did even the manhole covers emitting steam from the city’s streets.
Clearly, Manhattan could still be enchanting and (once again) I had to admit to myself that I, also, feel a kind of frisson whenever coming here, despite my increasingly deep misgivings about America and its hegemonic future. New York City, *is* after all so much part of the cultural memory of the planet that Modernity itself seems kind of unimaginable without it. So, I resolved, for the time being anyway, to leave my party-pooper negativity at the door of the van and to engage in the collective hallucination for a while, just to see what would happen. Finally, I arrived at Ruth’s place in the East Village and after being presented with a fascinating exposition on why I should have taken a taxi, I finally was able to settle in.
The Lions of St. Marks:
Despite the distasteful, hyper-gentrification that has hit the Loisida, a few things have thankfully remained the same. I was delighted to see Mosaic Man still plying his trade (despite his rumoured departure from the neighbourhood), this time encrusting a lamp standard near Astor Place with his signature neo-rococo tilings,. The Puerto Rican bike guys still engage in their happy processions through Tompkins Square Park on flag-festooned Schwinns, blasting the transistorized salsa music from their beloved Borinque, into the cosseting verdant canopy of the overarching elms. Up above St. Mark’s Place, the winged lions still stare down from the friezes with stony trepidation at the pullulating throngs on the street, as if ready to fly back to Venice and report to their patron saint their anxious tidings of a strange New World.

Winged lions over St. Mark’s Place

Beyond 7:
Although this was to be a working trip, I managed to extricate some time to hop the Number 7 train to Queens and see the last exhibition scheduled at MoMA, before the institution was to magically weigh anchor and float back to its newly renovated Manhattan home. I am so glad I made the trip out there to see the exquisite works of Lee Bontecou, an artist of whom I had up till now been woefully unaware. The exhibition started out with a number of untitled constructions from the 1950’s and 60’s resembling singularly yonic, inverted “holes” (rather like the individual cells of paper wasp nests or the tube-like structures exuded by undersea thermal vents), fabricated from wire, velveteen and bits of khaki-coloured army surplus ephemera. Some of these pieces were kitted out with leering rapacious teeth made from saw blades, conferring upon them a grim, shark-like aesthetic. Further on in the display, I found myself simply *blown away* by Bontecou’s whimsical vacuum-formed plastic plant forms and coelocanth-like deep sea fishes, that seemed inspired by the lovely hand blown glass plankton models and dioramas of deep sea creatures displayed at the American Museum of Natural History. The show finished with Bontacou’s bizarre, spidery, space ship constructions which looked as if they had just floated off the cover of Samuel Delaney’s Dahlgren.
The companion exhibit to Bontecou’s, called Tall Buildings, took the form of an intriguing display of architectual models of skyscrapers, (proposed and actually built) from all over the planet. This show actually managed to convey a sense of optimism, euphoria and jouissance about the imagining of innovative new tall buildings, that has largely been lost since 9/11 in New York City, exacerbated in particular by the grotesque indignities and compromise-riddled architectural bottom-feeding that has so tainted the re-development of the Ground Zero site. Standing out in the show, were several buildings proposed for construction in Asia, a continent where there appears to be not the slightest reticence to taking architecture to truly hyperbolic levels. Seoul’s Togok (XL Towers) and Hong Kong’s Kowloon Towers are cases in point, (be sure and take the little on-line *flash tours* of the buildings here to see what I mean.) These are absolutely titanic structures almost 500 metres in height that seem to flaunt the forces of physics and terrorism, yet to me they have an almost crystalline charm. The Togok XL Towers even incorporate their own temple. The most endearing objects in the whole Tall Buildings exhibit were surely a series of child-like, cobbled-together little models of tin, fly screening and bits of plastic made by Frank Gehry as studies for his (unbuilt) New York Times Building which, had it been completed, would have looked more or less like a giant melted popsicle. The proposal that was finally selected by the Times is sadly, an extremely conventional monstrosity designed by Renzo Plano, who describes its architectural value proposition as (yawn) “a simple rectangle reflecting Manhattan’s grid.” What a missed opportunity for the Times, which (had they chosen Gehry’s design) could have lightened up their rather staid and impacted corporate image. I mean, running the Times must be kind of like dealing with a melting popsicle anyway- with all that battling against time and sucking up that they do there.
Of course being in New York for any time is liable to give one heart palpitations, due to what social scientist Barry Schwartz in his recent book calls “the paradox of choice”. Seeing as I was in Queens, I just had to check out P.S.1’s latest offerings and was delighted to come across nARCHITECTS’ whimsical bamboo structure called Canopy, installed in the building’s courtyard. Bamboo has been utilized in a multiplicity of ways for millenia. But nARCHITECTS’ use of freshly cut, green bamboo as a free-form architectural medium, brings to it a freshness and contemporary quality, rarely seen. One has to appreciate bamboo’s utter amazingness. Imagine an extremely strong, light and flexible building material, with structural qualities akin to carbon fibre, that just sort of grows itself! My own groves on Cortes Island basically thrive on a steady diet of chicken manure, rotten leaves and pee, rewarding me with magnificent, useful culms, edible shoots and graceful, timeless botanical beauty.

nARCHITECTS’ Canopy installation at P.S. 1

Inside P.S.1, was the usual hodge-podge of works by emerging artists, including the sort of obligatory and tedious porn-esque photography that continues to clog the art world lately, like so much self-absorbed, arteriosclerotic fat. Why artists still feel compelled to mine the porn genre, when it is has in and of itself become so completely mainstream and non-transgressive, is a complete mystery to me. It it *about* porn, or is it *just* porn? Perhaps the most egregious example of this, that I saw on this trip to New York, was Terry Richardson’s show at Deitch Projects, which basically consisted entirely of large photographs of him getting blowjobs from various medicated-looking sex partners. While it might have been a fun project for the artist, it left me asking myself, “Why am I wasting my time looking at pictures of what Terry Richardson’s insalubrious dick did on its summer vacation?”
Imagine my surprise when (back at P.S.1), idling through yet another catatonia-inducing multiple narrative/multiple projection video installation, I came across a blissfully non-interactive display of Chris Marker’s preparatory copybook, for his (1962) film La Jetee, which of course to me has always been ‘the perfect film.’ Laid out on a long table were all of the film’s image sequences, in the form of tiny black and white photographs along with the director’s notes. And there it was –Sequence N, Image #25–the scene that has always haunted me, where the two actors are pointing towards the cross section of an ancient sequoia tree, covered with historical dates, and the narrator says:

She pronounces an English name he doesn’t understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree and hears himself say, “this is where I come from,” and falls back exhausted.

Sequoia scene in La Jetee (1962)

Ground Zero’s deleted history, (2004)

Objecthood:
In La Jetee, Marker somehow anticipated, over 40 years ago, the deconstruction of time, space and linear narrative that so characterizes contemporary network art. The Chelsea Art Museum has mounted a fascinating exhibition of this genre called The Passage of Mirage – Illusory Virtual Objects, which examines what the curators term “an expanded concept of objecthood” made possible in the virtual and interactive realms of cyberspace. There is a wonderful echo here of Marker’s use of Orly Airport as the platform for time travel in La Jetee, in the intriguing networked installation, entitled Short Films about Flying, 2003 by the duo Thomson and Craighead. In this work, the artists hack a video feed from Boston’s Logan Airport (the camera of which is controlled remotely by visitors to the webcam site) and combine these images with randomly loaded internet radio samples and text grabbed from on-line messaging boards. The resulting, narrative, montage and sound-track are all random, yet wonderfully poetic and beguiling and always completely novel. In a sense, everything and anything can and will happen in this non-dimensional state, all at the same time. Or maybe never.

suburban sequoia

The Sequoias of Old Vicky:

August has been a month of travel for me. I’ve gone from Cortes Island to Victoria to Vancouver to Banff and then on back through Victoria to finally return to Cortes. I’ve been displaced, disjointed but elated, reveling in the deep patterns I’m starting to notice everywhere.
In Victoria (or “Vicky” as I’ve been calling it lately in homage to the neo-Victorian characters populating Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age), I am often struck by the magnificent sequoias that grow scattered around that city’s bucolic streetscapes. They tower like massive sentinels, mistakenly left behind from some forgotten prehistoric age. The huge trunks and voluminous, coniferous spires completely dwarf the hapless bungalows and manicured lawns that appear to cower beneath them as if in awe of the sequoia’s primal and unstoppably eruptive, botanical energy. Sequoias should seem more at home in a landscape inhabited by brontosaurs and giant ground sloths rather than Vicky’s milieu of lawnmowers and minivans, yet their incongruous placement far outside their native environs of the Californian Sierras, is the product of both anomophilia and an abiding faith in the future.
The world’s largest tree in terms of overall mass, the sequoia caused a sensation when first discovered in 1853 and was the subject of great controversy over its naming that was (well) typically “Victorian“. The taxonomic wrangle pitted British botanists, who wanted to memorialize their war hero, the Duke of Wellington against the Americans who were (not surprisingly) outraged by the concept. The name got bounced back and forth between Wellingtonia and Sequoia, until the issue was finally resolved by the high-ranking French botanist Joseph Decaisne, who in 1854 published the species as Sequoia gigantea, after he unequivocally proved its close taxonomic relationship with the coast redwood, Sequoia sempervivens. American botanists were of course elated to see the British out-taxonomized by the French. In 1869 Joshia D. Whitney remarked:

It is to the happy accident of the generic agreement of the Big Tree with the redwood that we owe it, that we are not now obliged to call the largest and most interesting tree of America after an English military hero; had it been an English botanist of the highest eminence, the dose would not have been so unpalatable.

sequoia cones

Velocity Blues:

Whenever a young sequoia is planted somewhere, one can be sure that the person planting it won’t live anywhere near long enough to see it grow into its epic and voluminous maturity. So why plant a sequoia, or for that matter any tree that might take generations to mature? Why initiate any project that might take longer than the life of its initiator to complete? We seem to live in an age so immersed in a tyrannical (and shrinking) present that we have become almost completely un-moored from our connections to the future and the past. Too much blogging, for example, can exacerbate this kind of ad hoc twitchiness. I have on occasion actually wanted to *slow* down my life, so that I would have time to blog it properly because the blogging form is so essentially quid nunc. Lately, I find I am needing more time to think and then to synthesize my thoughts into some sort of coherent continuous entity, as opposed to responding to the raging present with a constant state of the jitters. As a result, my blog has gradually morphed from a conventional redux of the day’s events, into a kind of reflective monthly essay. I am noticing a kind of inverse proportionality between the rate of increase in the torrent of information that flows in from my RSS aggregator and the time that it takes me to compose a weblog posting.

At least since the dawn of Modernity, the art world has been terrorized by a cult of novelty that has created a concomitant need for an almost industrial pace of production. This relentless pressure has been the engine of both prolific innovation and prolific fluff. Walter Benjamin wrote about art’s “exhibition value” having overtaking its “cult value” and its resultant commoditization which (and here he quotes Bertolt Brecht):

fundamentally erases its past to such an extent that should the old concept be taken up again–and it will, why not?–it will no longer stir any memory of the thing it once designated.

In effect, the art then loses its own embodied history and becomes just about the immediate experience of viewing it, cut off from its underpinnings of time, space and cultural context, ready to be replaced by the next new thing extruded from the pipe. Which would be fine except that this commoditization and obsession with the next new thing diminishes the leisure of the present, by sandwiching it into an ever-narrowing gap between amnesia and our accelerated anticipation of the future.
This issue of time has been one of the greatest problems in explaining my own botanical interventions projects to funders and curators. These projects can take years to develop into something that may (or may not) resemble my original proposals and which are really about the dynamics of the work’s own accumulated history and the seething, chaotic interrelationships that emerge between its ecological and cultural components.
These extended time spans can drive my funders crazy, as I am rarely able to furnish *final* project reports within conventional fiscal timelines, because, in effect, the projects are never finished and are always changing in appearance and the way they interact with the communities in which they exist. I have been fortunate however in garnering support, not from the traditional institutions of art culture, but from neighbourhood activists and a few enlightened municipal bureaucrats, who share my fascination with the liminal between urban ecology and urban community, and who understand the time spans necessary for the botanical interventions to unfold.
Imagine my delight then, when I came across Brian Eno’s brilliant exposition on The Long Now, in which he documents his gradual dissatisfaction with art that lives out over short time spans and how he sees his own work as a sort of bridge connecting the present to the future as a continuous entity. He writes:

I knew a lot of young artists there who appeared mostly from Ohio it seemed, to make their fortune in New York. It was a very exciting time in New York. They were living an exciting life but their commitment to the city was absolutely zero. They planned to move on as soon as they could, or they planned to get a loft like my friend’s loft. At least there was no attachment to the idea of the city as a continuing entity. So I thought they lived in a very short Now, their sense of Now was from about the beginning of last week to the end of next week. And if you said what are you working on now they would tell you what they had been working on that morning, not what they’d been working on for the last couple of years or so – it was exciting but it was very narrow and that kind of narrowness in time – thinking slightly worried me, because it doesn’t translate into terribly productive social behaviour. It doesn’t encourage you to set in place projects and agreement s and arrangements between people that will flower over very long periods.

By directing our attention to deep time, Brian Eno, Bruce Sterling and the rest of the long now contributors offer a sobering change in focus away from the frenetic distractions of our manipulated quotidian news channel reality, towards an appreciation of a much deeper pattern matrix, containing at once the present in which we now exist and a myriad of other presents that have once been or have yet to be.
Landscape, in its timelessness and apparent immutability has always served as a spiritual anchor for those buffeted by the frailty of the human condition. So when the landscape itself changes drastically, right in front of our eyes, it can cause some serious anxiety. We are at a historical moment, where the pace and extent of obvious changes to our environment are verging on the apocalyptic. At the recent Society for Ecological Restoration International conference (at which I gave a short presentation on my restoration work), I learned that last summer, Switzerland’s glaciers lost up to 10% of their total mass and will be almost completely gone by the end of this century. A coordinator of the Eden Again Project which was set up to try to restore Iraq’s devastated Mesopotamian marshes, told the conference that the tree of good and evil, located at the junction of the Tigris and the Euphrates, has died.
The vast and ancient sea bird colonies of the Orkney and Shetland Islands have gone into a catastrophic free fall, with virtually *no* nestlings surviving this year as the entire North Sea ecology undergoes what is termed a “regime shift” due to global warming. Normally staid bird specialists are using such superlatives as ‘defying belief’ and ‘astonishing’ to describe this ornithological Armageddon while Friends of the Earth’s (aptly named) Tony Juniper warns us that
“this catastrophe is just a foretaste of what lies ahead.”
With the sea devoid of sea birds and the melting glaciers threatening to inundate coastal cities, one might be forgiven for lapsing occasionally into a fear of imminent death. Leeds University’s Professor Mike Pilling concurs, recently announcing:

“We will experience an increase in extreme weather events. There are predictions of a 10-fold increase in heat waves.The increasing frequency of these will inevitably result in a sharp increase in the premature deaths of people”

Reuters recently cited a psychological study showing how the Bush campaign actually benefits from people’s fear of death, especially in regards to terrorism and that there is a contention the administration deliberately declares an imminent threat whenever the president’s approval ratings slip. In fact, Vice President Dick Cheney did this overtly, recently, warning Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the Nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another (terrorist) attack. Apparently according to social psychologist Sheldon Solomon the author of the psychological study:

no matter what a person’s political conviction, thinking about death made them tend to favor Bush. Otherwise, they preferred Kerry.

But Solomon offers us some hope:

“If people are aware that thinking about death makes them act differently, then they don’t act differently,”

Well, alright then . . .
Ironically our fear of death might be the one thing saving some of the world’s most endangered wildlife. The New York Times notes that the heavily mined demilitarized zone between North and South Korea has become a haven for rare creatures, including spoonbills, cranes, Asiatic black bears, antelopes and possibly even tigers, making it one of East Asia’s most important wildlife refuges, because *people can’t go there.* Environmentalists are now lobbying to make the DMZ a world heritage site, against the stiff opposition of both North and South Korea. Ironically if the growing reconciliation between North and South progresses much further, this paradise of geopolitical interstice will likely be obliterated in the name of economic development.
I Break For Robots:

A few weeks back, I thought I would take a break from all of this seething consternation and learn how to build bots with my old pal Norm White. To my amazement, he hadn’t changed a bit since I saw him last over 20 years ago when I was just finishing up at the Ontario College of Art Back in those heady days, Norm and the rest of the Photo/Electric faculty inspired in us a deep love of hacking and coding. We were prepared to rip almost any piece of technology apart and subvert its functionality to our own bidding. At the UFO Workshop Norm introduced us to the intricacies of the Basic Stamp and other microcontrollers. With these tiny programmable brains, sculptures can be programmed to engage in complex movements and in effect become ‘sentient’ to their surroundings. I was able to cobble together a corrugated cardboard sea turtle which managed, with the help of its microcontroller and servos, to effect a kind of laborious egg-bound shuffle. Something about this little bot’s awkwardness and servitude to gravity, made me think I inadvertently captured some of the sad futility of the last of the living sea turtles, trying to haul their ancient carapaces up their last nesting beaches toward the orange electric glow of a hostile new millennium.

turtle bot

leatherback turtle

The much touted singularity seems like meager compensation for the annihilation of seabirds and sea turtles. After all we’ve had self-replicating, self-re-engineering DNA based intelligence since the Precambrian period, some 3500 million years ago. Still, technological singularity is an intriguing notion, be it ever so kludgy. There are some exquisite little self-assembling swarm-bots being produced by the European Community’s Future and Emerging Technologies programme that seem to point the way. And for when the planet completely degenerates into a giant cesspool, a team of British researchers is working on the EcoBot II–a “release and forget” robot that will generate its own power by eating flies, using sewage or excrement to attract them within range of its insect-sucking feed pumps. In the final analysis, maybe it’s the best we can do . . . .

Fire scarred Douglas Fir

Cover art from “Burning World”

Opuntia cactus, Mittlenatch Island, BC

Fifteen minutes of insipid rain has come and gone, as if to tease the parched grasses, shriveled mosses and cracked earth. It was a tiny punctuation to a relentless and roastingly radioactive marathon of sun.

There has been a palpable feeling of *imminence* for the past two months, as the hot winds blast through the scorched conifers, ready to fan the slightest wayward spark into catastrophic conflagration. Twice in the past week, earthquakes have rumbled along the great seam that joins us to the Pacific’s tectonic plate, as if to remind us we could be heaved from the earth into the roiling seas at a moment’s notice. Scores of snakes lie crushed to death, their last anguished writhings baked into the bubbling asphalt of the melting roads. Fifty-year old Douglas fir trees are turning brown and dying under the nuclear furnace of this unstoppable hyper-summer. Are we on the brink of epic disaster? We are, according to one expert, withering through the worst drought of the past 400 years.
Perhaps this is a harbinger for a period of Triassic like global dryness, with melted icecaps and vast, dusty burning continents as Ballard imagined in his (1964) Burning World.

“The drought” everyone called it, as day after day after day went by with no rain. All over the world it was still ” the drought,” though the rivers had turned to trickles and the trickles to mud as the earth dried, cracked open, and crumbled into dust. Dust that was at first ankle-deep, then calf-deep, then knee-deep . . .

What would it be like if the Pacific Northwest turned to desert? Will we all, as Ballard suggests, wind up sitting on the roofs of our cars staring out from the smoke of a burning landscape at a vast and bitter sea?

In The Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis describes just such a scenario in his essay, “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn,” where he points out the insanity of siting human habitations in the fire ecologies of Southern California, as evidenced by the disastrous firestorms that occurred there during the 1990’s. Apparently several movie stars, (including Dick Van Dyke) became temporarily homeless during these epic fires. Will global warming make the coast of British Columbia an extension of Davis’ “fire coast”? Only time will tell.

The trouble with rapid climate change is that it will likely lead to a biodiversity meltdown. Most species just can’t adapt quickly enough to the changing conditions and ancient ecosystems such as coastal rainforests will inevitably become impoverished. There are some interesting indications to the contrary, however, as a recent Reuter’s article suggests, that describes the recent colonization of the newly heated up Netherlands by plants from Africa. Perhaps here too, some new hothouse flowers will move in to replace the whispering ferns and cedars. Global warming is sure to usher in a strange and frightening new world. Still as an inveterate botanophile, I have to ask myself, “Can I surf global warming (or to quote Amory Lovins, ‘global weirding’)?” Can I populate my immediate vicinity with plants already adapted to the new climatalogical order, with the aim of maximizing instead of minimizing biodiversity? So far, I’ve had good luck with some of the hardier thermophiles such as Opuntia cacti, which seem to do fine in the increasingly arid conditions of coastal British Columbia’s summers. Other surprising botanical survivors (given the fact that I live at the latitude of Quebec City) include, Eucalyptus, Japanese Camphor tree, Chinese fan palm, Szechuan pepper tree, Paulownia elongata and several magnificent bamboos including my current favourite, the exquisite Himalayan, Yushania anceps, resplendent in it’s featheriness. Still, it is deeply tragic that despite my minute “botanical interventions” the misty, mystic, boreal stateliness of my mossy rainforest home will likely soon crash and burn, reduced to an over lit, melanoma-inducing, aridity with the collapsed trunks of massive conifers, charred and petrified in the heat haze and dust to form the next geological palimpsest. Some years ago, I walked through the blinding heat of eastern Washington’s volcanic scablands and got a glimpse of the future in the Gingko Petrified forest. In this otherworldly landscape, the silicated trunks of fossil trees lay strewn about a barren sagebrush steppe, like the fallen columns of some long abandoned temple to botanical antiquity. Many of the petrified logs were ignominiously encased in welded steel cages, presumably to prevent them from suffering the final indignity of defacement by the Quaternary’s ubiquitous upstart hairless primate. While pondering the ruined and withered landscape of our unmitigated internal combustion addiction, we might take comfort in our amazing ingenuity. The US army has recently invented a type of ration package that can be rehydrated by pissing on it. No need to waste valuable water.

If it ever does start to rain again, I know just who I’d like to hang out with. Paul Stamets has been inoculating the man-made deserts left on our island by industrial logging, with a cocktail of mycorrhizal fungi, which he says will form symbiotic associations with baby trees and make them grow faster Stamets is planting a 1000 year forest, a kind of deep time carbon bank against ecological apocalypse, to be protected in perpetuity by a cage of covenants . Stamets theorizes that mycorhizal fungi form a kind of mycelial Internet, transmitting information and nutrients through great distances beneath the forest floor, connecting the roots of trees, even of different species to create a kind of sentience.

Stametsians inoculating a clearcut

This subterranean inter-connectivity has resulted in the world’s largest organism a 3.5 mile wide honey mushroom growing underneath a dry forest in eastern Oregon, estimated to be over 2,400 years old.
And mushrooms can definitely talk. I remember once, over 20 years ago, crawling through the long dewy grass of a September pasture, on Vancouver Island, searching for elusive psilocybes (pronounced sil-(ah)-ci-bees, according to Stamets). After finally finding one, and consuming it, dozens of others, (and this is the only way to describe it), made themselves *known* to me, having found some direct conduit to my visual cortex, of which I had been previously unaware. It’s almost as if they were saying, “Here I am, Here I am!

I have seen things that you people wouldn’t believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion . . .

I watched sea beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain.

Time to die . . .

Roy Batty, replicant in Blade Runner (1982)

The inimitable, now deceased (and somewhat problematic) May Brussell once theorized that Ronald Reagan was a replicant, or in her words, a *robotoid*. Like Bladerunner’s Roy Batty, Reagan certainly made for an exquisite corpse, as cinematic in death as he was in life.

Last week, many of us sat through an endlessly repeated montage of images from the Reagan funeral, wonderfully cinematic yet transparently constructed. Towards the end, the cameras depicted the golden chapparal hills of the California rangeland, spreading out seemingly forever under a cobalt blue sky as a squadron of F -16s, the four shiny bird men of the apocalypse, hurtled through the frame. One of them peeled off majestically, vertically into the heavenly vault, as a vast sun sank sadly into the Pacific and then we cut to Reagan’s star and stripe draped coffin being lowered into the soft Californian earth. A Hollywood requiem for Hollywood’s cold warrior, simulacrum piled upon simulacrum, the air reeking of tears, jet fuel and collective amnesia.

The previous day, some merry prankster at BBC World, briefly super-imposed the hilariously incongruous soundtrack of *God save the Queen* onto the image of Reagan’s flag-draped coffin being hauled through the streets of Washington DC on its gun carriage, before being hastily cut off amid the sputtering apology of the newscaster. BBC World makes frequent (and in many cases unconscionable) use of stock footage (North Korea in the winter, the swimming pool in the Iranian nuclear reactor), but stock *audio* takes the idea of exquisite corpse, DJ style newscasting to new heights. Maybe BBC World is onto something.

Of course the blogosphere has been rife with Reagan redux, including exhumation of JG Ballard’s remarkable (1967) essay, WHY I WANT TO FUCK RONALD REAGAN. Upon re-reading this piece, one is struck by its prescience:

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect on spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions. . . (also) . . . . Reagan’s personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late J.F. Kennedy remained the prototype of the oral object, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms.

Reagan was perhaps one of the greatest modern practitioners of Lysenkoism, the death of science through its perversion to attain ideological goals. Who can forget Reagan’s fantastic (1981) assertion that “trees cause more air pollution than automobiles do.” Bruce Sterling discusses the even more cynical Lysenkoism of the Bush administration in Wired Magazine in which he explains how scientists who are critical of the administration’s pseudo-scientific obfuscation of global warming, air pollution, deforestation etc., are being systematically purged from positions of influence. When I was in high school, I remember watching the (1974) Nova program, The Lysenko Affair and thinking what an obscure little historical footnote Lysenko’s political manipulation of science was, and how far we in the (then) *space age* had moved in the direction of absolute rationalism. Little did I expect then, by the time I reached middle age, the institutions of scientific truth would be in free fall, mortally wounded by the twin demons of persuasion technology and anti-intellectualism.

Back on the west coast, I am bathed in the seething biological fecundity of early summer. Roses both wild and domesticated bloom everywhere and one feels as if one could drown in the fragrant cleavage of their dewy petals. Even in death they are remarkable, their deconstructed blossoms strewn like fallen birds on the damp morning earth.

anemones

starfish

more anemones (because I love them)

The lowest tides in 18 years have been exposing many exquisite echinoderms, ancient and radially symmetrical. My indefatigable marine biologist friend Sabina led us into a local lagoon to study them. We examined sand dollars, sea urchins and starfish (in situ), all remarkable in their radial symmetry as well as in their fascinating hydraulic vascular systems, which control locomotion, feeding, breathing and the removal of waste. As they die, the exquisite 5-petaled, flower-like imprints of their water intake pores become exposed on bleached calcaric skeletons that carpet the bottom of the lagoon in a thick, ghostly layer. “Why is there so much death here?”, I asked Sabina. “Because there is so much life.” she answered wisely. The sand dollars themselves are deposit feeders, absorbing the cossetting detritus of ubiquitous death so that they themselves can live.

In the same limpid waters, sea anemones wave crowns of hairy tentacles into the planktonic flux, from fat, sausage-shaped bodies as old as time. Acorn barnacles encrust everything, hunkered down in their miniature (alas) stationary, volcano-shaped houses from which they flail penises so (proportionately) huge that they are many times the size of their owners.

Amid such fecundity, it is hard to think about the current phenomenon of mass extinction, which I have discussed extensively in previous postings. Imagine then my surprise, when I learned at a recent workshop on Rice University’s *Open Source* Connexions Project, which::Laura and I attended, to find that my *favorite* tool Plone was being used to catalog the vanishing plant biodiversity of the Peruvian Amazon. This sample page shows how digital images of living endangered plant species, previously identified mainly from dried and pressed herbarium specimens, can be now be put on-line and identified through an on-going Wiki conversation between botanists and plant taxonomists from all over the world. This represents a quantum leap in plant identification, and it hasn’t come a moment too soon because, according to some researchers, almost half of all plant species could be facing extinction worldwide, mainly because of the unprecedented loss of plant biodiversity in tropical countries. It’ll be nice to know what we have(had) before it all disappears . . .

At the same workshop I learned about the concept of granularity as it pertains to learning objects. For example a *big* on-line object such as an video clip, or essay can be said to have low granularity whereas a sentence fragment would have *high* granularity. This is an important discussion, as there is a certain point where an object becomes *so* granular that it loses meaning, whereas at the other extreme could get so big as to be hard to metatag, in any kind of meaningful way. The whole ontological issue of metatagging is starting to obsess me. Metatagging makes things on the net *findable*, which is something that all of us content producers want. But how do I do it correctly and consistently ? EEK !

It seems it is no longer necessary to write science fiction because the future has already conflated itself with the present. William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition is set in the neo-present and I believe that this is the harbinger of a trend. A case in point is the recent, bizarre and tragic story of conceptual artist Steven Kurtz’s arrest on bioterrorism charges for using an apparently innocuous, genetically modified strain of E. coli in his work with “contestational biology.” Next on the list of vertiginous feeling developments of the neo-present is BBC’s report on the invention of an invisibility cloak, which projects an image onto itself of whatever is behind the wearer, allowing the wearer to (basically) disappear. The article notes that:

There are massive questions of potential misuse too, particularly surrounding the huge crime implications.

But what if we *all* started wearing them ? Disappearence could become the ultimate in haute couture.

spawning carp

the homeland

I’ve been dropped down here into the metastasized suburban wasteland of Mississauga, where I happened to grow up. Ask anyone who lived in the area 30 or so years ago, and you will likely hear a familiar litany about how beautiful and buccolic this Southern Ontario landscape once was and how post-industrially bleak it now is, having been almost completely tiled over in endlessly repeating fractal undulations of suburban sprawl. Mississauga has become the ultimate edge city, comparable perhaps only to California’s San Fernando valley in the scale of its architectural stultification. Yet there is something touching about this suburban landscape’s role as a kind of failed utopia. As in a new geological epoch, Mississauga’s vanished cornfields, orchards and leafy ravines, are now smothered by a layer of concrete freeway decking and aluminum siding, the new mineral manifestation of the hopes and dreams of its million immigrants, for whom perhaps the very vastness of its banality promises some refuge from a far too turbulent world. Palestinian community centres now stand cheek-to-jowl with Guyanese restaurants and Chinese supermarkets and everyone’s children groove to the thudding beat of hip-hop as they wait on bleak streets for the buses to take them to a *home*, at once everywhere and nowhere.

Mississauga’s *placelessness* is most easily negotiated in an automobile and one feels constantly as if one is inhabiting some massive Yutaka Sone sculpture, for example when hurtling down its (increasingly arteriosclerotic) aorta, the venerable 401, which at one point splays out into 16 lanes, knotting and un-knotting like some kind of dystopian asphalt pasta. The traffic never stops and the 401’s incessant howling penetrates one’s very dreams. The harshness of Mississauga’s blue-white continental sky is attenuated by a fine sepia mist, which hangs everywhere. Composed of particulate rubber, pulverized brake linings and diesel soot, it makes everything look like some post-industrial Canaletto painting, at which someone had thrown a cup of tea.

Of course, I had to get into the Mississauga mood by re-reading j.g. ballard’s Concrete Island, in which the protagonist becomes stranded like Robinson Crusoe on a grassy traffic island, surrounded by freeways that he is unable to cross. While rooting around slobber-space, I came upon Pippa Tandy’s interesting exposition, The DNA of the Present in the Fossil Record of the Cold War(through the imagery of JG Ballard Related sources and Documents in Various Media), on the very cool Sleepy Brain site. Tandy notes that she originally presented this work in Microsoft PowerPoint, which makes it the most brilliant subversion of tedious and dumbed-down business software that I have ever seen.

For a relief from *mall-aria” we drove to the only intact marsh left on Lake Ontario’s heavily developed north shore, which is a tiny yet biologically diverse ecosystem, tucked between the monster homes and mini-malls. Remarkably, it was carp spawning season and dozens of thes ponderous, muscular fish were busily engaged in bouts of noisy, vigorous nuptial thrashing that churned up the marsh’s silty waters in a flash of metallic scales and blood-red fins. The carp themselves are immigrants to these New World waters and displayed such *eagerness to achieve their goal* (the carpish quality most admired by the Japanese) that they seemed oblivious to the rusted out shopping carts and tattered plastic bags littering the cossetting mud of their new found spawning beds.

Of course growing up in suburbia meant that I watched tons of TV, because (let’s face it) there was not much else to do. In fact, my crib was frequently parked up against the television so I could absorb English, which was not my first language. One of my earliest memories is of gazing, through feverish eyes, at the phosphorescence of an early 1960’s, radiation spewing, black and white picture tube that showed an animated image of three pairs of tapping, shoe-clad feet; one of them in a pair of brogues, the kind with numerous little round perforations in the leather. Of course it was the opening credits for the quintessentially saccharine, haute Cold War programme, My Three Sons.. This image was burned into my visual cortex so early, that it has become effectively indelible. The tapping shoes are what I see, when I manage to strip from my mind all other thoughts and images, in deep sleep, in meditation, in fevers. Thee shoes (for better or worse) have become my mantra.
Television was the she-wolf that suckled the spawn of the suburbs, and the opening credits held a particular fascination for us because they marked the transition from one state of *TV mind* to another – full of latent possibility, of narrative as yet untold: “Is it a re-run?” “Which Star Treck or Flintstones episode was it going to be?”, we wondered catatonically as we gazed at the glaring cathode oracle, through the swirling blue smoke haze of our parents’ Craven A Menthols, our bivouacs on the avocado green shag carpet reeking of nicotine and the rye and ginger cocktail sloshings of their boozy weekend afternoons.
Sometimes the opening credits, like oracle bones, could give the keen observer a clue as to what was in store. A case in point was the Dick Van Dyke show, which Super 8mm rebel genius John Porter once beautifully deconstructed in a 3 projecter piece, I saw him screen at Toronto’s (now sadly defunct) Funnel. Each simultaneously projected film contains an endless, carefully archived sequence of all the possible permutations and combinations of Dick Van Dyke’s interaction with the foot stool in the show’s opening sequence, which Porter had obsessively filmed with his Super 8 camera in late night sessions off his television screen. Sometimes Dick trips over the foot stool, sometimes he sidesteps it, sometimes he misses it entirely. Occasionally Porter’s hand enters the frame, pointing to the screen and on the soundtrack warns Dick(?) to “Watch that foot stool!” In its absurd depiction of a TV viewer attempting to affect a show’s outcome, Porter’s film serves as brilliant comment on how, for my generation of Cold War suburbanites, the lives of the ersatz families we watched on television, began in some way to replace our own. In their glibness and relaxed Americanism, this pantheon of electric shadows promised us a way through the landscape of cultural displacement and collapsing consensus that lay under the carbon-copy streets of our treeless neighbourhoods.
I miss the Funnel and all of the hi-jinx that happened there. It is where I first saw the films of tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE and Jack Smith and countless other zealots of the underground. We all made films in those days, usually with thrift store Super 8 cameras and short-dated stock. We would film everything and anything, feverishly splicing together our little ribbons of pictures at late night kitchen tables, and sometimes developing our black and white stock in buckets in our bathtubs, so we could present the following day. The collection of non-sequitorious, *stream of consciousness* movies that I shot in those frenetic days, seem like magic to me now and I will continue posting the occasional digitized still to this weblog.

an old film