Dreams, Moments, Travels
The green of this grass struck me on this early spring day as to how not like the desert it looked. For a moment I was able to linger in memories of Oregon or Kentucky where this color is found quite frequently. With the temperature at a pleasant 75 degrees (24c), the feeling of the green was enhanced to the point where I was compelled to snap a photo that would allow me to experience this sense of green again in 60 days when the relentless sun begs me to answer why do I live in Phoenix?
Yes, I’m the proud owner of the Rabid Elephant Natural Gate! Some will obviously wonder just what the heck is such a thing? It is the newest addition of synthesizer gear for my Eurorack based instrument. This filter was just released in its second batch a week ago after being sold out for about six months, it too sold out but this time it happened in under one minute! I should probably say more about it except that I need to get busy installing it and seeing how it compliments my process of making sounds.
It’s a beautiful Friday the 13th and so I thought I’d take advantage of these fleeting moments of spring before every day starts pressing into the 100’s and walk to lunch. Along the way, I had time to stop and look at some of the details missed as we drive by with windows uptight and the air-conditioning on. This particular bloom is on the Prickly Pear cactus. If you look close on the top right of the paddle you’ll see some white fuzzy stuff, that’s evidence of cochineal bugs. This particular scale insect has a larger-than-life reputation and yet very few people even know what it is; it is the source of natural red dye!
It was nearly two miles to the Mexican restaurant three of us were meeting up at noon. My path took me through the Scottsdale Airpark and out along a main street that was fairly devoid of life besides what cruises by in cars. Prior to reaching that road though I got to ogle the well-manicured landscapes of these small corporate offices. I tried finding what type of particular cactus this was prior to posting it so I could share its name, but Bing and Google let me down.
So much is in bloom, just ask anyone who’s suffering from a wicked case of seasonal allergies. Walking out here only makes me think that we have this work scheduled short lunch thing all wrong. We should all have extended lunch breaks where we can take a long walk and feel healthier for the effort instead of racing the clock. I’m not complaining really, as I’m the boss and can effectively do as I please, but still, I wish all of us had this flexibility.
The early buds of the Saguaro cactus are still days away from blooming. On another specimen, sap was dripping from the buds and crystallizing much like the trichomes on the marijuana plant. My walk took just under 40 minutes so I arrived early and just kept walking to get my step count even higher before indulging in what was probably too many tortilla chips. How can someone go for Mexican food and avoid the chips? Damned diets.
It’s spring in Arizona and the amount of sniffling due to allergies is certainly a testament to the power of what’s in bloom across the desert. I was out for my walk trying to accumulate my daily 10,000 steps as it’s getting hotter here in the Phoenix area, now approaching 90 degrees or 32c. In another month I’ll have to visit a local mall for indoor walking as when it hits 100 degrees or 38c the sun becomes too oppressive to endure and often it’s this temperature by 9:00 in the morning. Someone I know in Finland just posted images of ice and snow, I can’t relate.
Looks like a road trip to me covering 2,811 km or about 1,750 miles and eight, maybe nine, countries.
A youth fraught with tension and the insatiable need for novelty propelled me to look to all corners of culture for the landmarks that would direct me to my creative stomping grounds. My mind was a minefield of explosive ideas that the 20th century launched onto the intellectual landscape. Covered in the excrement and entrails of the futurists and surrealists before being lightly dusted in the philosophy of modernity to the awareness of art Deco, pop art, and minimalism, I sought to find some kind of sense of what it meant to be human.
The grinding noise of modernity belched a symphony of agony first described by Luigi Russolo in The Art of Noises, followed by the anguish of Antonin Artaud and his Theater of Cruelty, which, when combined, acted as the dress rehearsal for the squalor brought upon humanity by the fascist propaganda and genocide of a world at war that has mostly stayed with us for the duration of my life. While not on the same scale of focus, the carnage of ghastly horrors with independent actors instead of state actors thrives in our internet age.
I looked to William Burroughs for insight into juxtaposed non-sequiturs as media and most information became a global cut-up. Charles Bukowski and his purple turkey neck collided with all that preceded him and would help forge the die that would manifest the model for a future president. Absurdity was supposed to be the domain of art, but as life is so apt to do, it has imitated art. We started becoming the embodiment of the cartoons of satirist Robert Crumb’s depictions instead of the aesthetic wholesome image Walt Disney would have liked to have modeled us in. One thing is certain, though: we should never have allowed ourselves to become characters in a comic strip.
Looking to complexity in the early days of the personal computer revolution, I was searching for a new technology manifesto that would channel the best of Tristan Tzara to create my own youth art movement in the spirit of Dada. I was ready for more nihilism, and anti-everything was on my agenda.
Nietzsche and Baudrillard were the perfect conduits for my rage against conformity. They knew the idiocy of our idols and icons that were programming us for mass stupidity. The bulwark of the money machine had other designs on the habits of people and preyed upon the laziness of those who would covet an easy path instead of one paved with struggle.
It would take decades before I would start to see the next big wave in creative intellectual meanderings that would illuminate a world not yet invented but just around the corner in our future. The minds of Marshall McLuhan, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno may have gleaned insight into the role our evolving media culture would play though they didn’t foresee the emergence of a distributed global real-time collaborative information and knowledge machine. The rules of distribution and ownership took a monumental turn with the close of the 20th century.
While the one-dimensional man hasn’t been reduced to ashes yet, the seeds of change have hopefully been planted, though the current socio-cultural landscape would certainly suggest otherwise. From Elon Musk’s Space-X, we learn more about Max Q and the pressures of reaching escape velocity, but who will be the inspiration that will help guide the collective mind of humanity to reach its own Max Q?
The ideas put forth in The Critical Engineering Manifesto lay a partial framework that, when merged with the nascent world of generative algorithms exploring blockchain-birthed truth tables, will, I believe, enable emergent systems to bring about creative swarms of enlightenment. This will effectively be the unveiling of a new language to the adherents of super-complexity.
Currently, fear of artificial intelligence is stymieing a majority of relatively older people by not allowing them to embrace the creeping lingua franca found in the abundance of readily accessible information. The machines that will first benefit from AI, also known as deep learning, will, in turn, share their new capacity for seeing the world differently to educate a new population unafraid and already raised on advanced communication in the ways of super-complexity. Just as a generation stumbled with electronics, cell phones, VCR clocks, and the internet, my own generation will likely fail the transition that is now underway.
Art has nearly always had the effect of alienating those in control bent on maintaining traditions. The situation with our current age is that we’ve been evolving a global mindset that some have started recognizing as maybe being “out of control” and are now trying to stuff the genie back in the bottle. This cannot work, though the violence of trying to fight this change may wreak havoc before the cultural marauders trying to arrest progress are pushed into the background as history has always done.
We are living with the baggage from two centuries of conflict as well as great progress and are about to take a quantum leap forward to throw off the burden of carrying outmoded ideas of a species on the verge of extinction. I do not mean to imply that humanity is on a path of collapse. Instead, I’m suggesting that the intellectual dinosaurs are about to encounter their meteorite. Now is the time to adapt and survive. Embrace the change and get ready for a moment in our evolution that will be as consequential as when humans began to talk and control fire. We are on the verge of a radical pivot – or maybe we are heading for the exit?