excitement

Last night, of course, I had to walk around the apartment, using my magic wand cellphone to scout the space. I have a substantial shrine in the Tibetan style, two rows of water bowls, lots of bric à brac. Months ago I had a very strange, first, experience of how -if I clicked towards them - I would get a visual image of lamp posts in my mind by sound. Correction: not by the sound itself, but by how I processed its bounce, apparently. Now the sensation was even stronger, because the image’s sweep-sound tracks shapes and shades of colour, so the experience is much more direct. At the sound coming from my cellphone, immediately, a visual sensation of three water bowls welled up inside me. I stepped back a bit. Four water bowls and behind that a shape I decided must be the Samantabhadra statue. I reached out my hand: there it was. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of joy and newly found power combined that swept over me. I’ve been thinking on and off, at M.’s prompting, about a Media in Transition proposal I’m formulating. Space and time, or rather: “visual-spatial” and “auditory-sequential”. In the visual-spatial there is power, control. In the auditory-sequential, there is subversion. I had to think about how in the early months of the war against Afghanistan, much technology was employed to establish Bin Laden’s location. The reasoning was that eventually a cellphone signal would betray him. He, however, made use of couriers on foot to relay messages over long distances. Next week, we will kick off a substantial conceptual project by gathering people around the fire to talk about it. Our hope is that by telling the project’s story to each other, we will build up a communal history of it, a shared repository of stories through time. Much in project management is about power and control over planning, a spatial representation of time. Yet in ceremonies, there is no project plan, yet the ceremony unfolds because everyone shares its story. So perhaps this is what we are doing: build a project like a ceremony, so that it will unfold itself.