It's time to begin, even in the States - we're there, 2009. I've been choosing a text for Proboscis from Project Gutenberg responding to an invite to contribute to their e-book series which is a typically joyful and thoughtful initiative from Giles Lane and Alice Angus, see http://diffusion.org.uk/?page_id=3
My choice of text is Stephane Mallarme's version of Edgar Allan Poe's dream-poem The Raven (Le Corbeau) with illustrations by Edouard Manet.http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14082/14082-h/14082-h.htm,
I have chosen Mallarme for his intelligent work in the dissolution of poetic form that has been playing out till now in the twenty first century. This was form as code well before the arrival of software and hypertext well before dreamweaver. His singular experiments which beautifully combine abstraction with performativity appear ever more significant over time as we look today at the emergence of software code and machine language as drivers of 21st cutural expression. His experiments with form exploring and revealing underlying latencies may be seen as a linguistic and poetic decoding. These were exciting developments that led directly to many of the most important aesthetic and cultural innovations of the 20th century and preceded the emergence, in particular, of serialism, concretism and forms of machine/computer art. We trace these experiments into process-based and open works of the 60s including Computerized Haiku, computer poetry devised by Margaret Masterman (with Robin McKinnon-Wood) of the Cambridge Language Research Unit as well as earlier tense exchanges between Boulez and Cage on the importance or otherwise of chance in composition and performance.
More about proboscis at www.proboscis.org.uk

London is sleet white today. It is an unusual combination of weather: blue skies combined with a light so clear one can imagine seeing the birds' hearts beat. I notice them from morning: first the song (a blackbird's easy listening melody) then two robins perched on the bush wearing their winter clothing, plump as puddings, bright decked and unmoving. Tonight I skype with other members of the team working on transmediale: the Deep North theme fits today's weather, the bleak and laser-cutting end of a year. This morning, I was however forced to consider that in Brasil, where my friend Ricardo was writing from Salvador, it is the opposite, swelteringly hot and foggy - he sent me some great youtube links to influence my day.
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=YSXEdTmpEmU
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=De2XmncutzA
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TdTacizYdA
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-TgPWrnkO7I&feature=related
In return, I send him a late draft of the mapping report I have been doing with Felipe Fonseca of digital culture in Brasil, five months of work now condensed into 45 pages,which has gone into SICA and which is due to be presented to the Dutch Culture Minister in a few weeks time. It's been a difficult and challenging exercise and like all such time-consuming things I miss it now its almost finished and am feeling a bit bereft. Ricardo sends some fine grained suggested edits in the flash of an eye and we think of another mapping exercise, this one to follow lay(mert)lines and to perceive the hidden cosmologies. Now that would be fun! We're planning an event for Berlin on 1st February - where some of the DesCentro network from Brasil will be making a House of Happiness within the House of World Cultures. It will be the final event of transmediale 09.
Roll on another year....

Just back from Amsterdam. Snow along the canals last night near the Lloyd Hotel venue pulled me fully back into European spacetime. The Virtueel Platform organisation - which is the sector institute for digital (or e-) culture in the Netherlands organised a workshop over two days, called the Walled Garden...which brought together international and national practitioners and theorists to consider how artists are (or could be) using networked culture (or how the so-called 'web 2.0' might evolve into a'web 3.0' with input from artists, designers, media researchers etc). The working group I was moderating was about the 'Network as Laboratory' and it proved to be a fascinating experience: our main group concensus was around the importance of finding and establishing 'agency' in online environments. I asked them to explore where and how sites for experimentation existed in these spaces and where the access barriers were. We also looked at the whole internet itself as a laboratory and considered some methods of visualising data transfer and network growth. What became clear in discussing how group members used various social networking sites (mostly proprietary) was the low level of knowledge and awareness among 'most' people of the implications of this use and the need to consider how one's data and profiles might be used in future. Might we see data wars? How can the level of awareness and consciousness (network literacy) be changed? A solution might be to start to build links between independent media organisations and primary schools - to start to teach children how to grow powerful through hands-on activity, to teach them to code and to value their agency (bricoschoollabs)...in online environments. Other groups were moderated by a great mix of researchers and practitioners including Tapio Makela, Matt Ratto, Erin Manning, Sabine Niederer, Adam Somlai-Fischer, Aymeric Mansoux and Tom Kinkowstein.

It's night in Copacabana - this is 'Beachwear Fashion Week' in Rio, though that's not why I am here and across the road some fine looking tents have appeared close to the water no doubt to show off the latest flipflops trunks and bikinis made from the latest materials and what an appropriate site for it this is. On CNN Russell Simmons 'entrepreneur and philanthropist' is telling us that Obama's victory has a lot to do with the hip hop (I'm wondering is that different from the flipflop?) generaton. It's November 5th but in the southern hemisphere there are no fireworks tonight. I sort of missed the Halloween celebrations also last week, on October 31st, when I was in Sao Paulo. No black hats or broomsticks were to seen. Brasil has adopted Father Christmas, snowy trees and all, with total abandon - but the November festivals we take for granted in the UK are nowhere to be seen. And just as well, there is more than enough going on here anyway! The cities teem with an energy that sweep you forward in their flow. Today I walked in the magical Jardim Botanico here in Rio and climbed into the Mata Atlantica forest which borders it to see long-tailed monkeys threading the skyline with sweet abandon. Tomorrow, I head to Ubatuba, right on the Tropic of Capricorn, My visit to Rio has included meetings with Ronaldo Lemos at the Niemeyer designed FGV building near Flamingo, Rejane Spitz and her team at PUC in Gavea and Katia Maciel and Andre Parente from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. I'm doing some work here that allows me to ask these brilliant people dumb questions. They're all generous and responsive. It's Brasil in micro and I am lucky to be here.

Today, probably around 8 pm Beijing time, I went to the Whitechapel Laboratory (Gallery) in London, to view a rather marvellous video work by Chinese artist Wang Jianwei. The Symptom is a series of tableaux that represent and depict elements and aspects of contemporary and traditional China, shot darkly, conjuring up images of nighttime and the separation of the individual from the collective. Those moments when the actors attempt to hold and pass the writhing fish enter forever into my visual memory. http://www.wangjianwei.com/