Travis the Arborist

Travis, from Moorhead Minnesota, is spending the night in my apartment. He's looking for work protecting things from breaking branches covered in ice. I asked him "What are the strangest problems you've run into?" and he said:

1. People think they own trees.
2. People think they can control nature.

He seemed to be really into the trees he worked with, but was excited about the prospect of going to school for business administration. So I asked him: if he didn't have to work, what would he do?

It's hard work, so if I didn't have to then I wouldn't. I'd take care of my own, of course, but I already do: mostly, I leave them alone.

From-To

Half-formed instruction piece using directions from Google Maps.

• In the form of images (paths) or as text (directions).
• Cities might be chosen at random or based on some principle.

Principles:

• Only very small cities.
• Only capitols.
• Cities with the same name.
• Cities with some other shared characteristic: crime rate, population, longitude...

Presented as prints or on a screen/projection, rotating through possibilities. These things make me think about how we can get from one place to another, and the ways in which we connect things in time, space, and using other labels.

Let Go

Only everything lasts forever.

Ablinger, Repetition, and Meaning

...redundancy produces information. And from here, it is not a long way to entropic noise as information in Shannon's sense. It was Arnold Schönberg who stated that variation is necessarily a form of repetition as at least something must return between variation and variation. And he thus shifted his attention from the changing aspect of music to the continuous, the repeated. Ablinger's attitude is something like the hidden, reverse secret of the same story: that each repetition is also variation, that there is necessarily always something changing—that, in other words: repetition does not exist except as an abstraction.

From "Static's Music - Noise Inquiries" by Christian Scheib

Repetition and redundancy do produce information, and information is meaning. However, this ability is not unique to repetition. Repetition is a subset of a larger meaning-producing process: the formation of relationships. I would argue all meaning comes from relations and connections; epistemology is relational. Repetition is a method of creating relations by separating similar events in space and time.

Taken loosely, repetition may be considered relation-formation in its entirety. There is a good reason not to define repetition loosely, however: we have an intuition for the "abstraction" of perfect repetition. This intuition might be defined as: multiple events produced as similarly as possible to each other, varying only in their spatio-temporal manifestation. When Mozart is performed today, it is contextualized (and thus meaningful) in relation to every other Mozart performance past (as well as many other things, including all of music history). However, these modern performances are not repetitions of previous performances — and any new performance is not a repetition of the theory and influences related to it — but it is still meaningful.

Piece for Post

1. Mail an empty envelope to a friend.
2. Without opening the envelope, they should put it in a new envelope and send it back to you.
3. Without opening their envelope, you should put their envelope in a new envelope and send it back to them.
4. Repeat until the Post loses the envelopes, or refuses to carry it.

How to Save Your Life

Two approaches to saving all of your experiences on a hard drive somewhere:

1. Create a device that is able to capture any experience and store it to a remote location.
2. Take a tool that already stores every action performed while using it, and reshape your life until all your experiences surround that tool.

Speech

Using a Microvox text-to-speech module, generate every possible vocal sound sequence. Potential interpretations:

1. A panoglot box.
2. A lying box.
3. A truth-telling box.
4. A future-predicting box.