Thoughts on Negypt

I saw Negypt twice this weekend. I made it a point to do so, in fact, because it took me two times to actually collect my thoughts on it. The first time I sat in the front row, the second I sat almost at the back, so that I could see others' reactions.

While I'm not a dancer and am not really well-versed in all the trends and schools of thought that dance is composed of, it's impossible to think that, even without a background in dance, I might have nothing to say about Negypt. One things for sure: whether you liked it, hated it, thought it was interesting or walked out of the show (I think one or two people did on Saturady), it's impossible to walk away from it without a reaction.

Personally, I really enjoyed it—even though I doubt many people would say the piece is not "enjoyable". The movement was a lot of convulsive, repetitive motions, highly emotive yet silent, and usually self-defeating. Hence the kind of movement Negypt is composed of, as it is self-described: "Deletist".

Some might find the idea to be pretentious or overthought. For me, such movements have their time and they place, and, when properly placed, can have great meaning. I appreciate it in that way. There were certain sections of the piece that I found to be downright peaceful. There is a certain place in the mind that is full of emptiness, and a simple state where one accepts that there is a profound lacking—and certain sections of Negypt evoked that place, which I know in my own mind as part of that which harbors the Muse. Negypt brought these hidden places to life in a palpable manner, palpable enough to remind me what it actually was like to exist in those places, and to absorb their reality.

However, there is a point where Negypt stops and does not go beyond. It visits that place of emptiness, that kind of nihilistic angst and the fact that the emptiness will not go away—but it stays there. I would dare to say that it wallows there, and is so introspective that its own angstiness, as beautifully expressed as it is, shows another kind of lacking—a lacking of redemption.

This is where people's various stages of personal growth and belief come into play. At a certain point you can't judge another person nor their work if they or it is nothing but honest—and Negypt certainly was. But, to use an analogy, if one is to truly embrace Taoism, for example, they can't just stay in the black/ying, they also have to venture into the white/yang. Negypt embraces the dark, but is so shocked by that embrace that it can't let go of it, and in forgetting to let go, refuses to grow from and beyond it. At a very deep and subtle level then, I would venture to say that it's imbalanced. You can't just gaze into the abyss—the abyss will also gaze into you. The pain that is in Negypt can be healed—at least, I believe it can. But it takes a certain measure of acceptance of that pain—and not the kind of acceptance that embraces pain as all that there is, and that's the end of it. It stops short of moving beyond the pain into the world beyond the abyss. If one is to be truly detached from this world, they have to be detached from detachment (it's not the same thing as attachment). That's the paradox of enlightenment—at least, what I've learned from it (I wouldn't claim to be enlightened). To be normal is to be enlightened, to be enlightened is to be normal. After awhile, it looks no different.

If Negypt's goal is to show the nature of enlightenment, according to Taoists and Buddhists (and darkness is part of it), it only presents half of the paradox. But as an intermediary step, a step into the initial darkness before the dawn, it is brilliant and beautiful. It truly does evoke the primal womb, and I would gladly stay there in those spaces if I could—it evokes the khora.

It's just necessary to remember that khora is a creative force as much as it is a destructive one. The movements in Negypt may be futile and self-defeating—the irony is that they have a great potential for peace and healing as well. Unfortunately, this isn't followed through with in the piece. Too often in such angst other side of nature is forgotten—and often it becomes only another form of blindness.

Seeing Negypt Tonight

My good friend and… very happy to say, significant other, ;) Natasha of Lunarius Graphics is performing in a psuedo Butoh piece tonight called Negypt. She also designed the promotional fliers for it, which in my opinion came out lovely. I've got one complimentary ticket, so I'll be seeing it on its first of three nights this weekend. A number of the rest of the Flam Chen family are involved as well, even though the piece is not Flam Chen. Aurelia Cohen, Barry Hatchel, and Katherine Tesch are all part of it (and others). The piece is written and directed by one Brandon Kodama.

From what I've heard from the rehearsals the piece promises to be intense and very conceptual, if not a number of other adjectives. If you're in the Tucson area and are looking or something that will probably jar your psyche a bit, it's playing at the Zuzi Theater tonight Friday, and then Saturday and Sunday night as well.

Feel free to check out the Facebook event.

I will look forward to writing my responses to it either tonight or Saturday. My apologies for the lack of blogging lately—the month of December, and January for that matter, have been so busy that I've barely had enough time to finish all the work I've made for myself, much less document it for others to read about. But there is a lot of great stuff to catch up on, so you can expect to be seeing it shortly—from new years in Bisbee to photoshoots to help promote the publishing of my SciFi novel (more on that later), a lot of good stuff is up ahead.

Happy 2010!

LED Tattoos. What would you use them for?

Another post courtesy of Wired. This one was just too good to pass up.

How LED Tattoos could make your skin a screen.

To quote:

New LED tattoos from the University of Pennsylvania could make the Illustrated Man real (minus the creepy stories, of course). Researchers there are developing silicon-and-silk implantable devices which sit under the skin like a tattoo. Already implanted into mice, these tattoos could carry LEDs, turning your skin into a screen.

The silk substrate onto which the chips are mounted eventually dissolves away inside the body, leaving just the electronics behind. The silicon chips are around the length of a small grain of rice — about 1 millimeter, and just 250 nanometers thick. The sheet of silk will keep them in place, molding to the shape of the skin when saline solution is added.

Check out the Wired article for a creepy yet awesome video from Philips that decided to make some future-casting as to what this would possibly look like—in this particular video, they explore the more… sensual side of the concept. I've re-posted it here:



Creepy? Maybe. But in my opinion, very cool. Aside from the cheesy and overcommercialized applications, such as turning one of your cheeks into an LED screen you can sell online as mini-billboard advertising. I really wouldn't be surprised if that happened. But of course, if it did happen, I would hope at least that more identity-related applications could be explored. Having images that shift and change according to an implanted device that can sense the chemical compositions in your bloodstream (a.k.a. your emotions) seems to me to just be novel. Human body language is complex and subtle as it is, but some part of the artist in me, which finds its home and lifeblood in self-expression, just thinks this is a great idea, actually. It adds a whole new dimension to physical and personal expression, which is one of many ways to express meaning and memory. Maybe that is actually why, if this existed, it is a tattoo I would actually seriously consider getting.

Of course, it's a can of worms too. I find it funny—things like this are just going to push certain aspects of our society until what we really value becomes more and more oblique. I've been considering lately how innately consumeristic American society is. Obvious? Yes—but down to its very core, I really think that the buck stops at profits. Beyond religion, beyond liberty—I think we really are the self-serving slaves of our own pursuit of wealth. If an answer to a question or a solution to a problem presents capital gain, it usually makes sense above most others. Why is that?

The ancient Maori were the ones who started tattooing, and that was back when tattoos were sacred and had meaning. They related to ancestry, personal milestones, challenges, and triumphs. For the American, would he or she actually find a celebratory, identity-related use for something like this, or would it just be another tool in the "pursuit of happiness?" Or a false display of meaning, like tattoos of the name of an ex boy or girlfriend?

Homo ex Machina

This past week or two I've been on an organization binge—or a frustrated binge, probably, because I'm not satisfied so far. Basically, it's organizing my silicon-based brain—my mail client (and getting rid of email addresses I don't use, or at least planning to), my address book (which I almost never use), my document files, my harddrive in general, my web browser bookmarks (just got Safari 4 and it's much faster than Firefox), and my iTunes Library (huge task).

It comes partially with this whole Proteus Creative thing I'm working on. In an effort to create an entirely new system for my professional life, working on a workflow, and designing a portfolio interface, it seems like everything now needs to be sorted and categorized. Which is funny—five years ago, I would have tested as a Perceiver on the Myers Briggs (a personality assessment). Now I would be classified as a very high Judger. For the non-Myers Briggs inclined, this is basically a transition from a loose, flexible organizational style to a tight, list and category oriented style. By far, I've swung the later direction, especially over the course of the last two years. Being at Arcosanti and prioritizing my work life to such an extent, out of necessity and not just personality, has only enforced this swing. I've learned a lot here—writing project proposals and plans, figuring out group workflow in an online setting where everyone already has busy schedules; delineating phases for a given project, even the notion of deliverables (something that, on the scale of a client and freelancer relationship, just seems silly) seem now like something useful, daresay necessary. From task planning applications to automated timers and alarms, from project outlining programs to RSS feeds that can keep you passively up-to-date on the latest open source developments and "Web 2.0" script widgets—everything needs to be synthesized, digested, and organized in such a way that it is easy, quick, intuitive, and causes as little stress on my person as possible with the maximum amount of payoff.

Overkill? Maybe. But also, perhaps, necessary. For some people, it's not so far fetched. And if I want to become truly "professional" in the graphic design world, and take on big clients that work in this sort of fast-paced environment and have that amount of organization not out of romance, but out of necessity—well, I might as well match them at their own game, if not exceed them.

There is a bit of romance to it—the romance of mechanization and automization. But on thinking about this, I realized my standard for the amount of organization I want in my life: everything should be structured to a point that it could practically run itself. Of course it won't—the intent is needed to push the button or move the mouse. The intuition of my design eye, which cannot be boiled down to anything other than what it simply is—intuition—needs to be there for anything worthwhile to come out of Photoshop. After that though, File > Save As, convert to JPG, run a script that uploads it to the web which triggers an alert to my client, etc., etc. It's all there, and the computer takes care of the rest. The entire process is automated—except for that one, tiny spark that makes the giant, anodized aluminum, pre-scripted machine run. Intuition—the intent that it should, and must, work.

I'm well aware of the fact that I spend most of my day in front of a screen, and I'm well aware of the fact that I, aside from having my laptop welded into my flesh, might as well be a cyborg. As I've written before, my iTunes Library and harddrive should be a fairly accurate mindmap of my actual brain. And I think that, as technology and the Internet progresses (computing in the cloud, Google makes an operating system, guess where that's going to go, etc.) the phenomenon is only going to sharpen and intensify.

But there will always be that one thing missing to make the giant communication web in the sky run, should humanity cease to exist.

I think that the Star Trek Borg image of a future, technocratic humanity is no longer an accurate depiction of our evolutionary future. We'll imbed implants in our brain, let machines help run our organs. But we won't let them control our will. We won't submit ourselves to the cloud-brain. We're too emotional, too individualistic, and too democratic for it. Our machines will grow ever more complex, more and more complex than even we as organisms could be. The silicon in our iPods will hold more information that our carbon-based brains could ever hope to. But there will be no instigation, without us, do use that information. We may create a machine race, someday, with its own intent, maybe. But we'll never submit ourselves to the way a machine thinks. We're too inconsistent and lie too much to ourselves to ever engage, effectively, that kind of evolution.

Then again, we're also probably some of the most adaptable creatures on the planet. So I might be wrong.

But at least for now, I think the real future of humankind is not that it will be amalgamated with technology, in the sense that we become the technology. The technology may become us in the far future, but for now, the machine may be a hulking mass, indisputably efficient and effective.

But without the intent in that circle of screens, there will always be that one missing element to make the whole thing run. The intent—the intuition between scripts, will not be there. The one thing that will not be able to be quantified, or scripted. The pure chance that something, somewhere, actually tells the system, to "go." We will literally become the spirits within the machine—the ghosts of flesh in an overwhelming sea of invisible information and rigid file directories. The machine will control everything—except for the one thing it can never understand.

The Places We Find Inside

I had another interview with Stephan today, our French documentarian. I'm always interested in giving a fellow videographer/artist some good material to work with, so I sometimes may give more complicated, lengthy answers to otherwise simple questions.

One particular question caused me to go into a certain area of my life that I have not mentioned yet on this blog—namely, my fluctuating identity as a Christian/Agnostic, and the influence Arcosanti has had on this identity. Since this aspect of my life will sometime this year be broadcasted across Europe, I figured I should at least give the readers of this blog a preemptive reading, so that they don't have to find out about it on DVD.

I have only mentioned on occasion to people here at Arcosanti that I have a deeply religious background, and even in those conversations the depth of that sea may not be fully measured (maybe measurable—even I sometimes gloss over it like it's a backyard pool, rather than roaring, distant ocean).

More than just a religious background that I later rebelled against, I could be classified as a "Church Exile"—a little-known category of ex-Churchgoers, but not necessarily ex-Christians. This includes my immediate family (I have no siblings), and we all worked in the ministry in one form or another. Dad was a Music Pastor since I was a toddler (or music director depending on the denomination), and Mom's online multimedia service is to this day targeted to Churches. I attended a Protestant Christian elementary and middle school in southern Florida, but a public high school and, later, a very "secular" fine arts school.

To cut a very long story short over the course of three family moves (from Canada to Florida to Maryland), uncountable discussions, a lot of personal transformations, and maybe a few intangible injuries along the way, we became convinced that the bureaucratic, systematized nature of an institutional Church and its theology was at odds with the actual teachings of Jesus. Maybe that's too fine a point—I only want to speak for myself on this matter, and not my family. But either way, at this realization, and with all the situations that led up to its formation, we decided to leave the Church, with no set date on when we'd return, either within the ministry itself or just as simple attendees.

This was approximately four years ago. My journey in this matter has been different, dare I say more formative for me, than my parents. In many ways, if you gave me a multiple-choice test to determine my spiritual/religious beliefs, I would probably come out as an agnostic, maybe an atheist (if it was a bad day). I should be thankful to have the tact to say, and believe, that I often try to turn my back on this Christian heritage, but know that such an act is futile. Brian McLaren, a well-known Christian speaker, writer, and once-pastor, once said to me that the gospel was "deep in [my] bones". That was around when I was around fifteen. Years later, I would be fooling myself if I thought, even now, that I could separate the teachings of the Nazarene from my beliefs, however you want to classify them, like I could the calcium from my skeleton. But I read the Tao te Ching now more than I do the Gospel of John. I find more comfort and lessons in Zen than I do Psalms or Paul's letters to the Mediterranean churches, which for me are so old and dusty from a life gone past, with maybe a bit of bitterness from what they once meant and how they were abused by others, that they ring hollow, if not simply irrelevant to my current aspirations and life.

But it was Paolo Soleri who not two days ago said "we always return to our origins" in answer to a question of mine at School of Thought. Granted, he meant Hydrogen—but I was thinking of a different kind of origin.

Everyone's beliefs evolve and change as they grow older. It's natural to rebel against your heritage, if for a time—only to come back to it again once you're wiser about it. And this was the answer I gave to Stephan in his to-be documentary.

There is a very odd, but distinct similarity between the churches of my youth and Arcosanti. I like to call them "ideologically-centered communities." Put it this way—both Arcosanti and a church, for example, are held together not by profitmaking or livelihoods, but by belief in a cause. This cause does not have to be religious. But whatever this cause is, it is optimistic—it may have some degree of spirituality (not because it is divine, but because it cultivates the human spirit), and it creates a lot of friction. Friction, because everyone wants to contribute to a communal effort with all that they have—and not everyone may agree to how those efforts should be synthesized into a whole. This creates politics. But it is a good kind of politics—it is the most healthy kind, because it is (usually, hopefully) a selfless kind of politics.

Before coming to Arcosanti I was secluded to my parents basement—at not fault to them. If anything, a fault of mine for not "going out and getting a job"—which, to my credit was really less practical than it was appealing or "normal" (and I did get a job). But it was the social aspect that affected me, and in a larger sense of identity than loneliness (I am an extreme introvert, so loneliness is a gift usually, rather than a plague). It was the lack of a community that cultivated the spirit that was lacking. And, now that I think of it, I think that is the "hole in one's heart" that Evangelicals appeal to in unconverted people—not knowing that it is the binding community of the church that heals them, rather than its doctrine and theology.

Despite my agnostic stance, or maybe veneer, I actually tried going back to our old Church back in February. It didn't stick. I was in a community up in Baltimore that was post-denominationally Christian, but I was landlocked from Baltimore after college. I knew that I needed a community of friends and common believers—but I could not believe the same things that my old churchgoing friends did—and even if I could, I was too much of a philosopher and skeptic to believe it consistently, like a good little "saved" person.

This was one of the reasons I came to Arcosanti, and why I feel so comfortable here. It is ironic—that a desert community built by an atheist would feed the spiritual and communal needs of a post-Christian psuedo-agnostic. But it fit. The community here is searching after something, and they're all doing it in their own unique, differing ways—and that is the glue that holds it together. Soleri's architecture and passion for "curing" urban sprawl is only a loose focusing lens. Arcosanti does not have a mission statement or 10 points of unequivocal doctrine. If Soleri is a spiritualist, he believes in the possibility of a God in the far future, which may be in the process of retroactive self-creation (that's how I interpret his "Mystero Tremendo"). There may be a God, but not yet. That possibility, yet undefined nature of the divine turns the orbit of this community on an interesting path. Out of a million chances, perhaps, it happens to be the right trajectory for me, a wayward comet, to fall in step with and be nurtured by this gas giant of vision that has a very small solid core of concrete and clay.

It is funny to think that most Evangelicals need, and say other humans need stability. I need stability, yes—but a kind that can allow the consistent (inconsistent) nature of instability to invade my life and propel me forward—the ability to change and evolve. It is only by walking forward, by evolving, that we come back to our origins, and that much wiser.

So all this I spilled out to Stephan's camera this morning—perhaps in a much more succinct way. But no less integral, or vulnerable, when speaking about my experience here.

I do not know what the future brings. These formative experiences set me on a path I can not fathom, especially when I am in the throes of it. But perhaps I don't need to run anymore. The refusal of what we are is the "perception of manifestations, promulgated by our desires," as the Tao teaches. And it is what this place teaches, even if it comes only to the issues of human evolution and urban planning. But if that place of origin is an immeasurable sea, at least I can be content that I am at a place where I can grow in the (im)possibility of life and God, of virtue and gross humanity, of simplicity and optimistic vision, all in the face of oppressing reality. We are not playthings of our heritage—we are heirs to it, and we do with it as we see fit. We engage with it, and more. We are forged with it and it is in us—we just oftentimes forget that it is as living and breath-filled as we are.

The Virtual Identity

I was thinking about something on the plane into Arizona, and my first evening here at Arcosanti only intensified my conviction of its truth.

The life I lived in Baltimore, and even in Silver Spring (as in, my parent's basement) was something of a virtual life. In a lifestyle that is dependent on constant (internet) connection, in a world of relationships that are defined by Facebook and text messages, and where the only way to stay sane is to have a constant inflow of information, no matter the quality or the content—"real" becomes a word, and not a definition. It's like not knowing what is up or down. My moods could be mapped by my music collection. My web of relationships delineated by my Facebook Friends list. My recent interests by the latest web pages I visited, and the projects that require my most attention, the most consistently opened files. I'm living in suburbia, and the economic downturn of this time necessitates that I not have a car, so I am landlocked unless I wish to take the bus downtown—but why would I do that? To shop at Borders to spend money I don't have?

So I stay put, in front of my terminal screen, moving onto the next task or train of thought without moving from my seat. I am an actuator at the keyboard—a mind surfing the infinite internet, defined by a biological clock based on necessity, and not the sun.

It is frightening to think about it. Virtual reality, originally a conduit for Real Reality, suddenly begins to define Real Reality, or at least mirror it such that the difference becomes moot. Who am I? Am I person, with dreams, hopes, visions, and fears? Or are these just binary recordings on a harddrive, and I am an agent that happens to exercise them via QWERTY at specific intervals of the clock? The idea that my brain is actually twin silicon disks, and that the gray matter in my head was nothing but a tool for inputting information into those disks, was a freakish idea, but one not at all a far-fetched one. My brain is the computer, and my identity being exercised, like an application, in the cloud.

And it's not just about being locked in one certain place and "not getting out." It's the urban identity—maybe a term Soleri would coin. The human identity that has become so dependent on machines—whether they run on gasoline, are powered by lithium-ion batteries, store data on a server, or transmit information via cell phone towers—that, if the machine were taken away, the entire organism would collapse (I think that's the definition of a cyborg; an organism that is as dependent on its machine parts as it is its mechanical parts). Or, and I think this is even better—if the machine was just programmed to do all the things the organic agent was doing, and the organic agent disappeared overnight—the world would continue running as if nothing had ever happened. It's encouraged by our lifestyle, by our urban sprawl, by our business models, and by advertising. We are becoming the passive agents of a technological civilization that would run itself, if we just gave it the code.

Obviously, we're all Cylons. I miss you, Battlestar Galactica.

Seriously though. If there was ever an antithesis to this "Urban Identity," it might be fostered at Arcosanti. Even though I've only been here a single night, I can already feel it. The organic structure of this microcosm of city forces humans to notice and interact with other humans. The nearly tee-total recycling programs reminds one constantly that nothing needs to be wasted. Moving from one place to another requires a bit of walking and fresh air, and the human presence integrates with presence of nature beyond, with either side being little disturbed (I doubt you will ever, ever find this in a place like Phoenix or Baltimore).

For me, this workshop is a bit of an experiment in combating the urban cyborg. I was fully aware of my virtual identity, and on most days I did not stop it. I dared it, wishing to see how far it would go. At this point, with everything from the car to Twitter—I see no reason to believe that my body could just be—that I myself could be—nothing more than a passive ghost in the machine, with odd bodily requirements that are little more than an annoyance to my 24/7 operating schedule. I am not interested in seeing Twitter be wiped away in favor of a monkish life without computers. We will all end up being Cyborgs—the thing is, we have to learn how to be healthy Cyborgs—Cyborgs that affirm the human side, and tend to its holistic, and not just bodily nature, just as we do our remotely wired technological selves. And this means changing everything, not just our technology. It means changing our educational institutions, the products we consume (I always thought the marketing term "consumer," which is now a cultural one, to be horribly betraying of the wastefulness of our society), the foods we eat, the programs we create. It means a shift in the American Dream, which never saw past its own white picket fence, to a shift in popular religion.

Humanity can be eaten by Twitter and Facebook. It's a shame they're so addictive, and so useful.

But again, it's all about unity and harmony. I'm not for the abolition of technology, and not from any ideological perspective—simply from a pragmatic one. The internet was invented, and there was never an off button. What we've started will continue, whether we like it or not, and whether it is healthy for us or not. I believe it can be healthy, but that depends on how we use it. And it may not be the internet that's the problem. It may, in fact, be the city itself, and how we build it. At least, that's what Soleri would say.

And I don't think he's too far off.

8 Days and Counting

It is about 8 days until I leave the state of Maryland for Arizona—and thus, Arcosanti. I will be staying with relatives in the Phoenix area for the first day of my desert-tracked adventure (Friday the 10th), and then head to Arcosanti for the Saturday thereafter. It is not uncommon for workshop participants to stay a day or two at the complex ahead of the beginning of the workshop's actual beginning. Cheaper plane tickets made this a frugal decision—and spending one day to simply get acquainted with Arcosanti again will not be a bad thing.

The reality of my trip is dawning on me more steadily as I get closer to it. It feels a bit like moving. This is due in part because I may be staying there beyond the duration of the 5-week workshop. There are possible Graphic Design and Web Design positions at Arcosanti—if not paid, then volunteer based (which offers free lodging as compensation). I am never good at planning in advance—things sort of come over my brain like what to bring, what to expect, slowly. So I've steadily considered more and more what I would choose to bring should I end up, in the possible case, of staying beyond the duration of the workshop—perhaps a great deal longer.

I am of course excited. I mentioned in a previous blog post that I'd first gone to Arcosanti before I was in high school. I've also admired Paolo Soleri sort of in the way that one would admire a well-known intellectual—an Albert Einstein or Jacques Derrida. I've read many of his books—or, at least, tried to, and have delved into some of the deeper aspects of his theories, such as the effect on the arcological theory of the city on the advancement of human evolution (in short: the city, built as an organism rather than a construct, can accelerate the development of humanity, if not physically, then consciously and spiritually).

I, in the meantime, am concerned with more mundane things, such as what kind of clothing I'll need to bring and the fact that I'll have to watch out for things like scorpions and rattlesnakes in the desert. Which, after you get over the initial anxiety, seems romantic. I'm eager to see how my insulated, air-conditioned self will do when put to work in a rustic environment that is ecologically on-par with its desert surroundings. It's one thing to say you're going to live in harmony with the desert; it's quite another to actually do it.

I'm fully expecting the experience to be a shock to my system. In fact, that's partially why I'm going. There are a number of reasons for me going to Arcosanti, all at once educational, economic, and personal. In the wake of my year off from school and MICA (the fine arts institution I attended for two years), I've been left with, to be honest, what I think is a half-baked freelance career in a shoddy economy, with no degree to speak of. I am lucky that I am able to attend the University of Maryland in College Park, which I will enter into after my period at Arcosanti (which I'm expecting to be another shock all to itself).

But I am in something of a bubble, and this is a bubble I want to break. I am going to Arcosanti not just because it will be extremely educational, but because I want to gain back some aspects of my self that, I feel, I've lost over the past year, maybe two or three years. This may be in part due to my family's falling out with the Church finally coming to developmental head in my own life. Readers close to me personally will know the story behind that—for new ones who don't, it would take another blog to tell the story entirely. The short of it is, for the purpose of this blog post: when you've dedicated yourself to the development and life of a human community built around a certain set ideals—and then you come to feel that the entire structure was a sham—well, it's not unfair to say that a bit of purpose may be drawn out of your own life in the process. Arcosanti is an idealistic place. It is ultimately optimistic, daresay even utopian, in an age of information and virtualized reality that sees personal identity as ever more shattered, web-like, and lacking of any consistent pattern or purpose. This phenomenon of shattered identity is not due to any specific reason, but a number of various ones, which culminates in a sort of "it's just the way things are" feeling—and most people go on thinking none the wiser.

I would like to think that I've experienced some of the deeper aspects, good and bad, of my generation—the internet generation, the shattered identity being only one of many things. For instance, there is little that I do that does not involve an LCD screen. If I'm not carrying my laptop, it is like I'm missing half of my brain. I get my entertainment, my information, my work, my communication, my finances, all through a screen. Anything that does not utilize some base bodily function is somehow done through pixels and a hard drive. Which I don't think is uncommon—I may be an especially potent case, but my generation's society is completely affected by the internet age, for better or worse. I remembered an instructor of mine at MICA who was consistently floored by the fact that I listened to my iPod every moment I was making artwork. He had been teaching there for 40 years and had seen the evolution of music go from the invention of the Boombox to the iPod. To him, my compulsive addiction to music was just that—an addiction. For me, music was a focusing lens that was a consistent source of inspiration, and allowed me to remain in my introverted "artist space" wherever I went. We had a great many "discussions" about this difference in perspective—all good natured of course. But I can only wonder what he would think if he knew that I listen to music almost 24/7, even when I'm sleeping.

And to his credit, I don't think he was wrong. There is something to be gained from silence, from stillness. But our world is one of noise, both seen and heard. The information age is not interested in the economy of senses, but the overloading of them.

Baltimore, is not a quiet city, for example. Not in any sense of the term. Arcosanti however… with its sienna-colored apses and tanned structures—that place has a quietness about it that is almost monastic. Something is to be said about good architecture—architecture with a soul, even. Even if you don't believe in such a thing as a "soul."

In short, I'm looking forward to being in a different world, and absorbing it as much as I can. And, of course, I will let you know what happens.