Columbine Star

Columbine star ...

Iris & Columbine: Contact Improv as Complement to Modernity, Harbin, Counterculture

I think contact improv dance jams are remarkable complements to modernity. (Modernity, for anthropologist James Clifford in "The Predicament of Culture" {Harvard 1988: 3-4}, is characterized by rootlessness, mobility, alienation, scattered traditions, craziness, and disorder, and entails historical uncertainty and undermines concepts of cultural ‘essence.’ See also scottmacleod.com/2003Feb03PolyphonyClifford.htm).

The physical touch, movement, interaction, community and friendships that develop can balance these 'modernity' processes which may significantly influence our daily lives, in a variety of ways.


Here are some great contact videos:

Making Contact: Atlanta Contact Improv Jam 2006
www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUNfM-n_Soo

Contact Improvisation in performance
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7p2Tof2y1yQ

Creative Contact:

Pilobolus: A performance merging dance and biology
www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOZ6KnVPvIU

(also posted here: scottmacleod.com/contact.htm)



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... just returned from Harbin, which is also a wonderful complement to modernity...


**

Both contact improv and Harbin emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, out of counterculture, in so many ways.

I see counterculture and the freedom-seeking movements of those years, as they take form in the present, also as responses to modernity.

Macaws: Children Bring Me Home

Children Bring Me Home

Little Sophie stopped me
in the Canyon valley,
as I walked to the
breakfast in the school.

The older kids there
are going on
a trip to Costa Rica.

Sophie asked me what
the big dog's name was,
which was near us.
Would I read its collar?
Julio was its name.
Sophie's little sister
came over,
littler Katie,
and we talked, too.

Their mother was fixing up,
in the nearby,
hippie-ish garden,
her old sculpture,
a gnarly, clay,
tree-stump piece,
to which someone
wanted to add mosaic.

I asked if I might add
to this sculpture,
too, at a later date,
and she said yes.

I walked on
to the breakfast
in the school.
Someone there,
not from Canyon,
said the Canyon School
had been heaven
for her kids.

Sharing sincere
*reality* with kids
~ seeing the
world together ~
brings me
heart-warmingly
home.

*

...

(http://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2009/02/macaws-children-bring-me-home.html - February 7, 2009)

Wilderness Water: World University and School, Online Universities, World Wide Web

I received an email recently from a freelance writer named Holly McCarthy in Britain wanting to write about my blog and post it to this blog. I've posted my {edited} reply and her email here:


Hi Holly,

Thanks for your email. Yes, you're welcome to write a guest post for my blog, which I would then post. And I would be happy to link to your web site. I think characterizing what's unique about this nascent World University and School Wiki vis-a-vis the other Universities you've written about might interest both you and I, and from which we both might learn. But I'm open to what you would like to write about.

Also, please post interesting courses you find to World University and School's Wiki, itself: worlduniversity.wikia.com

My web site, scottmacleod.com/papers.htm, and the Facebook page facebook.com/group.php?gid=48753608141&ref=ts offer more information, especially the folders to the right here - globaluniversity.pbwiki.com - in the first Global University Wiki. The transcripts from teaching my course "Society and Information Technology" on Berkman Island (Harvard's virtual island, but I'm not on Harvard's faculty) here - socinfotech.pbwiki.com/ - have the first avatar-mediated conversations about this global University idea. My avatar's name is Aphilo Aarde in Second Life.

World University and School is a Global, Virtual, Open, Free-to-Students, Multilingual University. The current Wiki has been up for almost a year. What's emerging is a Wikipedia-MIT OCW approach, potentially at all levels, and in all subjects and languages. In the envisioning and realizing process of this Wiki University and School, degree- and credit-granting are still only potentials. As you might see from this Wiki, part of my project is to focus on great Universities around the world vis-a-vis open courses, and also to see how the web facilitates a de facto digital standard for online academic courses (especially vis-a-vis MIT OCW), as well as a new orientation to university and school education online. I also see WUaS as being for the developing world and everyone, that is, people with video-capable handheld devices will be able to access and post video to this Wiki for teaching and learning in all languages. This might also facilitate teaching and learning among people who can neither read nor write. In addition, this should become a great archive, which might span thousands of years. I've read that Wikipedia now has more than 2.5 million entries, in more than 70 languages.

I also especially welcome healing arts' courses such as Watsu {water shiatsu} taught in Second Life, and for example, yoga and acupuncture, as well as all of the arts. I also envision a medical school, music school, Ph.D. programs, International Baccalaureate, and much more. Openness and excellence are two of my orientations. And while openness is important to me, I'm also interested in instructional courses that are really helpful - somehow the best - for people. These will also include school age courses, as well as, for example, home improvement instruction.

I hope World University and School's openness will encourage creativity and innovation in teaching and learning, through its openness. There are a lot of smart and knowledgeable people in the world, who, with their web cameras, will be able to post what they want to teach, - in quite specialized ways. And class interactivity can occur in virtual worlds like Second Life, which is developing. I'm looking for moderators in all 3,000-8,000 languages, and in many subjects, to facilitate the aggregating process of what's 'out there' on the web already.

Like Wikipedia, I think this will develop organically and gradually.

I hope this is helpful to you. (Click on the global university tag on this page to see other thoughts about WUaS).

Sincerely,
Scott

scottmacleod.com
scott-macleod.blogspot.com






----- Original Message -----
From: hollymccarthy12
To: scott@scottmacleod.com
Sent: Monday, February 02, 2009 8:33 PM
Subject: Scott MacLeod's Anthropology of Information Technology & Counterculture blog article

Hi Scott,


I came across your blog (Scott MacLeod's Anthropology of Information Technology & Counterculture) and am wondering if you would consider letting me submit a guest post on your site. I am new to freelancing, and I am trying to build my online portfolio. I don't know if you have a formal procedure or are willing to accept a guest writer, but please let me know if this is possible. I would appreciate you getting back with me with and I can send over an article for your consideration.


In terms of the topic for the article, I'm thinking about writing something that relates to the general theme of your blog, but if there is something specific you would like me to write about, just let me know. The only thing I would ask is that I can put my by-line with a link back to my writing (onlineuniversities.com) at the bottom of the article.


Please let me know if you are interested. Here are a couple of sample feature articles that I have recently written:


onlineuniversities.com/blog/2009/01/advantages-of-biotechnology-in-human-life


onlineuniversities.com/blog/2008/12/top-100-anthropology-blogs


Thank you for your time and I am looking forward to hearing from you.


Thanks,
Holly McCarthy

Common Kingfisher: Webnographers.org, Contact Improv, Realizing {Loving Bliss} Ideas

Here's an exciting new Wiki {editable web pages} - webnographers.org - where people who are studying the web ethnographically can add and share resources. It has amazing potential.

Webnographers: Resources for Virtual Ethnography

The Gist:

Cyberanthropology is but a fetal field, far from defined. This website was developed in the interest of providing a central hub for those interested in ethnographies of the internet. Created by and for webnographers, its success in contingent on your participation.

Ethnography is not constrained solely to anthropologists, and indeed the barriers that divide the various social sciences are at once arbitrary and collapsible. Any individual interested in the complex social, cultural, and psychological facets of humans relating with and through the internet is encouraged to join in this nascent community. Webnographers unite!

~ Jenny Ryan

*

Contact Improv jams embody and make possible those flexible {somewhat like the World Wide Web}, fluid, touch, movement and creative possibilities that life offers in wonderful ways.


**

Contentment and the neurophysiology of loving bliss, when and as one wants them, are appealing ... scottmacleod.com/#LovingBlissLetters

What's the 'chamber music' of understanding vis-a-vis loving bliss, and how might we develop these richly in conjunction with the pragmatics of daily life?

How to realize some of these ideas?

Heading soon to the Harbin pools ....

Yellow Iris: West Coast, Harbin, Ways of Worldmaking

I'm looking for a 'free' academic position. I'd like to continue my Harbin Hot Springs' research with funding. (I'm still waiting to hear about a competition I entered for World University and School).

Fortunately I can return to my 5 letters here at scottmacleod.com/#LovingBlissLetters to explore eliciting loving bliss, in a variety of ways. I still haven't found my 'on/off bodymind switch' {MDMA-like, but naturally} for this yet, but I continue to think about how this might work. The relaxation response does help, as well as facilitates contentment; I'm curious to think through how. It also seems to provide openings for 'accessing' loving bliss neurophysiology. Memory works sometimes, but not that passionately. Breathing can help explore loving bliss.

California has a great, Mediterranean climate, and Harbin is nearby.

A teacher of mine just suggested a book which seems very germane to my research, writing, and world-making: "Ways of Worldmaking," (Indiana University Press, 1978) by Harvard philosopher Nelson Goodman.

Spider Web: Internet's 'Pipes,' Meditation, Restraint

The Internet's 'backbone' is a number of major pipelines between continents on the ocean floor.

Rodica Buzescu characterizes this here, with a helpful map:

morphingthrough.blogspot.com/2009/02/internet-is-series-of-tubes.html


In the future, I hope these 'pipes' will include much greater data transfer through satellite, radio and other frequencies, and via nodes like ships, towers, islands, airplanes, etc., and become much more distributed, too, just as the Internet is a distributed system of nodes.

I wonder whether bandwidth demand will continue to concentrate data-transfer in key mega-pipes, which will, in turn, continue to make the Internet vulnerable, because these tubes aren't distributed enough?

I suspect we need many more, distributed 'pipelines' for data transfer, compared with what we have now to meet, for example, video streaming bandwidth 'needs' in the future, especially for the developing world. (I'm looking for a web site that summarizes this).


*

The 'relaxation response' ~ relaxationresponse.org/steps ~ which I enjoy eliciting, characterized secularly, emerged out of Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson MD's research on meditation.

I wonder how meditation, or the relaxation response, works, and why it has the effects it may have socially. A little wary of the word 'meditation,' because of its 'other worldly' connotations, its association with 'cults,' {we're all invovled with group ideas, however}, etc., I've nevertheless found meditating - eliciting the relaxation response - to have benefits, in creating contentment and ease. It can be one of the best, and most enjoyable, experiences in life.

What other effects does it have?


**

Restraint is an interesting concept and practice. Sometimes I think that 'restraint,' which carries restrictive connotations for me, and thus somehow goes against my freedom-minded orientation, and thus also has negative connotations for me, can give rise to great benefits. How would, or does, this work? Simply holding back a little can open new possibilities that we might not have found had we 'engaged' ~ acted, spoken, interacted, etc. ~ earlier. These can somehow be beneficial.

And especially vis-a-vis eliciting 'loving bliss,' for example?

Deep River: Omega-3s, Playing Music and Flow, Contact Improv

Here's information about how Omega-3s work, and what they help, with no side effects. In my experience they have a harmonizing effect, and have many health benefits. I like 1000 mg of flax seed oil, 3-4 times a day.

Understanding Omega-3s
washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A17258-2004Mar23?language=printer


*

I'm curious to explore how playing a musical instrument can generate very focused and self-generated 'flow: the psychology of opt exp' experiences {Csikszentmihalyi} . There's a lot of possibility for creativity here, potentially in 'flow' ~ absorbed mind ~ ways, where the playing 'feeds back' to your brain/bodymind, and influences how you play further. So, as you're playing, you hear, and then adjust. You can potentially move in very rich, and even wild directions {Bach, Jimi Hendrix} while playing. Regeneration ...


**

Heading to a Contact Improv Jam in SF soon ...

Ridge: Anthropology, Hippy-ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy, Creation

New anthropological approaches:

Hippy-ethno-wiki-virtual-world-graphy ~

for countercultural places around the world, especially.


Here's free Wiki (editable web pages) software: http://wikia.com Everybody can post or create art, ideas, videos, and photos from counterculture, and as it develops.

And here's free virtual world software: http://secondlife.com, (but it costs to have an island on which you can build).


Let's share this with countercultural places around the world {India has long been fairly freedom-minded in this sense ~ spiritually ~ for eons, it seems} to facilitate creating a network, to explore creating new worlds, and to change the world for the better.



*

I just returned from Harbin last night. Its quietnesss, its "nowness," its clothing-optionalness, its milieu, its ... , are wonderful.

The hot water just flows out of the ground, and the pool area and Harbin's valley are beautiful, attracting freedom-minded folks.

.

Blue: Harbin

Harbin is real, wonderful, with a lot of naked people around, especially in the pool area.