My LiveJournal is withering away. Many of the images have disappeared with my pro account (what was I thinking?).

I have it archived locally if you're looking for something in particular.

music: Warp20

I've packed my bags and I'm off again.

http://blog.msutherl.net/
LJ syndication is here: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/msutherl/

[EDIT: link updated]

Adieu!

feeling: accomplished music: Autechre

I hereby declare my "LiveJournal community" dead. The people who made this service worthwhile for me are gone. J-Dizzle, Maura, Ryan, Lili, Sarah, Kathy, Forrest. Even Josh hasn't been writing seriously for a year or more. Only Maddie and xkcd drone on. Tyr throws up occasionally. There could be others I'm forgetting.

I'm considering moving elsewhere, but I'm not sure where to go. I valued having a relatively obscure place to publish writing for my closest friends' eyes. Blogger and Tumblr don't seem to support the same sort of community. Facebook notes are too public and I can't selectively block people from seeing them. (Also, news feeds are so busy that anything you write just gets lost in the flow.)

Maybe I'll just keep writing here for my own enjoyment. Maybe I'll realize my former goal of becoming a more 'serious' blogger (Dorian seems to be doing well with this approach). Maybe I'll turn myself towards writing and selectively publishing wiki pages instead of blogging (I've been running a local wiki for a few months). Or perhaps this is an opportunity to disconnect from the the "connective tissue" of the net and refocus my energy somewhere else. I don't know. My real-life social situation is so much in flux -- I can't use it as a basis. Summer and Nantucket are coming and I won't have much energy and need to write this stuff anyway.

Consider letting me know if you'll miss my presence here.

It seems there's still some life here, but what the heck. I'll try something new for fun. Link and LiveJournal syndication forthcoming. http://nagrom-the-pink.livejournal.com/75794.html

feeling: calm music: "Merriweather Post Pavilion"

Up until now, I've lived like an upper-middle class American. Largely I've been unconcerned with paying to support myself, educate myself, and spice-up my life with (albeit restrained) luxury.

A few days ago I learned that the stream of money that has been paying for my rent and my education will dry up. Nobody intended this. It's a result of bad planning and bad circumstances, not good nor ill intention. The result is a shattering of my plans for the next three years and a sudden reconsideration of my place in society. Some consequences:

* I may or may not have enough money to return to school next Fall. Even if I can return, it will only be for one semester, after which I will need to move back to the States and find a job.
* The cycle will continue. It will probably take me four to five years to finish my undergraduate degree at this rate, oscillating between work and school.
* In order to shorten this, I will likely leave Concordia for an American school where fewer credits are required for graduation.
* Another reason to transfer to the States is for financial aid and access to loans.
* Any time apart from school that I have will be spent making as much money as possible so that I may return. I probably won't have time for internships and low paying jobs where rent isn't free.
* I will be spending a good deal of time on Nantucket in the next few years most likely as it is somewhere were I can (1) get payed a lot (2) live for free.
* I almost certainly won't be heading to graduate school after finishing my undergrad. I will need to work for a few years and save money.

Some mental shifts:

* My middle-class status is reaffirmed.
* It is now much more important for me to seek skills that will allow me to get high-paying entry-level jobs. Procedural programming in a popular language like JAVA or Python is a no-brainer, as is web-design / web-programming.
* School will quickly cease feeling like a right and start feeling like a waste of money privilege.

Suddenly I need to shift into a completely different gear. Many people in my life 'payed their way through college working 2 jobs'. I'm sure I'll be fine, perhaps even better for it.

What more can I say.

feeling: fuck music: Squarepusher

"I have a love in my life. It makes me stronger than anything you can imagine."

January is close to over and I don't feel like I'm striding confidently yet.

Tobias has been staying with Alexandra for more than a week now. He leaves today. I think he's had a fun and productive time. We made many meals and spent plenty of time staving off the cold. As far as I can tell, he's planning to come to Concordia to study urban planning next year. If so, then we will probably try to find an apartment with Sean in late August in which to create a most optimal living space. I'm excited to see what emerges from such a complex mix of skills and sensibilities. I think he'll get on wonderfully here if he learns to deal with the isolation that descends over the city for the four months of heavy winter.

Alexandra and I went to a future-themed weekend party at a lodge with the LAC this weekend. We dressed up, drank, danced, and had a few superb conversations. I think I'll be just fine in the college next year. I've so far found a higher-than-normal concentration of exceptional people and the community-atmosphere is lively, but not too gossipy.

This morning I woke up when it was still dark, probably because I didn't turn my lights off. Beautiful morning light streamed into this cave-like apartment as the sun rose.

The power just turned off and back on. *thmp* ... *thmp*

feeling: morning haze music: Avishai Cohen

So it begins. Let's throw some words on the page without thinking too much. My New Year's Resolution is to seek:

- Calmness
- Mindfulness

I'm in my second week of classes. My classes are:

- (2nd half of) LBCL295 - History of Art
- CART356B - Digital Sound Design: Audio-Vision: Synchresis and Synaesthesia
- CART253 - The Languages of Programming (Processing)
- ARTH387 - Issues in Art & Criticism: Bio-Art

I'm thinking of dropping the bio-art class and going part-time. My tuition would be cut in half and I could devote some time to other pursuits like:

- learning "real" programming (C++, Python or Ruby)
- learning more UNIX, shell scripting
- working on Ozone at the TML
- busy work like archiving and managing gear at the TML
- reading
- learning how to cook

That would be nice. I need to find a job for this summer on Nantucket. Primary suspects:

- Nantucket Community Sailing (teaching sailing)
- The Nantucket Atheneum (library)
- Strong Wings (summer camp)
- WiBLAST (wireless internet)
- A/V Inflections (home theater systems)

In May Chris Salter is organizing a workshop where undergraduates will be given access to a wireless sensor mesh and fancy new feature-extraction/mapping tools with which they will make performance/installation sketches. I plan to be among them. Should be fun, but I suspect stressful like last year's workshop. Book list:

- Audio-Vision by Chion
- The Allure of Machinic Life by Johnston
- Where The Action Is by Dourish
- One Thousand Years of Nonlinear History by Delanda
- essays from Signs of Life ed. Kac (if I stick with bio-art)
- Status Anxiety by de Botton
- Action in Perception by Noe
- Getting Things Done, heh

Speaking of GTD, I've been Getting Things Done with software productivity applications lately and it's working wonderfully for me. Thanks to OmniFocus (especially the iPhone app). This iPod Touch is meshing tightly into my life. It seems like going back to paper wasn't the right thing for me after all. Reminds me of my costly 'going back to hardware' phase when I was in high school.

Themes:
- the integration of computer technology into human life
- interaction design (IxD)
- am I a designer?
- do I have the balls to be an artist?
- subjective vs. objective, mental construct?
- analog vs. digital
- function-specific vs. general
- the artistic orientation of the photographer (framing) vs. that of the traditional artist (bringing forth new frames)
- what is the purpose of (media-)art in our post-modern age?
- art as: <--aesthetic---production-of-experience---production-of-knowledge-->
- the importance of 'play'

I'm coming to appreciate this western end of Westmount more and more. It's becoming my home. I will leave it soon enough however. Say, I'll have to move. Where will I come back to in August? I think I'd like to find a 2 bedroom place. I have a few roommate candidates. Leaving for the summer makes in complicated to find the right place, but I remain devoted to the pursuit.

My mother suggested I take next year off from school. Probably I would move to New York and do internships for a year. I think I'd like to come back to Montreal next school-year though. I'm curious to start my new liberal arts major and see how that works out for me. If it doesn't feel right, then I'll thrust myself into the scary outside-institutional world.

I don't think this year will be very exciting. I hope it will be calm.

feeling: headcold music: a duct squeaking in the wind

It's late, the certain type of late where words and thoughts get sucked into a mental sampler of sorts that centers a fragment in its sampling window and repeats it rhythmically in my head. The rhythm is that of triplets over 4/4 time. Any aural thought is fair material. This has happened occasionally for as long as I can remember, and it may explain why triplets were so natural to me when I learned about them formally as a percussionist.

I would like to review some of the major events of this 2008. But first, let's revisit last year's summary:

I was in the process of filling out an 'in reflection of 2007' meme and, in reflection, I stopped.
It's been a long year and an overwhelming amount of...life-stuff has passed. Aesthetics, relationships, epiphanies.

Questions of the form 'what was the one thing x..." seem unanswerable. There are forty songs associated with this year; few, weak, memorable moments, many more types of experience, 'aesthetic signatures' (how do I stop over-using "aesthetic"?); scores of epiphanies; uncountable (either because there were many or zero) excitements; no general trends (except broadening).

And, I can't seem to be proud of a single accomplishment. A year of branching and fortifying went by and, again, nothing got done. That's how I feel.

I'm afraid that it will, again, be futile to declare "stop procrastinating" at 12am. I'm afraid that I'm destined to play the strengths that have come of my amorphous, conflicted way of life.

Is it worth another shot for self-discipline?

The answer to the question at the time was yes. And I gave it one. Much of this year felt just as amorphous and conflicted as the last, but this time I have discrete katharses to reflect upon.

The year began with my second semester of university. Earlier in December I had interviewed at Bard where I planned to transfer. Somewhere in January I planned to write my application. The previous semester had been lonely and disappointing, though I didn't expect much. The environment was clearly wrong for me in many ways. Plus the girl that I loved lived a city away, in a city where I had dreamed of living from an early age. Montreal was overstimulating, underwhelming and heartbreaking. I needed to get out.

But in early January I decided to stay. Why did I do that? I don't know, let's see:

* Classes are inconsistent, but I've discovered that if I shop around, send emails to the right people, and leverage the powers of friends in high places, I can avoid the pot-holes and build a decent, or even exceptional educational experience, between the Liberal Arts College, CS, Computation Arts, Philosophy, the Science College, Psychology, and (even) McGill.
* I have friends in high places already and the kind of research involvement that I won't find anywhere else. This will be more valuable than anything else when it comes time to apply to graduate schools.
* The facilities here, for fine-art and CS, are state of the art; especially because of my involvement with the TML (Hexagram!)
* I can take classes in the summer (and do research concurrently). This means I'll finish my degree faster and I'll get to spend the summer in an amazing city doing something I love.
* Sure, I'm not impressed with the program, but nowhere else will I find such a large quantity of students studying "computation art" (or media art or whatever) and computer science concurrently.
* Montreal 0wnz. Plus it's a digital art hotbed. There's nowhere I'd rather go to school.
* I'll be saving, I don't know, say, 50 to 80 thousand dollars. I'd rather not have to pick up a programming job for 3 years just to pay for graduate school. Debt sucks.

In short: (1) If I'm smart I can build the kind of education I want (2) mad connexions (3) infinite access to sweet gear (4) year-round research position at the coolest lab ever (5) huge community to draw from (6) $$$.

In hindsight, I see that what I didn't admit to myself was that my decision was only partly rational. While I had a list of reasons to stay, I had a comparable list of reasons to leave. My roommate has criticized me for this, but most big decisions I make are colored strongly by how I feel (and my imagination). My decision to stay was influenced greatly by two emotional factors that added up, perhaps, to an emotional shift:

1. I was given a wonderful job and I did well on my first project. Along with this came something I needed desperately: respect. Respect is hard to turn down in exchange for uncertainty.
2. I met somebody who I got along with better than anybody I'd known ever before (and still). This somebody happened to be a girl: poison for a long distance relationship (not because I planned on starting a relationship; such an encounter simply expands your imagination for what's possible).

Feeling loved, or the potential for feeling loved, in Montreal for the first time in, well, only three months, drastically shifted my vantage point and allowed me to construct the list of rationals listed above. It allowed me to envision a beautiful future and to retire my worn rationals of old. It also allowed me to do something terrible: be lazy. Any plan that includes me not writing a college application gets bonus points automatically.

Spring

I made this decision fairly quickly and once it was made, it was like I had flicked a light switch. Another cathartic event would be needed to move it back into the 1 position. I had devoted myself to Montreal. This lead too naturally into my next major decision: to end the wonderful (primarily long-distance) relationship I was in that had stretched over ~2 years by then. Thinking back, it wasn't much of a decision. At the time that I broached the subject, I meant merely to broach it. The reasoning was simple: 'I've decided to stay in Montreal for the next 3-4 years, am I up for a long-term long distance relationship?' But I've since learned, having been through two such situations, that once the topic is brought up, the relationship crumbles readily. The aforementioned 'poison' and my feelings at the time lead to a quicker crumbling than I was expecting. I found myself in mid-January single for the first time in awhile.

It didn't last long. Meetings with aforementioned "somebody" quickly became all-day affairs where warm words poured from our mouths and noses continuously until a few hours after we were willing to stay up. I'd shed my significant other, she shed hers, and our relationship eased gradually over months from a best-friendship into a full-blown relationship. It was good.

Otherwise the semester went well. I got top marks except for a retaken math course, enjoyed my classes, and at the lab we completed two major production (as opposed to purely research) projects in which I played a significant role. Though, I found this quote to be quite true about school that semester:

"...I would still defend my early description of the life of the lower-division student as, perforce, that of a distracted intellectual juggler."
– A Venture in Educational Reform by Joseph Tussman

Summer

School ended and I decided to stay in Montreal for the summer. L was to head back to Calgary leaving me with what few friends were staying (none, really). I planned to move into the apartment of my dreams and the deal fell through the day before I was to move. So, I slept on a friend's couch for the summer until September 1st. In June I participated in a two week workshop with fellow TML associates and apprentices. We produced two beautiful dance pieces that can be found recorded under the heading "Movement+Media Research" here: http://www.topologicalmedialab.net/joomla/main/content/blogsection/9/75/lang,en/
I also started Calculus I. After the workshop was finished, I found myself remarkably free, with one class and a casual research project at the TML. Unfortunately I didn't take advantage of my freedom really. I did my best to meet as many young people as possible, going to interesting shows and parties. I found myself often with a group of McGill kids and I felt my way through their social network. I spent a lot of quality time with my wonderful roommates and their kittens. I attended a conference at UQAM for two weeks in early July which only solidified my distaste for scientific academicism, Psychology especially. On the flip-side it reinforced my interest in philosophy and computers (though not necessarily computer science). I felt like August was a waste of a month. While I got an A+ and Calculus I, I don't feel comfortable sharing my grade for Calculus II. The summer ended with a dreamlike trip to Nantucket. I reconnected with my loving friends and rejuvenated in the atmosphere of my forever-home. I came back to Montreal, moved into a room in an upscale apartment in a building called the "Pickwick Arms", and school reared its head at me. Overall I was disappointed with my lethargy and I felt unprepared for the semester ahead when it ended.

Fall

The next four months can best be described as hell. I broke up with L and then we got back together without really resolving some issues. I took two computer science classes which for the most part ruined my life. I worked on an interesting installation with the TML, but my code was broken at runtime both in Montreal and Shanghai (not completely my fault, but it still feels shitty). I wasted money, didn't take advantage of my classes, and merely subsisted. It was much like high school, an utter shame.

My living situation was, however, odd and surprisingly enriching. I moved in with clearly the smartest and most knowledgeable person I've ever met: a somewhat elderly, Austrian, Jewish, retired architect with obsessive tendencies. The night of my first day there, we sat and talked over his $6,000 dining-room table for about six hours straight. Every week from then on this man gave me pointed criticisms and nuggets of advice that completely blew my mind. More generally, he exposed me to a value set to which I've had little exposure: that of the aristocracy. There's so much to say and I'm getting tired. I'm still living with him as of January 2009 and, while it's a bit like living with parents, I feel like I continue to learn and grow in ways I wouldn't have expected to here.

Winter

Then the semester ended, slowly and disappointingly. The only good thing that happened in December was that L and I resolved our issues, made some commitments and grew closer than ever. This was another major catharsis, but it's not something I want to share with the world.

Christmas was ok. Relaxing. I didn't do as much reading as I wanted to. I got exactly what I wanted from my nuclear family (materially). I spent some wonderful time with extended family. I hugged all of my beloved friends whose social mileu is largely the same as it was when I left. I didn't see them as much as I wanted to though, and many of them disappointed me.

I was snowed in at my grandparent's house for New Years. We ate lamb, watched a symphony, then the ball-drop. The next day I spent time with relatives in outer-Boston. Then I got a ride to Burlington with a biology graduate with whom I discussed environmental policy and liberal bias. I waited in the Burlington bus "terminal" for three hours and found myself so excited to be back home. I fell asleep with warm breath on my neck.

(Well that turned out to be more of a review than a reflection.) 2008, a year of learning what not to do, is over.

feeling: relieved music: Bibio

'best of XXXX' lists are uninteresting to me. Much more interesting would be a music released in 2008 that blew my mind list:

* Flying Lotus - "LA"
* Max Tundra - "Parallax Error Beheads You"
* Autechre - "Quaristice"

Honorable mention goes to: Clark - "Turning Dragon"

Some notes on how to make the internet more like a book, magazine, or phone than a television. That is, more like a tool than a world:

1. Do not use iGoogle, FriendFeed or any other service that provides you with "status updates" from a number of services at once. This leads to a condition where "checking your email" becomes "checking everything". Every hour you will find new interesting things that will bifurcate your attention into many worlds. (However, I have the feeling that an iPhone/iPod Touch, which is in a sense a portable iGoogle, would be a positive replacement. Better to check constantly on a non-immersive device...?)

2. Do not invest yourself in social networks like Facebook. Don't join groups that encourage participation or frequently send out mass-messages. Don't friend anybody that you don't really want to read about. Use your profile as nothing more than a node (don't post anything to your profile that you might someday want to fiddle with). See it as a communication tool: glorified email/chat. Rather than making certain parts of your profile private, make everything public and make sure that anything anybody can see is something that anybody can see. (This means that you must occasionally un-tag photos and delete Wall posts.) Don't add any applications. Don't try to model your real-world social life.

3. Twitter is cool. It's addictive, but it doesn't take any time. <5 min. to check what your friends have written and update.

4. Blogs are cool. As long as you're producing content, there's nothing to feel guilty about. The point is not to stop doing drugs altogether, it's to make sure that every time you do drugs, you're using them to enhance your creativity and your relationships.

5. Use Times for aggregating feeds. Nothing compares. It frees you from the feeling that you have to read every article. Promotes quick scanning, just like a newspaper.

6. There's nothing to be done about email. It's addictive and time consuming and it's not going away. Make sure that you're not on any corporate mailing lists (Apple.com, stores you've bought stuff from). Filter mailing lists into folders. Practice self-discipline. Don't see yourself as somebody who 'replies within an hour'.

7. Create a habit of taking notes when you go on a tangent. This will force you to think deeply and remember what you've learned (plus you'll have it stored for future reference). It will also force you to slow down. I use an Instiki wiki running on my server so that I can access it from anywhere (though I'm considering switching back to desktop tools like VoodooPad and DevonThink).

8. Favor anti-design. Anytime you have any control over CSS, choose a white background with black text and blue links. Or find some other theme and stick to it. Remember, the internet is blue.

9. When you can, use UNIX (command line). It feels more like a tool for doing tasks than a world.

10. Make sure that Facebook sends only two types of notification to you: notification for Messages and Wall posts. This way checking your email means checking your email and also checking the only time-sensitive feature of Facebook at the same time, thus allowing you to ignore Facebook.

I've been thinking about how to make computers non-immersive for a few months now. I'd like to start crystallizing ideas now. Some problematics:

1. Ubicomp says that computers will decentralize. The personal computer will splinter into many devices like pens, hammers, and shoes. How can we do this without introducing more stuff into our lives and spending more money than we would need to if we just used a PC (which does everything)? (Adam Greenfield argues that the mobile device is the platform for ubicomp. Is he right? I hope not for some reason.)

2. Most people don't care that personal computers are fragmenting and hollowing out their lives. How will I make money making devices that are deliberately less attractive than the current norms?

3. Should the web-site just die? 50% of the internet is just applications now anyway (Facebook, Google, MySpace, Flickr, etc.) Why not replace the browser with applications like "Photo Sharing", "Communicating With Friends", "Writing Periodicals", "Researching Databases"? That sounds like a bad idea, but I think something like that needs to and will happen.

feeling: busy music: Murcof

"'So much time and thought goes into trying to figure out what the comparative worth of all these skills and labors are. But the problem begins with trying to reduce them all to the same measure of coin in the first place: skilled time, unskilled time, the talk of a clever woman, nature's gifts of fish and fruit, the invention of a craftsman, the strength of a laboring woman – one simply cannot measure weight, coldness, the passage of time, and the brightness of fire all on the same scale.'"

"'There are certain thoughts,' Venn said, dryly, 'which, reflected by language in the mirror of speech, flatten out entirely, lose all depth, and though the may have begun as rich and complex feelings, become, when flattened by language, the most shallow and pompous self-righteousness...'"

feeling: content music: Autechre

Something I need to learn to remember and accept is that I'm an undergraduate student. That is the identity that I'm expected to have. It's not really something I get to define. The undergraduate student identity has been formed by hundreds of thousands of white men over the last 200 or so years. I'm expected to be at a certain point in both my emotional (personal) and intellectual development and I'm supposed to be developing those "faculties" in a certain way – or at least I'm supposed to select from an array of closely related paths.

Now, I think I have the option to outright reject this. I'm in an institution which expects me to behave and feel a certain way, but it's still possible to resist the values they instill and replace them with my own home-brew values that allow me to take advantage of my contract nonetheless. As long as I'm excreted through the final orifice of the machine with a stamp of approval, it's all groovy. But this is difficult. Where to start? What if my values when jiggled fall into a deductive arrangement that tells me to reject the very institution that I was 'constructing' the system to interface with? Being yourself, creating an interface with bindings to the mainstream, but that lets you move according to your own rules is non-trivial to say the least[1].

I don't think it's worth it. Better to pick some appealing white men and submit yourself to their guidance. Or a Chinese one.

A large part of my trouble this semester was that I entered with an identity that was 1/3 researcher, party-person, and procrasti-nager. I did not feel like a student. I was happily socializing and idly tinkering with patches when suddenly some Chinese guy with a British accent said – no, didn't say; implied sternly – 'you, memorize this shit. You will need to spend hours every week doing it. You are an engineering student. You are a machine. We will train you to create machines that will allow you to in the future make faster machines dadaah dadaah dadah'. Wait? Who are you? Why are you telling me what to do? Am I paying you to make me do this crap? Aren't you supposed to be paying me?

No.

I'm canon fodder. Still, I shouldn't be ripped to shreds, but I should wear my damn uniform, follow the orders spat in my face, and take a bullet or two like a man. I can't trust myself to be my own commander[2]. I'm not responsible enough. I lack the experience. And "knowledge always comes from the outside". I do not know what I do not know. I'm here pissing away money so that white men can guide me down a path and into certain ways of being. The process is a tradition in our society and I'm in no place to reject it.

Again, the trick is to pick wisely. (I think I have some good choices where I am.)

At the moment I'm neither rejecting the student identity in a structured way, nor am I accepting it. I've decided it's better to accept it – though I suspect I'll never be able to fully – and now it's a matter of dismantling and reconstructing. Perhaps I could use another 'identity crisis'. Actually, I think I had the one I needed awhile ago. I'm still rebuilding.

( a quote about choice from Tussman's A Venture in Educational Reform )

I'm looking forward to a productive semester as a student. And a productive winter break reforming myself as a student. And reading some fiction for a change. Alexandra bought me a copy of Tales of Nevèrÿon – magnificent so far.

1. Though I believe that should be every creative person's goal in life, but only after undergrad. I'm not sure it's a good idea to start from zero. It's like the wise-man says. You must become the master before you can reject the tradition.
2. Canon, not cannon.

feeling: hungry music: Triosk, Distance, GRIME, ilkae

As classes are coming to a close, I'm feeling an immense weight lifted from my chest. I will be sure never to have a semester like this one again. It felt a bit like all four years of high school: a waste. A period in which I was forced to do something I didn't want to do, and worst of all, during which I was too stubborn to 'make the best of it'.

I look forward to breathing fully in the coming year. Sparkles in my eyes. Sparkles in hers.

feeling: blank music: sirens 7 floors down

Lola writes about brand preferences: http://lolabc.blogspot.com/2008/11/this-hip-self.html

I think this is an interesting exercise. I follow suit:

Bianchi, Pinarello, Campagnolo
Patagonia
Asics (Onitsuka Tiger), Puma
Nike
BDG, GAP, Polo, BR
Levi's
Apple, Google, Facebook
Moleskine
Faber-Castell, Staedtler
MIT, MIT Press
Grado, MOTU
Doepfer, Clavia, Elektron
Sony
Ableton, Cycling '74
Solomon
Nintendo
Canon, Manfrotto

feeling: calm music: a drain

Related to my Twitter post: "Do you situate yourself in a self-narrative? Do you like to look at your life as a story unfolding? Do you make it that way?" 2:58 AM Nov 25th

What cultural elements can be seen to be interconnected with technology? And we believe technology to be more than just a system, but rather the strongest 'symbolic entity' generated since the development of perspective, and thus a conveyor of a wide range of meanings. Which elements then? In a chaotic and complex era, when traditional values are challenged, the method of story-telling becomes ever more necessary and central to man.

In a chaotic era, story telling has in the past provided order, not always a logical order, rather an interior order; it has provided ways to understand through stimulating experiences. As Giuseppe Long rightly puts it: "We are never left unchanged by the telling of a story. Even the most superficial retelling of an episode of our life changes that episode in our memory, it changes ourselves, it changes the way we perceive ourselves. By telling stories we look for–and at times fleetingly glimpse–the reasons and meaning of our being rooted here, to this world, to this sort of unsolvable enigma of existence.

from Ambienti Sensibili by Studio Azzurro

feeling: sore music: synthesized breathing