is an innovation and media theorist involved with negociability strategies of new technologies and artistic practice, predominantly ubicomp and rfid (radio frequency identification), the relationship between the formal and informal in cultural and economic policy, and the requirements for a sustainable cultural economy.

Every body is a teacher.
every place is a school

It took me five years to figure out, to grasp, - understand - let me use the word resonate - these lines of Heraclite: and I rephrase them in my own lines - “of all that which is dispersed haphazardly, the order is most beautiful.” In the Fragments you read that these lines are incomprehensible as far as the Heraclite scholars are concerned. They can not link it as a line of verse with other words in other lines in verse. I read it and in reading I knew it to be true. Knowing that only as experience is not very productive in a society that has no non-iconic medium for transmitting these kinds of ex periences. In order to make this experience productive; read: make it politically viable and socially constructive - in order to find ways of transmitting, ways of teaching experiences like this - we textualise them. We find analogies, we read initial lines as metaphor, as metonomy. I went for a walk one day in the woods near F., in the Belgian Ardennes. A beautiful walk it was, steep down, hued autumn colours, leaves fading into black. In the quiet meadow that we passed I saw autumn leaves, small twigs, pebbles sometimes - hurdled into the most beautiful of patterns by the strenght of water moving. I looked hard realizing there was indeed no other way of arranging them. I recognized leaves as data. I recognized data as data. And I recognized the inability to find a way to come to terms with Heraclite’s line without walking, without taking a stroll in the woods and look around you, look around you and find the strenght of streams arranging. The ability to read data as data is what makes new beginnings.

Let us visualise a setting in which people resonate with media through simulating processes.Simulating processes that are actual processes, for in a digitized real, any process might become experiential, might resonate. In such a digitized real, a hybrid reality in which our analogue bodies and digital processing fuse into each other, any data might become information; that is: data to which we relate, resonate. Such a world is not a world of science fiction, in fact it is very real. Overlaying our world of things with a digital veil already transcends space and time coordinates. Heineken, for example, has teamed up with IBM and a shipping company to test the use of a global coding standard in simplifying customs clearance for the company's beer exports.The project, called the "Beer Living Lab", will use IBM's software to track cargo container shipments of Heineken beer from Europe to the US using satellite and cellular wireless technology. The companies will also use the coding standard created by EPCglobal to track the beer cartons. The goal is to create paperless documentation through better systeminteroperability, resulting in faster deliveries and reduced costs for international trade, IBM stated.The system allows the company to skip building and maintaining a large central database with huge amounts of information. Instead all data sources held by the various players in the supply chain are linked through a common interface. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,about 30 different documents are associated with a single container crossing a border, which equals roughly five billion documents annually. This test is part of a project funded by the European Commission to develop information technology for electronic government services. The project aims to help reduce security concerns and tax fraud. A unified data system would allow changes in information about product sizes, weight, name, price, classification, transport requirements and volumes to be immediately transmitted along the supply chain. For example it would allow shippers to immediately know if the amount of product stacked on a pallet had changed, or give a retailer time to adjust display space. (Cee-food, 11/2006, http://www.cee-foodindustry.com/news/ng.asp?n=71845-heineken-ibm-epcglobal)

Now let us visualise a framework for this setting in which people resonate with media through simulating processes. I remember hearing the words intelligent interfaces, disappearing computer and smart environments for the first time at a conference in Sweden, Jönschoping. Bewildered I listened to academic researchers painting scenarios of strollers in the park being able to point at trees with their smart ( rfid/bluetooth enabled) watches resulting in... a screen rising up either from the ground or next to the tree. On that screen? ...information, data rather - about that tree. I'm sitting in my chair and look around me for smiling or laughing people, but nothing. This audience, top EU researchers and technical wizards, does not think this is ridiculous, strange, unnecessary at all. Instead, on the contrary what they see is open territory, a vast unknown adventure. Room to play. Yet I visualized a framework for this setting, grasping its radical potential immediately- as that tree had always spoken to me, as trees do to people who feel as well as see and hear. Or towers for that matters, my towers. Do they not realize that what actually matters in this vast grid of affordances that overlays so called material objects is their potential? their imaginary? Unaware they raise issues of alchemy, of witchcraft, magic.

And we will not be fooled again.

Chinggis Khan or Temujin never rode out without his faithful hawk. One day the hawk prevented him from taking a ride to a quiet little lake. "The warrior was not to be thwarted by anything or anyone. Impatience culminated in Temujin's wrath so that he smote the bird there and then.Upon reaching the lake, the warrior found that it was inhabited by a venomous snake. A death trap in waiting. He looked to the skies where his old friend no longer soared. Temujin sank down to his knees with his head in his hands. The hawk's loyalty had been repaid with anger and mistrust and the reward could never be undone." (http://clochesoumise.blogspot.com Subject: A different game) The big warrior-King forgot the power of his routine and ancient ways of knowing and paid for it immediately. In 1825-1830 Java war - rebellion in Yogyakarta - Prince Diponegoro made a similar mistake, of trusting the Dutch. Tricked into coming to peace negociations, he was captured by Dutch treachery.

As the Sarai Reader list so poignantly shows, as the House of Natural Fiber testifies to, people are beginning to map, debate, discover ways of writing and ways of publicizing their everyday lives in cities. As much as counter-research it is the emergence itself of a new kind of research that will have more repercussions for the academic research tradition then for the media places. Eventually it will become the default. As with new media itself, the uses of blogs, email, email lists, websites, mobile phones, play out fundamental changes on the news information mediascapes all over the world. Upstreaming says that the first pictures about incidents are now blogged before they are published. All over the world dominant paradigms of dispersing data and information will have to change or go bust. The most provoking aspect of Zapatista management is that the actual people who make up each junta "are rotated in an incredibly rapid fashion. According to Marcos these rotations are from every ”eight to 15 days (according to the region)”. The delegates are themselves drawn from the members of the Autonomous Council (AC) and because these are rotated in turn (over a longer period which seems to be a year) this means that by the time everyone on an AC has been on the junta a new AC is created and so all these new people must in turn learn the ropes. ”If this is analysed in depth, it will be seen that it is a process whereentire villages are learning to govern. ”The advantages? Fine, one of them is that it’s more difficult for an authority to go too far and, by arguing how “complicated” the task of governing is, to not keep the communities informed about the use of resources or decision making. The more people who know what it’s all about, the more difficult it will be to deceive and to lie. And the governed will exercise more vigilance over those who govern”. It also makes corruption more difficult. If you manage to corrupt one member of the JBG, you will have to corrupt all the autonomous authorities, or all the rotations, because doing a “deal” with just one of them won’t guarantee anything (corruption also requires “continuity”). Just when you have corrupted all the councils, you’ll have to start over again, because by then there will have been a change in the authorities, and the one you “arranged” won’t work any longer. And so you’ll have to corrupt virtually all the adult residents of the Zapatista communities. Although, obviously, it’s likely that once you’ve achieved that, the children will have already grown up and then, once again” (Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2005 15:56:41 -0500 From: Andrej Grubacic < \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it > To: \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , \n This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it , Subject: The Zapatistas: A New Strategy

http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story 051119000316439 From Red &Black Revolution 10 -2005 - online soon The Zapatistas: A New Strategy By Andrew Flood)

As with a need for an everyday ethics that can re-affirm a communal integrity and sense of trust in leadership, we need a pragmatic philosophy that does not shun but foregrounds the absolutes and belief in religious essences: “Whether we are scientists or artists, politicians or publicans, the question of the “potatiness of potatoes” or the “wateriness of water” is there for all to inquire into. Those who know say we only have to open our eyes, look, keep looking, and see. With the dangers facing the our world as it is today, that could make a real difference.”[C.J.Moore, Herald Tribune, August 2005] First and foremost this means we have to abandon the rational Enlightenment ideals in favour of an deeply human alchemistic and bodily philosophy for every day life and practices. We will respectfully bow to the very will to become kebal (invulnerable) and gracefully decline its powers in this life. Yet we will not to be afraid to perform our jimat (sacred charms). Every body is a teacher. Wong Cilik. Wahyu for all.

RvK