theory.sauna dialogues
an IRC transcript from net.sauna

OAF: Hi

HHeater: Hi Alexander! Welcome to the net.sauna.

OAF: Thank you for the invitation

HHeater: How is Stockholm doing; beautiful day there? It is blazing sun in Linz.

HHeater: The sauna stove was accidentally left on for the night, temperature in the sauna was 50 Celsius when I entered, almost 60. Now the door is open, cooling down for the beginning of our dialogue.

OAF: I don�t know anything about the weather – I have worked all night.

HHeater: I had a party instead. Would you like to dive in to talk about dialogue?

OAF: Nice feeling I liked your ? so how about a beer (danish).

HHeater: Thanks, pop it open. Sk�l. Kippis. I throw some on the stove also to get an aroma of fresh rye.

OAF: Wow sk�l to you too – but do you really think that it has so much to do with physical spaces?

HHeater: Dialogue, you mean? Ok. I will do an introduction to the net.sauna research…

OAF: ok

HHeater: We started out researching how intimate dialogue is related to an environment, a space with certain conditions. Also we were interested in looking at the cultural tradition of sauna as a dialogic space. Within the Ars Electronica framework, it has turned out that this quiet sauna space is rudimentary enabling factor for intense and intimate dialogues. Also, in chat environments, we are now on a password (door) protected channel. If it was open space, our dialogue could be interrupted at any moment… We attempt to move the metaphor of sauna as a dialogic space into the net.space.

OAF: Aha – nice idea – of course a dialogue can be intimate but is it always like that?

HHeater: No… there are several factors when dialogue is not intimate, for instance, a dialgoue in a space where there are other people, who have a different agenda, different will. I think chat is not = dialogue… I tend to see dialogue as a productive mode. You, as a philosopher having researched dialogue, how would you define it, and how would you see intimate dialogue as a concept?

OAF: I was just wandering in my brain and writing …. but intimate can also be that you know the persons or the rules – (I belive that dialog is a kind of play). And I think that a dialogue is productive, it must be so, but the dialogue also allow jumps to strange things – since it�s productive.

HHeater: Exactly, productiveness is about unexptected new links, like hypertext in corporeality. And yes, knowing your partners in dialogue is important, or having a shared ground.

OAF: But why are we afraid of to be productive? I mean to say it?

HHeater: I think productiveness has a heavy baggage from industrial metaphors…

OAF: Hm but now is it postpost to accept it? I don�t care but our thoughts of our time are interesting.

HHeater: Being part of a linear process, identifiable results (expected outcomes) is the industrial understanding of productiveness. Productive dialogue for me deals with innovation, delight, construction of knowledge and also understanding of the other person in the dialogue.

OAF: That must depend on a kind of scale or? Like fractals.

HHeater: Please elaborate on the scale and fractals…

HHeater: Sauna is getting steamy again; dialogue and human heat is replacing the machine generated dry air in the sauna. Dialogue is the fuel of human interaction; previous net.sauna dialogue logs are thrown into the stove to generate more intimacy through dialogic steam.

OAF: A scalpel (sharp knife) looks like a saw in a microscope – it�must be the same with a very non linear event in a smaller scale – it would look like a line.

HHeater: … please link that to the intimacy of dialogue… nice analogue.

OAF: Ho ho that one demands more beer. Sharp objects must be handled with trust.

The Egg Nebula

On September 27 and October 16, 2002, the Hubble Space Telescope pointed its Advanced Camera for Surveys at the 3,000-light-year-distant Egg Nebula in the constellation Cygnus. The view is nothing short of stunning � it is as if someone tossed a pebble into a celestial pond. The scene here is a composite image from three polarizing filters. Light from each filter has been colored red, blue, or green; the colors indicate different orientations of dust particles in the nebula.

The ripples are actually shells of gas and dust sloughed off in convulsions by the obscured, dying central star. Although it is hidden by a donut-shaped disk of thick, dark gas, beams of light from the central star do leak out, which in turn light the “pond.”

From Sky and Telescope

Cabinet by James Krenov

Krenov on Grain: The Story of a Cabinet

James Krenov is a cabinet maker from California. He has written a lot about the craft of cabinet making and is considered a giant in the field. Hi thoughts on working with grain remind me of many other crafts, including writing and facilitation, both of which I do. Here he writes about making the cabinet pictured above.

“When I saw that the side of the cabinet created a forward curve, I decided to change the stand to one with front legs that swept forward. Making this change is an example of observing what’s happening with the wood as you work. But while you sometimes let the wood guide you, you shouldn’t let it dictate. You have to refer to the wood without abandoning your intentions. There has to be a cooperation, a partnership between the two. The idea is to follow, but be careful.

It’s a matter of getting acquainted with all of the properties of each wood you choose to work — a wood’s colors; its hardness or lack of hardness; whether its grain is ornery or not. It’s a very personal thing, and not everyone pays such close attention. But if you do, you are more in harmony with the wood and the work. And the results seem to flow from this harmony, even though it is connected with periods of stress and doubt. In the long run, knowing about these things will help a person.”

Do we have to blog this war anymore?

Yesterday I saw a photograph in the Globe and Mail of feet. There were three or four pairs of bloodied feet stacked on top of each other from a morgue in Iraq somewhere. Some of these feet were no bigger than my two year old son’s feet.

I know this war is sick. I know that no one is of one mind about it. Many Canadians and Americans think it’s great, many do not. Many Iraqis are grateful, many are angry. Many people have died horrible deaths in this war, and many more will continue to die. And many will NOT die becasue this war has happened. We can horse trade woulds and shoulds until the cows come home.

But death is happening and it’s obviously a price people are willing to pay. Warmongers are willing to see babies killed if it means the ultimate goal is acheived. Peaceniks are not at all comfortable with this assertion, and despite the fact that we were the only ones wailing against the hundreds of thousands that died under UN sanctions. The moral high ground seems to be the trophy that everyone feels they can lay claim to. And everyone seems to be fighting for a piece of it.

So I’m going to let them.

I’ve said my piece to my leaders and I’ll keep you informed about the time I’m wasting expecting Stephen Harper to give me a list of the dictators he invited to his party. But frankly, I give up. I’m going back to blogging about things that are beautiful.

I’ll let others post pictures of the collapsed skulls of children and trade higher hit counts for this pornography. (Props to Euan for changing his mind). I’ll let other bloggers build their reputation on how fast they can produce the “real story.” The bottomline is that I am just too overwhelmed with people who feel like the thing to do is blog the war. So many people have followed that trend that there is hardly a blog left anymore that points me to beauty and peace. I tip my hat to whiskey river and Gassho and riley dog among others. These folks are providing little islands of peace, not by ignoring the war, but by carrying on with their very purposeful explorations of beauty. And that’s where I’m going too, to that field that Rumi promises us.

You know, before this war began, there was lots of suffering and bloodshed going on around the world. Most of us ignored it and we continue to ignore it. Very little blogging happened about Zimbabwe or Cote D’Ivoire or Colombia. Most bloggers don’t understand or even care about war and suffering, even as they link to the theatre surrounding them. Blogging as a movement hasn’t matured enough that we can get really good insight from a variety of sources about the whole world around us. Instead, the blogging world seems to me to me like a pack of five year olds playing soccer. Everyone is following the ball. Dumb mobs.

That’s partially why I assembled my list of human rights abuses in the coalition of the willing. There is no NEED to blog the war, I don’t think. We choose to do it. And I’m incresingly finding that choice, for me, to be disingenuous.

I’m no expert on Iraq, or warfare, or death. What I have to say is irrelvant next to outfits like the BBC bloggers who are actually there, or the StratFor folks who aren’t but who can provide pretty interesting opinion. I have struggled with my own moral feeling around this war, but who are you, dear reader, to care about that? I’m not out to win hearts and minds.

I think a lot of the johnny-come-lately bloggers who have become Instapundits are too caught up in playing “gotcha” games to really matter. I wish the warbloggers would stop screaming at people and sign up and fight. Go put your money where your bluster is. I wish the peaceniks would get off their duffs and STOP this thing. If the peace movemnt, full of reductionist positions as it is, was really effective, then we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Me, I’m finding better ways to use my time. I’m going back to concentrating on the work we have to do around here. The good stuff that’s happening in and around Vancouver I’m involved in, like Storyscapes and the Ashoka Institute for Community Practice and the Vancouver Aboriginal Council.

Sorry about this rant, but I’m cranky and haunted by the bloodied feet of a child much like my own. I can’t shake the image, and when I look at my son, I can’t help but think of him lying in that pile. It makes me sick. That’s when I know it’s gone too far. I’m in tears for the kind of world where this is okay. And I’m turning my attention back to the beauty that surrounds us, the poems and culture humans make and the wonder that the universe instills in us.

When you’re sick of the war, come here for a rest. I’ll put the tea on.

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.

–Rumi

Blue Tinged Auroras, photographed from the International Space Station

I’m tired of reading, watching and blogging about war. More on this later, but right now, enjoy this sight.

Courtesy of NASA