You know what a blog is, shorthand for a weB LOG. A blogject is one of those things that has a certain kind of blogger thinking about. Literally they are inorganic object that blog, but that definition does not cover one important part of what makes a blog. A blog needs a mind to write it, while a sensor that publishes its data online writes but lacks in a self.



This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can't store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online.

The relationship between blog (and someone using it) and the blog-ejects rendered from/within this input is symbiotic. The blogject only starts functioning when memory reached a tipping point (being full), the blog can continue to accept new entries for as long as the blogject succeeds in freeing space, to which again there is an upper limit.

As an experiment in writing by a selfless-self (adjacent to automatic writing and the cut-up) there are two angles to this system: the blogject's output and the stuff stored in the blog as its increasingly looses its integrity, are both written by a non-self. The purpose or meaning of this writing is not in the writing itself but in the interpretation of it by the ones submitting writing to its memory. This property too it shares with dreams.

Follow the system as it ages here:

http://socialfiction.org/palimpsest

http://tu-tutimes.blogspot.com/

Seeing God as KUZU through a Viewfinder

Look for the following six divine attributes in your everyday life and photograph them as a sequence of two or three photographs. KUZU is God in motion. Send them as jpg images as an attachment to your Word captions to the e-mail: photographgod@yahoo.com.

Compassion / Hesed : Largess / Loving All
Strength / Gevurah: Judgment / Setting Limits
Beauty / Tiferet: Aesthetic Balance / Inner Elegance
Success / Netach: Orchestration / Eternity
Splendor / Hod: Gracefulness / Magnificence
Foundation / Yesod: Integrating All / Gateway to Action

See Mel Alexenberg’s blog www.photographgod.com for exemplary photographs and details.

See Mel Alexenberg’s blog www.photographgod.com for examples of his students' photographs of God as KUZU in their everyday world. KUZU is God in motion.

Seeing God through a Viewfinder
Look for the following six divine attributes in your everyday life and photograph them as a sequence of two or three photographs showing God in motion. Send them as jpg images as an attachment to your Word captions to: photographgod@yahoo.com
Compassion / Hesed : Largess / Loving All
Strength / Gevurah: Judgment / Setting Limits
Beauty / Tiferet: Aesthetic Balance / Inner Elegance
Success / Netach: Orchestration / Eternity
Splendor / Hod: Gracefulness / Magnificence
Foundation / Yesod: Integrating All / Gateway to Action

Seeing God is Getting in Touch with Reality
Rabbi David Aaron, head of Isralight Institute in Jerusalem, wrote an insightful book, Seeing God, using kabbalistic insights to illuminate how we can see divine light all around us. He shares my discomfort of using the word “God,” a Germanic word conjuring up images of some all-powerful being zapping us if we step out of line. He calls God Hashem, literally “The Name” in Hebrew, the name of the nameless One encompassing all of reality and beyond. He writes:

Hashem does not exist in reality – Hashem is reality. And we do not exist alongside Hashem, we exist within Hashem, within the reality that is Hashem. Hashem is the place. Indeed, Hashem is the all-embracing context for everything. So there can’t be you and God standing side by side in reality. There is only one reality that is Hashem, and you exist in Hashem…. Everything is in Hashem, Hashem is in everything, but Hashem is beyond everything…. Seeing God is all about getting in touch with reality.

Like the spectral colors that make up white light, we can see the spectrum of divine light in our everyday world, as the attributes of compassion, strength, beauty, success, splendor, and integration.
This spectrum in the kingdom of space-time in the world of action, is expressed in the biblical passage, “You Hashem are the greatness of compassion (gedulah/hesed), the strength (gevurah), the beauty (tiferet), the success (netzah), the splendor (hod), and the integral foundation of everything (kol/yesod) in heaven and on earth.” (Chronicles 1:29)

Where to Look for God
In Every Nook and Cranny of Life
Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, one of the foremost thinkers of the 20th century, teaches us not direct our glace upward but downward, not aspire to a heavenly transcendence nor seek to soar upon the wings of some abstract, mysterious spirituality, but to fix our gaze upon concrete, empirical reality. Do not confine your search for God to houses of worship for God permeates into every nook and cranny of life. Look for God in the marketplace, the street, the factory, the house, the mall, and the banquet hall. “For God your Lord walks in the midst of your camp.” (Deuteronomy 23:15)

In Our Work and Social Life
The Rebbe of Lubavich, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, emphasizes that it is not enough to rest content with our own spiritual ascent, the elevation of our souls in closeness to God. "We must also strive to draw spirituality down into the world and into every part of our involvement with it – our work and our social life – until not only do they not distract us from our pursuit of G-d, but they become a full part of it."

At Ground Level
In his acclaimed novel, The City of God, E. L. Doctorow echoes these thoughts:
"If there is a religious agency in our lives, it has to appear in the manner of our times. Not from on high, but a revelation that hides itself in our culture, it will be ground-level, on the street, it’ll be coming down the avenue in the traffic, hard to tell apart from anything else. It will be cryptic, discerned over time, piecemeal, to be communally understood at the end like a law of science. They’ll put it on a silicon chip."

Everywhere God Looks Back at You
Photographer Jan Phillips writes in her book on photography and creativity, God is at Eye Level, and quotes from Rabbi Elimelech:
"My eyes find God everywhere, in every living thing, creature, person, in every act of kindness, act of nature, act of grace. Everywhere I look, there God is looking back, looking straight back…. Whoever does not see God in every place does not see God in any place."

Photographing a Verb
God is a Verb
God is no thing, nothing, everything in motion, in action, in the process of becoming something else. The primary biblical divine name YHVH should be translated as “Is-Was-Will Be.” It is a verb associated with the attribute of inner beauty (tiferet). When beauty hidden in the mundane suddenly jumps out at you, catch the action in a series of photographs of Is-Was-Will Be. Don’t snap a still-life, nature morte (dead life in French), photograph living processes like comic strip or storyboard sequences.

Photographing KUZU
KUZU is YHVH in motion. The biblical passage beginning with “Hear, O Israel, YHVH is our God, YHVH is One,” is written by a scribe on small parchment scrolls affixed to doorposts in Jewish homes. These min-Torahs called mezuzot, a word derived from the root zaz, which means movement. Each scroll is rolled up with the biblical ext on the inside. On the outside of the scroll at the place on the reverse side of where YHVH is written, the scribe writes KUZU. KUZU moves YHVH one letter forward. It is spelled with each of the letters that follow YHVH in the Hebrew alphabet. It is if we were to write GOD as HPE, H being the letter following G, P the letter following O, and E the letter following D. In addition to moving each of the letters in YHVH forward, KUZU is written upside-down to invite us to see God as a dynamic process from multiple viewpoints. Photograph KUZU.

Ideasonair.net is a web project serving artists. The site promotes artistic ideas in various fields,
especially digital art, therefore: “Dear artists, poets, architects, designers, critics, curators and
‘lovers of the trade’, if you are short of ideas, this is the site for you!”. Here, the ideas “from
hyperuranium” have landed and found a place or better, a “virtual factory”. Ideasonair, has a
particular theory about ideas and how we perceive them. In fact, think of it like this: “ideas are ‘in
the air’ and the earth is spinning around, connecting with these ideas at various places. So an
identical idea could ‘land’ or be had in New York and Rome at the same time”. This site could be
considered somewhat like entropy. It puts in order and takes down ideas for you. This “online
factory” will be continually updated to give you always new ideas.
Ideasonair is a conceptual artwork in progress and it would put in evidence the concept of “open
artwork”, it gets ideas and wait for their realization. Moral of the fable? The ideas are the artwork
and they can be transmitted… just like the thought.
Check the links to know about realized project inspired by ideasonair at:
http://www.ideasonair.net/realizedworks.html
Main web-reviews on Ideasonair
http://www.artforum.com/links/
http://www.random-magazine.net/modules/news/article.php?storyid=887 ( now archive )
http://rhizome.org/text/?start=781 ( now archive )
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/001608.html ( now archive )
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ideasonair ( “Essential language” )
http://www.reblog.co.uk/archives/2005/12/ideasonair_blog.html
http://www.timmatheson.com/blog/
http://www.noemalab.org/sections/art_focus_more.php?page=5
http://www.pixelart.org.uk/community/deficit.pdf
http://www.newmediafix.net/daily/
http://netzwelle.blogspot.com/2006/01/look-what-i-found-ideasonair-blog.html#comments
http://uber.tv/envisioning/clippings/2005/10/008787.html
http://www.spudart.org/blogs/links_comments/3526_0_4_0_C/
Ideasonair is was selected in the best of the web 2006, for category “innovative”.
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2006/best/list.html