Before heading out to Linz, I was working day and night on a major Hospital system deployment as well as an upcoming project for an art exhibition in Prague this Fall (not to mention harboring a palatable anxiety about the on-going Israeli/Hezbollah conflagaration). The persistent sleep deprivation and fatigue over the past week disappated slightly after managing to arrive at the airport on-time. I sat for a bite to eat and opened Foucault's Power/Knowledge. After jotting a somewhat critical note about the French theorist in the margins, the page sliced my left-hand finger from the tip to past the middle knuckle. Blood erupted like thick ketchup from the fissure.

I looked up and made eye contact with a Buddhist monk sitting across from me, who turned away, and someone reading The Journal of American Medicine (JAMA), who got up to use the bathroom quickly. Trying not to bleed all over the Lufthansa carpet, I made my way to the men's room.

The Precocious Wu Riding an Umbrella-Winged Dragon

After fashioning a bandage out of tissue and packaging tape from the duty-free mart, I eventually stopped bleeding. I cleaned the wound with some Dasani water, and it actually burned! Turns out this evil liquid (from the makers of Coke) contains sodium. Three-fourth of this planet is covered with saltwater, and Coke has the audacity to charge $2 per bottle for it. I conceived of a new project to do: an online children's book ostensibly written, illustrated, and aniamted by a kid.

How to Make a Better You, by Victor Wu, 9.5 years old

1. Don't drink Dasani water. It has salt, magnesium sulfate, and potassium chloride in it. Bleh! For the cost of 150 bottles of Dasani, you can buy a new video iPod, which doesn't even have salt, magnesium sulfate, and potassium chloride in it -- even though an iPod is made of metal. (Mom, will you buy me an iPod?)

2. Don't drink Coke either. You're better off drinking pancake syrup! (Mmm, pancake syrup...)

3. Turn-off the TV. Even the news Daddy watches is just entertainment. And TV makes you tired! If watching TV is so relaxing, why are you so exhausted after watching 4 hours of it, huh? Think of all the extra time and energy you'll have to do things like building that time machine.

4. Start a new project. Like that time machine you've been thinking about!

5. Draw a picture every day. Even my daddy draws pictures on his notepads that he brings home from his office. It seems like the more meetings he has in a day, the more doodles he makes. Today, he drew a picture of me riding a dragon with big black umbrellas as wings, and the dragon was saying,"Raaarrraahhhgh!" And it was raining (he drew big drops in the sky to show it was raining), and the wings kept us dry and flying at the same time.

Researching Methodologies to the Madness

I'm finally catching up on my reading on the airplane. Jared Diamond asks some fascinating questions in Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. Why did history unfold differently on different continents? Are there "ultimate explanations" for the chains of historical causes and effects? Why were Eurasian cultures so overwhelmingly dominant? His chapter entitled "Collison at Cajamarca" is pretty breathtaking. It's the story of Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro slaughtering the Incans and executing the Incan emperor Atahuallpa. Despite having only 168 Spanish soldiers versus 80,000 Incan warriors, Pizarro easily ambushed and captured Atahuallpa without a single Spanish casualty. He massacred 6,000-7,000 Incans (mostly by swords) in a single day.

Diamond traces the reasons for this "success" to literacy (i.e. Pizarro's awareness of say, Cortes' similar war strategies), metal weapons, horse cavalries, and diseases like smallpox (which weakened the Incan empire with a civil war before Pizarro arrived in Cajamarca). In The Ever-present Origin, Jean Gebser downplays these theories and claims that the Spanish prevailed because of their "vigor of consciousness."

Are you kidding me? If I'm fighting for survival in 1532, give me a gun and a horse, and you can keep your vigor of consciousness. You can see Jung's influence on Gebser when he talks about the aperspectival basis and ego-individualism versus collectivism. And some of his ideas are intriguing, but really, the important question is this:

Does he have to keep talking about himself in both first person plural and the third person? Is he the Queen of England?

"We would emphasize the general validity of the term 'aperspectival' .... Our discussion will rely more on the evidence presented in the history of thought than on the findings of the natural sciences as is the case with the author's (meaning himself) Transformation of the Occident." Ugh. Really annoying.

Paul Feyerabend rails against both Diamond and Gebser's research methodologies in the appropriately titled, Against Method. He's questioning established methods and examining how they can actually inhibit progress. This kind of questioning the establishment idea is nothing new; the impressionists were railing against the status quo of the Salon long before Feyerabend picked up a pen. It's one thing to question, criticize, and challenge conventions in pursuit of the truth; it's a completely different thing when you decide "anything goes" and become too lazy to actually do the work required by established methodologies.

Shortly after the world learned that certain Korean scientists had exaggerated their cloning successes, The Onion published a hilarious and poignant article, Rogue Scientist Has Own Scientific Method. Satire often reveals the truth better than the news. And of course, Jon Stewart and The Daily News coined the term, "truthiness", which better encapsulates the ubiquitous falsities in our media-saturated world than anything written by a cultural theorist. The current U.S. presidential administration has even made a habit of completely manufacturing facts for their own political convenience. And religious fundamentalists have even adopted the guise of legitimate research methodologies to question evolution and support the "intelligent design" theory. The news shows both sides of the "controversy" in its ostensible objectivity, but there's no substantive debate. You can give the same credence to a single moron with a PhD talking about intelligent design versus the entire global scientific community. He's no Copernicus. It's like a crazy guy saying the moon is made of cheese and the earth is actually flat. Why are we even listening to these people?

Meet and Greet

I met Chris (a painter with digital media expertise and a background in physics), Jean (graphic designer), and Z (Macedonian artist coming back from an SVA residency) at the airport in Linz. Chris was reading Friedrich Kittler, an activity only a Transart MFA graduate student would possibly be doing at that moment. After checking-in to the hostel, we all gathered at the O.K. Centrum museum and informally met everyone in the program.