for a couple of months.

Make that seven or eight months. I will set aside some time next week to figure out what to do with the backlog and what my future here might look like. Thanks for all the faves and comments. You haven't missed any new art from me, as there is none. Trying to figure out what to do next. I wish you all the best and I'll have more to say next week.

-James Koehnline

For Life, Liberty, Love and Levity.

I am the founder and curator of:

and a member of:

Just a goofy animation...

I did in 2003, which I've just posted on YouTube in celebration of the end of the Bush presidency:
[link]




2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints Released

17 years ago I began a project in response to the hype over the Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee. I wanted to construct a sort of global collection of inspiring ancestors, an alternative, secular communion of saints, so I created a wall calendar in which every day is a holiday/feast day in honor of a "saintly" ancestor. Iwrote up the Chronicle of Higher Jubilation as an introduction/invitation to contribute.

I presented the idea to the Autonomedia Publishing Collective in Brooklyn, and it became the Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints. The 17th annual edition has just been released [link]

Back around 1996 my friend David Brown created The daily Bleed [link] , which expanded greatly the information in the Saints calendar. It is also still going strong.

For Life, Liberty, Love and Levity.

I am the founder and curator of:

and a member of:

Just wondering what you think

I read an essay recently which predicted that we will never find intelligent life beyond our planet, because any sufficiently evolved species will, in a variation on the fate of the Krell from Forbidden Planet, succeed in the technological satisfaction of all of its evolved drives and desires and will, in effect, crawl up its own brainstem and amuse itself to death (voluntarily enslave itself in the Matrix?).

I am not that much of a pessimist, but I can see that tendency in the way we use technologies that could easily be moving us toward a golden age of deep communication and collaboration, empathy and equality, an end to poverty and war, and the general movement toward a sustainable and diverse global culture of peace and plenty that honors pure science and the quest for transcendent knowledge and even wisdom.

Which side are you on?


2009 Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints Released

17 years ago I began a project in response to the hype over the Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee. I wanted to construct a sort of global collection of inspiring ancestors, an alternative, secular communion of saints, so I created a wall calendar in which every day is a holiday/feast day in honor of a "saintly" ancestor. Iwrote up the Chronicle of Higher Jubilation as an introduction/invitation to contribute.

I presented the idea to the Autonomedia Publishing Collective in Brooklyn, and it became the Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints. The 17th annual edition has just been released [link]

Back around 1996 my friend David Brown created The daily Bleed [link] , which expanded greatly the information in the Saints calendar. It is also still going strong.

For Life, Liberty, Love and Levity.

I am the founder and curator of:

and a member of:

Just released


17 years ago I began a project in response to the hype over the Columbus Quincentenary Jubilee. I wanted to construct a sort of global collection of inspiring ancestors, an alternative, secular communion of saints, so I created a wall calendar in which every day is a holiday/feast day in honor of a "saintly" ancestor. Iwrote up the Chronicle of Higher Jubilation as an introduction/invitation to contribute.

I presented the idea to the Autonomedia Publishing Collective in Brooklyn, and it became the Autonomedia Calendar of Jubilee Saints. The 17th annual edition has just been released [link]

Back around 1996 my friend David Brown created The daily Bleed [link] , which expanded greatly the information in the Saints calendar. It is also still going strong.

Of late I have been considering a new project to extend the concept into the future, to include individuals who are still alive and kicking, to integrate it into a social networking setting, make it more interactive and participatory, a kind of club for breeding future Jubilee Saints. More on this to come. Any thoughts? I've been reading the series of books edited by John Brockman, based on the annual question asked of some of the world's leading thinkers over at edge.org [link] Currently reading the 2007 question, "What are you optimistic about?" This got me to thinking about how to carry these old projects forward in the spirit of Edge, The World Game, etc.

I would love to hear any ideas all this suggests to you.

For Life, Liberty, Love and Levity.

I am the founder and curator of:

and a member of:

Food for thought...

I've been reading voraciously of late (escaping dire circumstances) and I'd like to share a couple of ideas I've come across:

1) There is evidence that humans are a self-domesticated species. What does this mean? Intentional selection for tameness in animals generally leads to a retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood - less violence, more sexual behavior, smaller skulls, brains, jaws and teeth, thinner bones.
(Other traits that emerge in the domestication of animals include curly hair, short tails, lopped ears and the mysterious star mutation - a white spot on the forehead that appears on some domesticated horses, cattle and goats).

This appears to be exactly what has happened to humans in the last thirty to fifty thousand years - and is continuing at a good pace. While the common belief is that brain size has been increasing for two million years, the fossil evidence suggests that, in fact, human brains have shrunk by as much as fifteen per cent in the last thirty thousand years, and continue to do so.

2) We are the cyborg species. Considering technology in the broadest sense, including spoken and written language, number systems, etc., humans seem to be hard-wired to grow into extended cognitive and computational architectures. The popular view of the brain-mind dichotomy posits a ghost in the machine, some supernatural essence provided by some spooky skyhook that "explains" the intellectual/spiritual/moral capacities of humans, separating us from the animal world. But ghosts and skyhooks may be unnecessary. Instead we might say that the "mind" is the sum of the brain and its cognitive and computational extentions. We are cognitive hybrids, continually moving into new regions of design space as our technology evolves, and the process is accelerating.

Just a little food for thought. Do with it what you will.

PS: Clearly there are hazards involved in negotiating the world as cyborgs. The current global economic melt-down is a good example. We, as a species, have in recent years been living in a design space that we might call "Planet Finance", where the use of incomprehensibly complex financial technologies, supporting unprecedented levels of debt, have allowed the global economy to balloon to many orders of magnitude over and above any reasonable notion of value. Now we are experiencing an awkward and painful return to Planet Earth, where we will regroup and prepare for our next journey to the unknown.

For Life, Liberty, Love and Levity.

I am the founder and curator of:

and a member of: