1. Receive Andreas M Kaufmann's CD entitled "public/~image" from Carol.
2. Place CD into my Imac's disk drive.
3. Take the first image and the last image from the CD and download them to desk top.
4. Change size and proportions of both images to 250 x 323 pixels.
5. Change both images to grey scale.
6. Increase the brightness and contrast of each image by +30.
7. Rename both files. (now called "smbook.jpg" and "smcar.jpg")
8. Think about old still books and new crashing cars.
9. Think about Europe at the beginning of the 21st Century.
10. Eject public/~image CD from computer.

11. Create a new folder on desktop named "kaufmann".
12. Create a new folder within "kaufmann" named "media".
13. Move smbook.jpg and smcar.jpg from desktop to "media" folder within "kaufmann" folder.
14. Open Simple Text program.
15. Begin to write step by step what I am doing and thinking.
16. Save Simple Text file as "howto.txt" in folder named "kaufmann".
17. Open smbook.jpg and smcar.jpg again.
18. Stare at images...stare at images.
19. Open cold beer (It is a hot night and in Brooklyn)...stare at images.
20. Think about Brooklyn at night.

21. Okay, we seem to have eased into this work and now we can be less formal. Let me introduce everyone:

I will be I (aka M. River of MTAA) writer #1
You can be you/reader.
Carol will be Carol/reader/and a bit later writer #2.
Kaufmann will be Kaufmann/reader/artist/subject.

22. Think about Kaufmann.
23. I know very little about him.
24. I know he is male, living and an artist.
25. I think he may be European.
26. I have been told the images from the CD are sampled or lifted from media and the net.
27. I have resisted the temptation to look at the rest of the images on the CD. I want to know him via smbook.jpg and smcar.jpg.
28. I imagine he is interested in information as landscape and data fields as portraits.
29. I imagine he owns a DVD player and a cell phone.
30. I imagine he sometimes enjoys Sushi.

31. Describe smbook.jpg.
32. I think it is an image of a library.
33. I think it is a library that is either old or was made to look old.
34. I think it is a library that treats reading as a holy act.
35. I think it is a library for the rich.
36. I think that if a walked into this library wearing the black t-shirt, black cut off jeans and black sandals that I am wearing as I write this, I would be asked to leave.
37. I like this image. I would like to have this image printed and hanging near my computer.
38. I would like to lay on the floor of this library with you and stare at its ceiling.
39. I would like to see it at night.
40. I would like to meet Kaufmann and Carol in this library and ask him about his work.

Carol: "Kaufmann, This is my friend M. River."
M. River: " Hello Kaufmann, Where are we?"
Kaufmann: "Let me give you a tour"

41. Describe smcar.jpg.
42. The car, floats above the road in a constant state of action.
42. It looks like an angel.
43. It look like the face of the female robot from Metropolis.
44. It looks like a slap to the face.
45. It looks like faster than a slap to the face.
46. It looks like Ballard.
47. It looks like the news.
48. It looks like physics.
49. It looks like space.
50. It looks like the sun going down on a crisp fall evening when you know that summer has run its course. Kaufmann, Carol and I stand by the road as the car freezes mid flip.

Carol: "Did you see that?"
M. River: " Holy Shit!" (This is a common American phrase of amazement)
Kaufmann: "What does this mean to you?"

51. Meet with Carol.
52. She is busy setting up her show "Consuming Places".
53. Tell her about this text/game/writing.
54. Give her the CD back.
55. Ask her to write ten notes on the first image and the last image on the CD.
56. Ask her to email them to you.
57. Smile and refuse to give her a hint.
58. Make a date to speak with her again after this is all done and ready to send away.
59. You see, this is all about how information moves from point to point and the technology that moves this information. It is how information slips and distorts as it moves. It is how technology enables this slippage. It is about old books and fast cars, Europe, art, and my friend Carol. That's about all. I think that is about all.
60. Oh, say good-bye to Carol and wish her luck on her show.

And now, Carol's Section/writer #2:

61. First, switch voices. Imagine writer #2 sitting on an old, pealing pleather couch with her G3laptop cracked open. The TV is on. Mavis is watching. It’s time to contemplate the Reading Room/Library/Old Place… "The Social Life of Paper" Looking for method in the mess, Malcolm Gladwell, The New Yorker, March 25, 2002

http://www.gladwell.com/2002/2002_03_25_a_paper.htm

62. Launch IE. Begin with google and free associate. The Wayback Machine, "The Internet Archive have created the Wayback Machine which makes it possible to surf pages and other cultural digital artifacts stored in the Internet Archive's web archive. "Surf the Web as it was…"

http://www.archive.org/

63. I remember to look for "The Technologies To The People Photo Collection"

http://www.irational.org/tttp/collection/Collection.html

64. …and don't want to forget Antonio Muntadas' interactive database of cultural censorship.

http://www.thefileroom.org/

65. Who is in this place? Communities, Audiences, and Scale. "Can we have a medium that spreads messages to a large audience, but also allows all the members of that audience to engage with one another like a single community?" from Clay Shirky's Writings About the Internet: Networks, Economics, and Culture, (April 6, 2002)

http://shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html

66. "ice_cream_for_everyone/open_source_ice/ice_cream_generator/190600/version01/" generated:19/06/00 by Simon Pope & Mark Greco

http://bak.spc.org/ice/open_source_files/i4e_open_source001.html

67, Recall a previous encounter with M. River. Imagine holding a large and almost round pearl in your hand. Peering into its translucent surface...Lo-fi Baroque

http://www.mteww.com/mtaaRR/lofibaroque.shtml

68. Writer #2 brews a pot of coffee and chooses a topic of current obsession. Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon…Sight & Sound review by Penelope Houston (1976)

http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/sk/ss/barrylyndon.htm

"Pauline Kael in the New Yorker suggested that 'he's taking pictures of art objects; that antiques-filled room at the end of 2001 must have been where he wanted his own time machine to land.'…

… Barry Lyndon is not an easily approachable work, perhaps partly - and perversely - because there's so much surface to it. What seems to have worried critics, to a surprising extent, is the dissonance between the prettiness of the settings and the pessimism of the theme. And bafflement begins not with the film itself, though there are areas there for perplexity, but with the question of intention. Why did the director whose computer intelligence had seemed programmed towards the 21st century take this step backwards, to a 19th century classic writer's least read novel, about the life and progress of an 18th century scoundrel? Why at all, and why now?"

69. What does the future hold? Little Screen, Big Picture. "Michael Bove Jr. and Wilfrido Sierra at MIT's Media Lab are developing a miniature laser projector to make handheld devices easier on the eyes. The project or consists of an array of semi-conductor lasers spaced micrometers apart, approximately one laser per pixel. A tiny mirror mounted about the array rotates to sweep the beams up and down while their intensities are varied, reproducing text and simple images. With the touch of a button, a cell phone could project its postage-stamp sized display as an image up to a meter diagonal… Bove expects the projectors to appear in phones in two to five years." [go to PG 17 Technology Review Sept 2002]

70. "Look up. See who's watching."**

71. 10 down 10 to go. It is late. I have a feeling M. River is fast asleep. Kaufmann should be starting on his first coffee of the day.

72. The last image AKA the Mobil Flip led by "The First Crutch Flip" Bill Shannon aka CrutchMaster.

http://www.virtualprovocateur.com

73. "Make a mistake."** oval94diskont. Markus Popp - Sebastian Oschatz -Frank Metzger (thrill jockey) gorgeous glitch.

74. Think about safety and danger. "CarnivorePE (Personal Edition) is now available! CarnivorePE turns your computer into a personal data surveillance tool. Use CarnivorePE to run Carnivore clients from your own desktop, or use it to make your own clients. The clients are each designed to animate, diagnose, or interpret the network traffic in various ways." Favorites: Mark Daggett's "Carnivore is Sorry" and "Guernica" by Entropy8Zuper!

http://rhizome.org/carnivore/

75. "Call a number which is one number different from that of a friend. If someone answers try to keep them talking."**

76. How to Fly the Tank: "This might sound absurd, but it works. First enter the code to get a Tank, then enter the "Fly With Cars" cheat (codes page). Get into your Tank, turn the turret 180 degrees so it's pointing backwards and start firing the cannon rapidly. Continue doing this until you gain altitude. To turn, just turn the turret slightly. Avoid the tall buildings and you'll do just fine!"

GTA3.Com : GTA 3 : Assistance : Tricks http://www.gta3.com/?zone=tricks

77. Constant cross-referencing has unexpected impact. . . "Google Time Bomb", by John Hiler Google and Weblogs seem inextricably tied together, as link-rich blogs are increasingly influencing the algorithms of Google's search engine. Google is unique among search engines in that while it almost always shows you pages that have the exact keywords you are looking for, occasionally it will show you pages that don't have those keywords, but other pages linked to that page with those words. Will Weblogs blow up the world's favorite search engine?

http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/googl ebombs.htm

78. Instructions:
How to blow away a wall:
It is easy.
Close your eyes,
concentrate
and blow.

Marjetica Potrc "Untitled" from: DO IT, a project curated by Hans-Ulrich Obrist/DO IT at E-flux is produced and presented by electronic flux corp.

http://www.e-flux.com/projects/do_it/manuals/artists/p/P002/P002.html

79. **SURRENDER CONTROL highlights from Tim Etchells' mobile research commission.

http://www.the-media-centre.co.uk/medialounge/archive/index.html

80. Hit save and power down, it’s time to sleep. "Sorry! The Trojan Room Coffee machine was finally switched off at 0954 UTC. . . The final image, which shows the server being switched off, is here

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/xvcoffee

And now, we return you to voice of M. River of MTAA (aka writer #1):

81. Mentally overlay image smbook.jpg and smcar.jpg.
82. Describe commonality in smbook.jpg and smcar.jpg
83. Both show no flesh.
84. Both are in daylight.
85. Both are visually blank (if you know what I mean).
86. Both look like they could have been lifted from a National Geographic circa 1982.
87. Both are locations for consumption.
88. Both are spaces of the leisure class.
89. Both contain built in audio (silence and or crashing).
90. If I had to distill the nature of the two images down to one trait and then overlay that trait onto this entire project of Kaufmann's, without really understanding any thing about the entire project, I'd have to go with information-flow which is how I've tried to structure this text as an example. I'm not that sure I've succeeded, but sometimes you just have to move forward anyhow.

91. Call Carol, back from vacation, from my studio.
92. Read to her the entire writing which she is hearing for the first time.
93. Edit. Edit. Edit.
94. Open folder named kaufmann.
95. Write kaufmann/index.html
96. Upload kaufmann folder to http://tinjail.com (Note: Hey if you are reading this as an email or in the book, go take a look at this online at http://tinjail.com/kaufmann You get to see the pictures and click on the links. If you are reading this online, I have no idea how to show you the book that this work was produced for. I guess you will have to imagine it as I am imagining it as I write this text.)
97. Email this text to Carol who will then email it to Kaufmann.
98. Think about the protocol that digitally holds these words within its walls on its way to Europe.
99. Think about the location of the work as email, html, and printed word.
100. Wait for the book to show up in the mail to see how it all worked out.

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