I'm here and I'm talking about how people, ideas, and things fit together. How we represent culture with maps or ecologies.

How we render something like flickr: people, gathered in groups, a network of connections.

Or we look to the living world for models. Of this image we're told, "microbes in the soil consume the leaf's soft tissue and leave only the celullose and lignin skeleton."

The flickr image suggests space; the leaf says time, the slow decay, paradoxically, revealing connections.

It's these connections we're about to explore. Let's start . . . with language.

I'm here and I'm talking about flowzones, those spaces where transformation happens, the in-betweens where we find . . . the breathing current.

This is old style the focus zoomed smack dab to the printed word:

"the truth which the poet utters can be approached only in terms of paradox."

We bring new focus now, but wow that's some hard commitment to the power of the written, or here the spoken . . . word:

"metaphors do not lie in the same plane or fit neatly edge to edge. There is a continual tilting . . . necessary overlappings, discrepancies . . . contradictions."

The edges of paradox emerge with words, arrayed and linked to new ideas. Like how the tenor of the metaphor makes way for its vehicle.

Words cross the connotational space, where one idea flows into another, where meaning develops. In poetry we call for vehicles, red wheelbarrows from which we borrow attributes, modes of transport that bring the associations of one element into circuit . . . with another.

I'm a mac I'm a pc. This commingling of human and machine reveals the back and forth coursing of attributes. Virus. Spyware. Glasses. Cool shirt. The machine and the human coinforming each other.

The mac or pc metaphors show how people, ideas, and things flow together in cultural networks. The currents circulate back and forth.

"A network . . . its the trace left behind by some moving agent. It has to be traced anew by the passage of another vehicle, another circulating entity." The red wheelbarrow depends upon the bicycle and the bus driver being on time.

Moving entities tracing and circulating. Fantastic detail. Wow . . . texture. Amazing focus. My favorite color. Relationships growing within flowing networks of red, umber, pencil. Powercords. Power chords.

What follows is we find ourselves awash amid entities that give and take shape among one another. The Shins. Kelly Clarkson. Mac mail. Mastodon, Web mail, copy, paste, copy, paste, powercords, empathy, celebrity, sharing, IP, music, text, text editor, Justin, John, Hannah, Lady Gaga, cheesy, ukulele, sun dust rolling thunder clouds crowding . . . circulating collections of people, ideas, and things.

"[We] depend on a flood . . . of entities to exist. To be an actor is now at last a fully artificial and fully traceable gathering."

The concern is that these networks constrain us, shape us and tell us who we are.

The gatherings threaten the human figure by binding us together, surrounding us with ideas and things.

But there is also an organic flow as we gather together in circuit with machines, an entity among entities, conduit for streams of meaning making and performing action, never powerless, full of awareness of layerings, knowing that categories (like worlds) can still bring us transformation.

I'm here and I'm talking about fitting in. PC goes to Pandora and types in Shins. The machine responds. The composition is one of mixing, but the zoom is way out. Choosing word over image or sound feels myopic. The composing here is one of entity in flowing network, not type cast but acting.

I'm talking about performing. The way the network is never hung up to dry but always in motion, always calling us to be . . . composing.

What is a text? What isn't? What is writing? The paintbrush. The poet. The CPU. The lungs. The organic mechanic typing song as worlds unfold in the streaming cast. Fantastic detail. What focus did you use? My favorite color. . . .

"[through circulation] [. . . we ] become, layer after layer, comparable and commensurable . . . human. The question is not to fight against categories but rather to ask: 'Is the category subjecting or subjectifying you?' . . . [F]reedom is getting out of a bad bondage, not an absence of bonds." All the world's a studio, and we are but performers and mechanics, transporting and fixing meaning through each lignin layer.

I'm here and I'm talking about the connotational flow, the liquid mixings of sound and light, felt-like, felt like the composing of self with words. I'm a map. I'm a green tree.