Where you are … now

Dr. John C. Hopkins

Administrative Faculty :: Media Specialist w/ the Colorado Geological Survey

OPINIONS EXPRESSED HERE ARE MINE ALONE AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE GEOLOGICAL SURVEY OR THE SCHOOL OF MINES

Wha’, back in Golden???

Yup, forty years later to the day, I find myself sitting in Guggenheim, filling out papers. “A theater of the absurd,” I think to meself. The day referenced is the one I found myself registering for my frosh classes, not yet eighteen years old, in the very same building. Gah. Of the intervening forty years? Ah, the scars of time, the stories to be told:

A native of Anchorage, Alaska, Hopkins is an international educator in networking, creativity, art, and technology; he has a long history in media arts — photographic, sound, video, and writing and has survived a BSc, an MFA, and a PhD. He made one substantial detour into an education and career in Big Oil and geothermal energy as a geophysical engineer, but more creative opportunities called.

He was artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland; at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah; with the Aotearoa Digital Arts collective in Whanganui, New Zealand; and at the Gilfélagið in Akureyri, Iceland.

Finland? Utah? New Zealand? Iceland? For much of the last 35 years he’s been leading a peripatetic life that’s oscillated seasonally between Northern Europe and the Western half of the US (with another detour ‘down under’ for his PhD) although he’s also been spotted at many points in between, and sometimes he gets the seasons backwards. Along the way, he has worked, played with, learned with, (and made portraits of) hundreds of really cool and creative people in strange contexts across 30 countries.

While watching the sky, he’s witnessed 15 minutes of totality chasing solar eclipses around the world with his dad, an avid amateur astronomer and photographer who studied with Ansel Adams. He plays with water wherever he goes. He has tracked and met mountain lions in several places in Colorado. He photographs and records who he is with, where he is, and what he’s doing: what he sees and hears while bush-walking.

Education

• BS Geophysical Engineering, Colorado School of Mines
• MFA Photography / Electronic Media, University of Colorado Boulder
• PhD Media: Screen+Sound, University of Technology Sydney/La Trobe University

Things Thought About

• Systems
• Sustainability
• Regenerative Design
• Ways of Listening
• Nomadism
• Entropy and Order

Sonic Manifestations

• neoscenes drift: lost in a maelstrom of sonic simulations and stimulations, re-collected, re-presented, via various creato-destructive algorithmic methodologies, drift moves through many post-cartesian spaces and through several parallel universes. depending on your frame of reference you may follow a similar path. or you may not. drift demands relativity and provides quantum realism.
  (01:00:00, stereo audio, 115 mb)

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• AudioBlast Festival #4: le cri des neurones: A one-hour live improv stream of material drawn from a sizable analog/digital archive: the multi-tracked material will be selected based on a criteria of neural resonance — during a lead-up to the performance, and during the improv performance itself. There will be various electric field disturbances, recorded in a variety of ways, along with the neural traces of memory, re-constituted from ancient electromagnetic 4-track and cassette tapes.

  The controlled behavior of a magnetic dipole is the primary model for all material used to store information via electromagnetics — both tape and hard-drive — to relinquish control of the dipole moment is to spin into chaos and noise. (01:04:40, stereo audio, 150.2 mb)

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• Once again, hopkins/neoscenes — joining the party, walking the plank, perturbing the ‘net — will delve deep into the archive to bring a signature improv sonic streaming mix to the Eternal Network, celebrating 2016 Art’s Birthday, the 1,000,052nd. The stream, in fond memory of network friend Robert Adrian X, will originate from the neoscenes studio high in the Arizona desert mountains. (02:06:17, stereo audio, 303.1 mb)

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