Front Of Mind | 2021

Permanently Moved Podcast Cover Ep 2020

|

S03E21

Attention, Lil Miquela, Tree Relationships, Old Scripts and Wheelbarrows

Links:
Interdependence Podcast: https://interdependence.fm/
Wheelbarrows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheelbarrow#Medieval_Europe

Permanently moved is a personal podcast 301 seconds in length, written and recorded in one hour by @thejaymo

Website: https://www.thejaymo.net/
Podcast: http://permanentlymoved.online
Zine: http://startselectreset.com


Front Of Mind

Over breakfast this morning I was thinking about what today’s show should be about. Usually, an idea or another will come to mind during the week. Ah yes, I’ll think, I should do my show on that. Then I think about it on and off.

Mentally rehearsing the beats and developing the idea until it’s time to write them up in one frantic brain dump. But nothing really arrived this week. So I thought perhaps we should just take a tour of things that have been front of mind this week. 

Work Is Slow

Well firstly, work is slow.

All the folks I’ve been working with are either too busy to focus on the pre pandemic  projects I’m involved with, or they are all furloughed. So I’ve had time to reapproach some self directed personal projects. This is not to say of course that I wouldn’t like to have some work. If you listen to this and think i might have something to offer you then this is the occasional reminder that you can contact me via the form at thejaymo.net

Attention

Let’s begin then with a document I have open in another tab that is just called ‘Attention’. My pdf zine ‘Your attention is sovereign’’ from last year has been linked to from somewhere and has had another boost in downloads in the last 10 days or so. Wether as a reminder or unconnected an acquaintance got in touch asking about mediation and whether it would help them get their attention back.

Of course I said. Yeah, maybe, as a side effect. But it isn’t the sole reason you should be getting into mc mindfulness. I said that In certain circumstances my attention span can be very focused, at other times, not so much. I KNOW that it’s terrible. For example I’ve basically given up on watching TV shows and movies (much to eves disappointment) due to the mediums lack of ability to hold my attention.. And yet I’ll happily spend hours out in the garden doing nothing except watching the sky and listening to 1950’s radio plays like x minus one on archive dot org.

Getting to the root of my friends problem it seems their (usually very focused) attention span has been shredded by social media during lockdown. We talked about 40mins as a useful unit of attention. Not as arbitrary as an hour, but well over the average of 8 seconds our attention spans have been reduced too. We talked all about different qualities of attention and have found myself writing something about deep listening, attention, and sound. 

Lil Miquela

I have another tab open called ‘Lil Miquela’. An essay I started writing back in November as part of my self set 30 essays in 30days NanoWriMo challenge. It’s up to about 4.5k words. Returning to this document was spurred by Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhust’s recent discussion with Trevor McFedries of Brud on their excellent new podcast Interdependence last week. I thought I better finish writing it and post it on the internet – before the world moves on and whatever usefulness it might contain slips away. It’s about the phenomenon of virtual influencers, the current state of virtual property and crypto, headless brands, Distributed Autonomous Organisations (with others) and possible future Metaverses.

Tree relationships

I have another document called ‘Tree relationships’.. It’s just me writing down all the trees I remember fondly throughout the last 35 years or so that I’ve been on this earth as part of my daily 300 words of writing practice. I’m at an age now where it’s apparently fun to remember and reminisce. This lockdown period has been an opportunity to think about my social life, and dare I say, wider social network that includes the more than human world.

Is amazing that once you sink into that area of thinking, how many memories bubble up to the front of mind. Like remembering a forgotten face or  old friend. Like everything sitting on my hard drive I’m not sure what will become of this, but I was thinking that i should like to maybe do a cut and paste zine that includes rubbings from the trees I can still access and mention in the text. We’ll see.

303 – 001

I also found a document towards the bottom of my Google Drive called 301001. I found it when clearing out and archiving my digital life recently. The document’s last edit was made 18th September 2014. Inside, I was surprised to find the first script for the first iteration of this podcast. It opens as follows: 

Hello, this is the voice of @thejaymo and for the next three minutes and one second you are listening to Episode 301.001

In 1977 the World Administrative Radio Conference a technical conference of the International Telecommunication Union assigned each country five high-powered channels for direct broadcast by satellite (or DBS) for domestic use. 

It’s surprising really, that the seed of this podcast was all there 6 years ago. I don’t seem to be able to find the mp3s of the three test episodes I made back then. But still. I wish I’d started making this show then. But 3mins and 1 second was super hard to write a script for. Turns out it took me 4 more years to realise it should be 5mins and 1second .

History of the Wheelbarrow

Also because reasons, have been reading about the history of the wheelbarrow this week. A topic I was toying with for this week’s show and how I just refuse to believe that Europeans forget how to make them after the roman empire collapsed. 

Anyway that’s been me this week, See you again same time, same place next week.


The script above is the original script I wrote for the episode. It may differ from what ended up in audio due to time constraints.

Prefer Email? 📨

Subscribe to receive new posts straight to your inbox!

Or subscribe to my physical mailing list from £5 a month


Leave a Comment 💬

Click to Expand

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *