[Marius Watz / mid-progress plotter sketch]
Visual complexity isn't an inherent characteristic of generative techniques - it's easy, if not very interesting, to make a generative process that turns out visually simple results. So to some extent it's an aesthetic choice, or a tendency that pursues a certain aesthetic or sensual reward. Susanne Jaschko has called this its "retinal" tendency. Computational generative techniques act as an enabler or amplifier for that tendency - they automate complexity to a certain extent, or reduce its cost. If generative art is a cultural organism, then the "retinal" charge of visual complexity is a kind of lure that attracts both artists and audiences to computational techniques. – Mitchell Whitelaw
The above quote is culled from of a fantastic conversation between Leonardo Solaas, Marius Watz, Mitchell Whitelaw and Jeremy Levine on the topic of generative art and process-based work in Digimag 57. Read and enjoy the entire roundtable/article here
Don Miller, aka NO CARRIER, has just released a new, updated version of glitchNES. This is very exciting! For those not familiar with glitchNES, here's a brief introduction.
glitchNES is a custom-built Nintendo ROM that uses software tricks to create visual effects reminiscent of hardware glitches. Everyone who ever owned or played an original NES system should recognize these patterns, usually indicating that you need to hit the reset button and/or blow in the cartridge. Instead of remaining static, glitchNES encourages live manipulation of the imagery using a keyboard or external controller. Modifiable parameters include direction of movement, color, pattern, speed, and more.
Here are a few of my past experiments with v0.1.
Version 0.1 was a good start, but the concept is much more fully realized in v0.2. In particular, the live performance capability has been greatly increased. This was always the most exciting aspect of glitchNES to me, ever since I caught a video of Don Miller generating live visuals for a really crunchy electronica show, and I'm glad to see that he has continued developing with this in mind.
Version 0.2 doubles the number of controls (it now requires 2 controllers if you aren't using the qwerty keyboard), and adds more graphics banks which can be swapped on the fly. There is also a tap tempo function that allows for some rhythmic fluctuation of the imagery. As with the v0.1, the graphics banks may be edited using a tile editor to customize the resulting visuals. While I recommend this if you are planning to use glitchNES for a live show, I had a lot of fun just playing with the default banks that come pre-loaded.
Hardcore NES hackers can even buy some specialized hardware and create their own physical NES cartridge for use in an original system (works for NTSC anyhow). Everything you need for this process can be found at RetroZone.
glitchNES is available for free download here. After downloading, you need to run the compile.bat file to generate the ROM (glitchnes.nes). In order to use the ROM you will need to load it into an NES emulator. I recommend Nestopia or RockNES.
Enjoy!
Editor's note: Don Miller will be leading a short workshop on NES hacking as part of the GLI.TC/H festival in Chicago. This will be held at the Nightingale Theater on Saturday, October 2nd @ 5pm. Ben will be performing a live set alongside Evan Kühl at the same venue a few hours later. A full schedule and further details can be found at http://gli.tc/h
Broadcasting for Reels: Success Through Failure
Sometimes you can't do something right without doing it wrong. A mistake can be an unplanned act of genius. Getting hopelessly lost can set you on the right path.
Broadcasting For Reels is seeking works of audio art that address the idea of "Success Through Failure." Chosen entries will be aired on CKDU-FM in Halifax and distributed to community radio stations throughout Canada.
Broadcasting For Reels is an audio art project presented annually by the Centre for Art Tapes since 1993. The project accepts new audio work no more then one year old up to a maximum of 10 minutes in length. Works should be submitted as an audio CD or as a data file (wav, aiff or mp3) via email, web transfer or disc. Only those selected will be notified. If you would like your submission returned to you please include a self addressed, stamped envelope.
Deadline for submissions: October 1, 2010. Artist fees will be paid.
Send submission with current CV and artist statement to:
Centre for Art Tapes
5600 Sackville Street, Rm. 207
Halifax, NS B3J 1L2
cfat.communication@ns.sympatico.ca
For more information contact (902) 420-4002 or visit centreforarttapes.ca.
We are excited to announce VT Audio Editions, a new venture that we've been working on for the last few months. Curated by VT audio art and music don Neil Wiernik, the project will program an ongoing series of releases that sit outside the standard EP and single format. Neil's concise mission statement for the project:
Focusing on the aural art genres that we have featured from the very start of our publication, VT Audio Editions invites artists to create a longer piece of audio/music content between 20 and 60 minutes in length. These submissions could be a composed work, a live studio session or a concert recording. Each Audio Edition will include a statement and biographic information on the participating artist.
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Our first release (embedded above) is by the Michigan-based composer Matt Borghi and it is a half-hour long, etherial, Lynchian soundscape with some fantastic sax work by Michael Teager. If this is an indication of the quality of the work that Neil will be programming, we're in for a treat.
Head over to the release page to download the piece and keep your eyes peeled on the VT Audio Editions page for future releases.
The consistently excellent Motherboard.tv recently published the above feature on the most recent FutureEverything conference. The short video is a good overview of the portion of the 2010 festival that considered 'smart' cities and open data – Drew Hemment and Adam Greenfield offer some thoughtful insights and there are a number of interesting projects mentioned that are worth investigating.
A few weeks ago we passed along an announcement regarding the FABRICATE conference that will be taking place in London next April. We just received word that (for various circumstances) the submission deadline has been extended through September 20th, so if you had been considering making a submission there is still lots of time. Check out the (updated) original announcement for information on the call for work.
Vague Terrain has recently entered its fifth year of showcasing progressive, idiosyncratic digital art practices. Our growth is due in large part to the contributions of guest curators who have shared their expertise and energy with us, including Joshua Noble, Kim Cascone, Paul Prudence, Rob Cruickshank, CONT3XT.NET, Carrie Gates and David McCallum. We would like to continue to collaborate with members of the digital art community, and are inviting proposals from interested artists or curators to work with us on future issues of Vague Terrain.
Journal Format: The best way to get a sense of our project is to browse the archives. Each issue is a mix of essays, interviews, in-depth documentation of multimedia projects, broader surveys of art practices and EP-length audio art and experimental music releases. We aren't locked to a specific formula and have featured issues almost entirely dedicated to article-length essays or music. Each issue should feature 8-15 contributors.
Schedule: We are looking for guest curators for issues to be published in January 2011 and onward. A curator will need about 90 days of lead time to organize an issue and establishing communication with the invited artists at the beginning of the process is one of the most involved tasks. The guest curator will work with the Vague Terrain team to set up a timeline for participating artists to follow.
Responsibilities – A guest curator is responsible for the following:
Support – Vague Terrain offers the following assistance with the above duties of the curator:
Interested curators and digital artists should email us with the following:
Deadline: This is an open, ongoing call. However curators interested in the January slot should contact us ASAP as we'll be selecting the curator for that issue in early September.
Submissions and inquires should be sent to submit@vagueterrain.net
Turbulence.org and Pace Digital Gallery announce an Open Call for Networked Art to be commissioned for the exhibition Turbulence.org @ PaceDigitalGallery 2.
Three commissions @ $3,000 will be awarded. The deadline for proposals is November 1. The works will premiere at Pace and on Turbulence in April 2011.
The curators are seeking works that address the notion of “Levels | Hierarchies”, as in chains of command, levels of play, stages of life, degrees of comfort... Pace Digital Gallery is, itself, distributed across three floors of a building; within a broad stairwell to be precise. Practitioners are required to address the theme according to both the physical space and the distributed space of the Internet, where the works will permanently reside.
Potential applicants who live in New York are encouraged to visit the gallery to see the space (gallery hours are Tues - Fri, 12 - 5pm). On view through October 22, David Crawford: Retrospective. Otherwise, here are some images of the space.
For full submission/application requirements please see the announcement on Networked_Performance
[Artwork for Ryoji Ikeda's Datamatics]
Composing with Process is a series of six episodes, written and edited by Mark Fell and Joe Gilmore, which explores generative approaches (including algorithmic, systems-based, formalised and procedural) to composition and performance primarily in the context of experimental technologies and music practices of the latter part of the 20th Century. Each episode is accompanied by an additional programme, entitled EXCLUSIVES, featuring unpublished sound pieces by leading sound artists working in the field.
The first two episodes of Composing with Process are online and available for download and streaming and contain work from Florian Hecker, Ryoji Ikeda, Mika Vainio, David Tudor and others – listen here.
[Philip Jeck, Jean Baudrillard / Spool, Le Xerox et l’Infini / photo via: Hard Format]
Nostalgia for a certain point on the brief timeline of the machine age is a relatively new phenomenon; or at least it is a condition that is being more explicitly integrated into audio artists' public statements than before. Past music subcultures with a nostalgic component to them have hewn as closely as possible to an organic presentation (although the suspicion of insincerity is rightly aroused when 'folksy' and 'organic' acts insist on ultra-modern promotional machinery to aid them in their projection of such an image.) This is less evident in revivals of the kind abetted by labels like Tapeworm, where there is no hint that mechanization is an automatic disqualification for a work's being considered "authentic." Cassette culture stalwart Hal McGee has even referred to the post-industrial music released during the prior "cassette culture" as a kind of "folk" music in and of itself: in both cases, the locus of authenticity shifts away from the implementation tools and towards the overall attitudes of the artists to both creative process and end result. The need to further the expressive life of a small tribe of individuals, and the precedence this takes over commercial concerns, is a common feature of folk music and of self-released electronic music. In fact, with the history of electronic music being much more open to examination now than in any previous era, it seems more and more naïve to believe this music has been made entirely in the service of futurism. For example, the enveloping two-note synth drones and primal vocal whoops of the ur-electropunk duo, Suicide, had much more to say about the time in which they were composed than about any future utopia or dystopia1. Also, much has already been written about electronic music's attempts at providing a shamanic 'trans-temporal' continuity not excluding the present, as in the trance states encouraged by all-night raves.
Certainly, the attachment of utopian hope to machinery and circuitry is far from dead, although it must compete more strongly than ever against the critique of constant technological novelty. For every Wired reviewer who lauds the "liberating" potential of the latest generation of iPods and their ability to serve a number of functions with no movable parts, there is a skeptic like Tapeworm's creative director Philip Marshall, who denounces the widening rift in the producer-consumer relationship that these devices create.
Over the past several years, cultural theorist Alexei Monroe has been one of the more reliable commentators on the phenomenon of "tech-nostalgia," and it seems logical to turn to him at this point in the discussion. When discussing this phenomenon, Monroe uses the metaphor of the "sleeper agent" for a cultural flashpoint that "will activate at some point in the future when they themselves are re-discovered and/or re-invented, destabilizing their own time and potentially releasing a further set of unintended consequences in another two to three decades."2 It is a colorful analogy, and one that probably springs from Monroe's own interest in Cold War Europe and the history of espionage and subterfuge that accompanied that era. Currently recording electro artists like Franz Falckenhaus also romanticize the period's heightened suspense in the design schemes and track titles of their albums (Falckenhaus' Stories From My Cold War features tracks such as "Surveillance In The Hotel Lobby," "Escape From KGB Agents In The Old Town," and "A Tupolev Disappears In The Darkness.")
Yet, despite the potentially ominous overtones of the term "sleeper agent," Monroe contends that their creating an explosion of unintended consequences is a positive scenario where "tech-nostalgia" is concerned. He also proposes a negative scenario involving the exploitation of consumers who seek out authenticity and inspiration in re-discovered "sleeper cell" artifacts, which could certainly include rarities from the early days of the underground cassette network. Considering how that culture relied so heavily on minimal recording and reproductive techniques, it is easy for a savvy rip-off artist to emulate their model with today's powerful microprocessors: "pre-stressed" graphic design and simulated "lo-fi" audio can very easily be confused for legitimate "period" pieces, especially when prospective buyers have convinced themselves that there was far more clandestine audio activity from the previous generation than has already been documented. When such items are being sold through the digital marketplace rather than in physical retail shops, the con is that much easier to pull off on hopeful "tech-nostalgics" before they realize the extent to which they've been duped. Monroe likens this process of falsification to the production of bogus relics by the pre-Reformation Catholic Church, one aspect of the "barter in spiritual things" which became known as the crime of simony:
As in the present, this was partly based on people’s genuine and continued need to possess what they believed to be lost relics, that might reduce the time spent in purgatory or show their devotion to the community (as the fan demonstrates their devotion by possessing a rare artifact such as a “lost” album.)3
While Monroe casts a wary eye on modern-day producers of fake cultural relics, he also suggests that there will always be a portion of the listening audience that enjoys these fakes and the spiritual rewards that they may confer in spite of their dubious origins- even if they are fakes, they may still comfort the "tech-nostalgic" listenership by reassuring them that yesteryear's ideals of truth and beauty can survive in the present. With this in mind, he also warns against "zealots" that may narrow the range of "acceptable" listening to certifiable originals, despite the fact that the carefully constructed fakes may have some redeeming value.
Monroe's insights in the following conversation, though informed by his personal tastes, are applicable to the broad spectrum of "tech-nostalgic" thinking.
Thomas Bey William Bailey: One thing I was thinking of the other day- some of the quirky ‘retro-futurist’ trends we see now, such as people selling hand-crafted fashion items made to resemble vintage synthesizers, seem unique to me- I think this is because most 'traditionally' nostalgic cultural manifestations have tended to champion pre-industrial, ‘organic’ modes of living as being the most ‘authentic’ ones. Do you feel the pop culture from, say, the ‘90s to the present is really the first to have such a penchant for ‘tech-nostalgia,’ or for seeing previous eras of as electronic development as being more sincere?
Alexei Monroe: From a historical perspective, it seems unlikely that any pattern is totally unprecedented, and as I began to write this I was struck by the most obvious 1970s example of tech-nostalgia, which in some ways has structured the sonic and visual manifestations of all tech-nostalgia in electronic music. Kraftwerk – "Radioactivity" [embedded above] in particular, the way they used the romantic aura surrounding the early days of radio. Firstly there's the image of the Volksempfanger (Third Reich-era radio set) on the cover. They could have chosen a contemporary shortwave set of the type which now has a nostalgic aura around it, but they chose a 1930s set (and were criticised for using this icon of Nazi technological modernism.) "Radioland" is the best example of their technostalgia, but also "Airwaves" and "Radio Stars". There's a pervasive technostalgic romanticism at work in the album, even if it's also ambivalent and ironic.
In the aftermath of Punk, there was a kind of Denkverbot (mental/conceptual prohibition) against anything associated with the '70s and this included (for instance) Moog synthesisers and analogue generally. Cubase, the Atari, and sequencing were making it possible to create electronic music without using expensive units that were tainted by association with the hippie and prog eras. If we look at pop culture from the '90s, then one of the dominant forces from about '92 to maybe 2000 was techno, and techno carries the influence of Kraftwerk's retro-futurism in its DNA (even if it's not always apparent on the surface). It's interesting that almost simultaneously with the vanguard era of techno, you also had producers like Sven Vath straying into '70s- influenced synthesiser motifs and starting to discuss the devices of the period. My (sketchy) theory is that the techno and rave movements met with repression just as the previous Denkverbot wore off. Techno either went underground (into specialist forms like minimal techno or gabber - both of which fetishise vinyl as a technology) or went closer to the mainstream. In both cases, this is maybe symptomatic of a loss of faith in explicit futurism, and/or a belief that past futurism was more powerful and authentic.
I think another reason for this loss of faith was that just as music became more explicitly post-human and futuristic, music technologies became ever blander and utilitarian as objects. This led people back to boxes with wires, and to the unpredictability of analogue technology. It's as if when the (aesthetic) future finally arrived, it was so anti-climactic and instantly quotidian that people needed to search for it in the past. Other factors might be the general rehabilitation of the '70s that began in the mid-'90s, first as irony and then as unapologetic fetishism (I have another theory about how '70s revivalism was a symptom of increasing populism and reactionary politics in Britain.) This was very much a market-driven process as is much of technostalgia (for instance limited edition reproduction synths and mixing desks with walnut veneers etc.) This is not to say that analogue technology doesn't have some real sonic virtues, which are hard to replicate with contemporary gear, but this kind of technostalgia can't be considered in isolation from market and cultural trends (in my own project we're moving away from laptops to physical devices, although nothing older than a [Roland] TB-303). In summary, you could say that digital is banal and omnipresent, and this only adds to the lost futuristic aura surrounding analogue (which of course is very important to the (re)-production of '80s electronic and industrial sounds). Perhaps there's even something culturally positive in this rejection of perfection in favour of rawer and less stable technologies.
Do you feel that, as you've mentioned here with people’s love of analogue technology, these period-specific references are being used because they provide a convenient metaphor for the geopolitical anxiety and utopian hope we now deal with (and perhaps are intended to offer us a bit of comfort as well, by hinting that the early 21st century is not the only age to have experienced its ‘unique’ shocks?) Or do you feel this re-appropriation is being done on a more naïve level- that is to say, cultural flashpoints as diverse as the DeLorean DMC-12 or Soviet MiG fighters just look and sound “cool”?>
The Cold War is a very rich and evocative period, particularly the period of ‘New Cold War’ from 1980-1985, which I remember clearly. I think that the general cultural awareness of the proximity to mass annihilation did directly influence the aesthetics of the period, and even that there is a type of ‘Cold War poetics’. Perceived mortality and ongoing crisis tend to generate deep and even sublime cultural responses. A track like Test Dept’s "Comrade Enver Hoxha" transports you back to that time instantly (and helps those too young to remember it experience it vicariously.) I would even say this period is so intense (and far from fully processed) that there is as much legitimacy in contemporary producers addressing as there was at the time. The only question is whether those with no lived experience of the period can do more than replicate the style or aura of the period. One comparison might the be the explosion (literally) of interest in World War Two, and all the films made on it during the sixties and seventies. Certainly it was a cultural obsession for my generation (born 1969.) By this cyclical logic, a fascination with the New Cold War seems unsurprising. It may also be a way of relativising the current real and imaginary threats the West faces, as these (currently) do not include mass global annihilation.
I can partly relate to the fascination among with the period among younger people because although I remember the news and general atmosphere of the period, I was about 5 years too young to be directly involved in the industrial culture of the early '80s. However, I like to think I can re-imagine myself in the culture of that time better than someone 5,10 or 15 years younger.
[DeLorean DMC 12 / photo: Michael Smith]
Regarding the DeLorean example, that can be seen in directly political terms as part of what I term the kleptocratisation of culture that’s been ongoing since the mid-1970s and accelerated massively in the '90s. What we have now is an unashamed klepto-culture and it’s entirely natural and absolutely functional for those in line with the klepto-culture to celebrate the icons of the first ‘Greed is Good’ era. Even after the sub-prime crisis and the recession, I think there are many who would fight or even kill to preserve the klepto-culture and the economic relations it celebrates and fetishises. This has penetrated so deep into the social and cultural subconscious that many producers are not even aware of the extremity of the ideological statements they are making in this way. Of course some present these references as irony, but that serves the status quo just as well as those that unashamedly celebrate these references.
Given what you’ve said here, do you feel the current wave of retro-futurism would be possible (or, at least, as enthusiastic as it is now) without the fact that many of its original progenitors are still alive (and, in many cases, artistically active?) After all, I seem to remember a lot of the more acclaimed retrospectives of the second World War –like the 1973-1974 ‘World At War’ TV series- got their credibility from the participation, as interview subjects, of people who had been frontline combatants. A feat that obviously can’t be replicated now, 35 odd years later. So, in short, how valuable is the present-day input of ‘elder statesmen’ for the culture we’ve been discussing, especially since access to records of their work is fairly simple for anyone with an Internet connection and a will to parse a good deal of information?
Yes, I think this presence is important, perhaps especially as a 'corrosive comparator' - with veteran performers still active/present (assuming they're still artistically effective) then it's much harder (though not impossible) for younger producers to pass off sub-standard replicas. It's also important that the old guard is present in the clubs, passing on knowledge and (sometimes) adding authenticity. That said, my experience of the Reeperbahn club night was that I was the oldest person there (at 39.) The average age was mid to late twenties but they were playing records I bought or danced to between '89 and '92. It was also clear that for 99% of the audience it was simply a style statement: they had no awareness of, or interest in, the social or political contexts that generated these sounds. On the other hand, there are many veteran '80s artists now touring, re-releasing and issuing new material almost exclusively because of the neo-'80s trend that began around 2000.
One thing I find interesting about the revival of home-taping, which is happening to a significant degree in the various Industrial or esoteric underground sectors, is that it is often being done for the opposite reason that people once again pick up analogue synths- while the latter confer ‘authenticity’ along with a sound that people argue is superior to digital emulation, the former is seen as ‘authentic’ because of its inferior qualities- e.g., the cassette’s surface noise is more audible and adds somewhat to the intimate drama of listening. So this makes me wonder, is the ‘scene’ really as paradoxical as it seems here, or can these different takes on the concept of authenticity be logically reconciled somehow?
I think the confusion here is that authenticity and superior sound are not always the same thing (or not perceived to be.) Vintage Russian synthesisers are much in demand now, not because they sound better but because they sound 'other' and (arguably) 'worse' compared to Western models. I don't think the cassette revival is purely due to what we can call inverted sonic snobbery. More significant is that it's an attempt to connect with the eighties tape underground which is enjoying an afterlife, both through official re-releases (on Vinyl on Demand etc.) and through the ever-growing number of blogs dedicated to obscure cassette culture (there's even one on Yugoslav experimental music now.) As ever we can't wholly ignore the market factor - when buyers make purchases now they want something collectible - a standard CD digipak is insufficient. These cassettes are instant collector's items and symbolically connect the producers with their predecessors. Currently they also confer an 'underground' aura that isn't necessarily plausible – Touch Records are releasing a series called Tapeworm, but it's many years since they were an underground tape label, and for me doesn't quite ring true. That said, I will buy new tape releases if they're unavailable otherwise. It's also worth mentioning my favourite cassette album (Laibach's Kapital) contains different and better versions than those on the CD and vinyl (which also differ from each other).
Alexei Monroe is an independent cultural theorist currently based in London. He holds a PhD in Communication and Image Studies from the University of Kent. He is author of the books Pluralni Monolit (Plural Monolith, MASKA 2003) and Interrogation Machine (MIT Press 2005). These books deal with the Slovene arts movement Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK). Interrogation Machine was reviewed in publications including Frieze, Radical Philosophy and The Wire. Besides his work on NSK, he writes widely on the aesthetics and politics of electronic music and wider issues of cultural theory, including an ongoing project on the cultural history of the Stag as a symbol. His work has been published in Contemporary Music Review, Central Europe Review, Kinoeye, New Moment, AS and other publications in Britain, Serbia, Slovenia, Brazil, Belgium and America. He is a founder member of the Industrialised Culture Research Network and also active as a DJ.
Notes:
1. This is to say nothing of the lyrical content on the record, which deals with very of-its-time
2. Alexei Monroe, "The False Scent Of Asparagus." Unpublished manuscript.
3. Alexei Monroe, "The False Scent Of Asparagus." Previously unpublished.
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Our second VT Audio Edition is ready for the world and it is contributed by the Hamilton-based artist/musician Christina Sealey. Christina describes the piece, entitled "Living Spaces (live version)" as follows:This recording combines location recordings and sound synthesis to create a psycho-geographical reading of a particular route through the city of Hamilton, moving from the harbour to the interior of the city and out to the periphery.
The piece is an improvisation drawing from material performed at the Art Gallery of Hamilton in spring 2009. Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.
The Root of the Root is the title of a new group show featuring Paul Prudence, Marius Watz and Aaron Meyers that opens at Devotion Gallery in Brooklyn this week. The show will feature recent AV experiments and by Watz and Prudence and several laser-etched wood pieces by Meyers. The blurb for the show highlights the presence of each of these creators in their work:
While this art may harnesses the power of computation to create work enacted via machine, the human originator is ever present, even if acting by proxy. The works in this show amalgamate the organic and the methodical, seducing with pattern, texture and beauty.
More info on the projects being shown (and sold) is available at the exhibition page – the show runs Oct. 22nd through Nov. 21st and Watz will be running a related Processing workshop at the venue this week.
Electric Fields, the Ottawa-based AV culture biennial festival programmed by our peers at Artengine draws near. The event runs from Nov. 3-7th and one of the participants is Paul Jasen, a PhD candidate researching "low-frequency sonic experience". Paul posted an annotated mix on the Artengine blog in advance of a talk he'll be giving at the festvial and we've reblogged it below.
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Not sympathy in the sentimental sense. Sympathetic vibration has nothing to do with the personal or emotional. For Helmholtz, it meant transduction of energy, resonance induced in a body – a room, a building, a glass, an eyeball – by an external force. At its resonant, or natural, frequency a body ceases to dampen energy and begins to oscillate with it, amplifying it, even to the point of self destruction.
A 40-minute, sub-centric mix, ahead of my talk (Bass: A Myth-Science of the Sonic Body) at this year’s Electric Fields festival. So much discussion about bass focuses on dancefloor material, so this mix goes the other direction, collecting a series of low-frequency investigations into industrial and earthly hum, pure tones, pipe organs, peculiarities of bodily resonance, and overlapping fictions of sound and signal. Listen loud. To borrow Eleh’s instruction: Volume reveals detail.
MP3: DOWNLOAD (320kbps / 95Mb)
TRACKS & NOTES:
Demdike Stare ‘Suspicious Drone’ (Modern Love)
“…a dense 6 minute opening that chugs along like a malfunctioning mechanical beast, honing in on Lancashire’s dark industrial landscapes.” Following on the heels of labels like Mordant Music, Skull Disco and Ghost Box, Demdike Stare wed body-humming sound system sensibilities and (occasional) frenzied percussion, with smatterings of occulture and Radiophonic hauntology.
Bass Communion ‘Ghosts on Magnetic Tape III’ Original and Reconstruction (Headphone Dust)
Unsettling vibrations, voices in the ether. Bass Communion looks for spectral encounters in the crackle and grooves of manipulated 78rpm shellacs, drawing equally on theories of the infrasonic uncanny and the peculiar phenomenon of EVP. Supplemented here with excerpts and Raymond Cass commentary from The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP (Parapsychic Acoustic Research Cooperative/Ash International)
Thomas Köner ‘Permafrost’ and ‘Nieve Penitentes 2′ (Barooni/Type)
More of the ice than about it, Köner’s geologic drone work would sit well alongside John Duncan’s Infrasound-Tidal, NASA’s Voice of Earth, and the tremor tones of Mark Bain. The theme is The North, but these aren’t field recordings. Instead, Köner builds his glacial terrain from the shimmer of pitch-shifted gongs. Augmented here by a dark piece from Ruth White, the little acknowledged American electronic composer who’d have made good company for Delia Derbyshire and Daphne Oram at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. ‘Mists and Rains,’ from the 1969 album Flowers of Evil, sets the Baudelaire poem to an electronic windscape.
Eleh ‘Together We Are One’ (Taiga)
Anonymous and secretive, Eleh is a minor sonic fiction unto itself, its album art drawing on the retina-skewing experiments of Op Art while minimal sleeve notes give faint clues to method and aims. Titles of the first three releases –Floating Frequencies/Intuitive Synthesis volumes I-III – would seem to sum up the project, reputedly based on the layering of outputs from aging audio test oscillators. Subsequent releases Homage to the Square Wave and Homage to the Sine Wave, along with track names like ‘Pulsing Study Of 7 Sine Waves’ (parts 1 & 2), ‘Phase Two: Bass Pulse In Open Air,’ and ‘Linear To Circular / Vertical Axis,’ are nods to both the minimalist tradition and a clinically empiricist attitude toward sonic investigation. But others – ‘In The Ear Of The Gods,’ ‘Phase One: Sleeps Golden Drones Again’ – show a mystical side that revels in the autopoietic strangeness of the subbass encounter.
Nate Young ‘Under the Skin’ (iDeal Recordings)
If Eleh finds the mystical in impersonal vibration, Nate Young’s Regression is the sound of signal possessed, angry, and on the move. ‘Under the Skin’ is a churning slog – submerged in a liquid-matter mush, broken occasionally by a taught screech, before resuming its subcutaneous march.
Sunn o))) ‘Sin Nanna’ (Southern Lord)
Metal with bass weight, indebted to the gravity-enhancing sounds of Earth. ‘Sin Nanna’ is a largely guitar-free interlude, gutteral chanting like the nightmare version of new-agey Gregorian revival. Elsewhere, 2008′s Dømkirke had the band pulling ungodly rumbles from the massive 16th century organ at Rokslide Cathedral, Norway.
Christian Fennesz plays Charles Matthews ‘Amoroso’ (Touch)
And into the light… A 7″ offshoot of Touch Record’s ongoing Spire project (below) which focuses on organ-based and organ-inspired works. 2300 years on, the pipe organ still mystifies. An acoustic synthesizer, one of the earliest machines, it’s clearly been designed to direct force at the body as well as emit musical notes. “Audible at five miles, offensive at two, and lethal at one,” was the contemporary description of the 10th century organ at Winchester said to require 70 men to operate its bellows. Note the mastering credit on this release: Jason Goz at Transition Studios – the name attached to virtually every foundational dubstep release between 2003 and 2006; dubcutter for Jah Shaka, Mickey Finn, Grooverider, DJ EZ, Mala, Loefah, kode9… London bass flows through Transition.
BJNilsen ‘La Petite Chapelle – Rue Basses’ (Touch)
An excerpt from Spire: Live in Geneva Cathedral, Saint Pierre (2005). From the notes: “In a duet with himself, BJNilsen moved back and forth between organ and electronics. He established a link between the old sound inherited from centuries past and a new one being instantly generated. The organ sound was decomposed and in a way, tortured, in order to get at the core of the sound… BJNilsen’s piece ended with a background organ sound, as if to remind us that after all, even if altered, the organ had remained the core of the entire concept.”
Paul Jasen is a PhD candidate in Cultural Mediations at Carleton University. His research focuses on low-frequency sonic experience. He also DJs under the names Autonomic and Mr. Bump. Writing and mixes at Deeptime.net & Riddim.ca.
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Our seventh VT Audio Edition has been released! Contributed by London-based Simon Longo (aka Dithernoise), "Flux" is collaboration with photographer Era Vati that explores the "cross-contamination between sound and drawing as a gesture through an electro-acoustic system." Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.
note: This post is adapted from a talk that I intended to turn into an article for academic review. It was posted to my personal blog Complex Fields this past December. No citations here for now, will add later.
The Palm Pre is an interface I can speak of primarily as an object represented in use, since I’ve barely used the thing. (In fact, I recently downgraded my phone so that I don’t have email or web in my pocket.)
The Pre is an interface experience situated within some very particular rhetoric by its marketers and fans. As with many other mobile technologies, the creators of the Pre, its operating system and marketing campaigns set out to identify their product with the expansion of individual freedom through autonomy and self-determination.
As an interface, the Pre and its creators faced some very specific challenges in this effort, since Apple had beat them so soundly to the punch. As my colleague Lisa Nakamura points out, Steve Jobs performed a masterful display of agency through interface at the iPhone rollout.
The Pre’s answer to this represents a substantive departure, countering “boom” with “bing.”
My ability to speak about this device at all despite having barely used it is an indicator of how strong a presence interfaces can take as performed objects. While admitting to an incomplete analysis without attending to actual use, I’ll dive in here to describe how I see mobility understood and granted through this object’s representations and rhetorics.
The Pre - which I initially misunderstood as sharing the name of my favorite French poem - was heralded early on as Palm’s return to its former place as King of handheld interface design. In what looks now like a last-ditch effort, Palm brought on developer Jon Rubinstein, a key figure in the design of the original iPod. The Pre and its new operating system was Rubinstein’s first big contribution to the company; not long after the phone’s announcement, he was named CEO. Expectations were high, and Palm stock prices began to climb upon the Pre’s announcement in early 2009.
Among the standout features of the phone’s design was the operating system feature dubbed Synergy. This timely innovation marries one’s various contact lists and calendars across multiple social media platforms to create a single dashboard to access them all. One technology writer and market strategist described it as “the ability to integrate personal and business information into one cohesive view,” and compliments the Pre for “showing off how mobile is the intersection between business and personal lives.”
This, and the phone’s multitasking capability, is clearly the feature that Palm decided to push in its expensive rollout marketing campaign.
This portable interface promises power through mobility - while the subject, whom the script names “Anima” barely lifts a finger. The mobility promised is one of potential for movement between disparate social spheres, a promise of ease where the flaneurs of earlier modernities experienced only shock.
The problem of experiencing awkward social confluences is itself a sign of economic mobility. The need for smooth flow between social spaces in this case indicates not a changed polis as it did for Baudelaire or Benjamin, but rather an increase in one’s potential for movement – a change not in one’s shared environment but in an one’s prospects for moving through disparate environments. So the campaign needed to emphasize more than mere power through movement – the Pre’s marketers needed to display a sense of mastery over any space, and even a proclivity toward mastering new spaces. To this end, the language of flow, repetition, and rhythm pervade the whole campaign.
It’s not insignificant that the Pre’s function as buffer or lubricant for social mobility is visualized here through other bodies. The dancers “re-arrange themselves” for the main character, symbolizing in small part the actual people in her networks, and in large part the data streamed through her device. Anima’s fluent interface performance seems all the more powerful in contrast to the gargantuan task of choreographing such a huge group of dancers. Thus power is not only granted through the promise of mobility, but through picturing mobility as a relational phenomenon. Like the first violinist of a large orchestra, Anima’s autonomous movements seem all the more expert through contrast with the huge coordination behind her.
By employing a whole military consort in the production of this ad – and it is a group of students from a Beijing martial arts academy – the piece inadvertently also visualizes the ways in which digital mobilities depend on whole other networks of differing mobilities, people required to move in more and less regimented ways to produce the user’s expanded realm. I’m thinking here at least of the manufacturing and infrastructure laborers who support the networked consumer electronics industry – who probably, like the dancers here, differ from Anima in their skin color. But I’m also thinking of the global infrastructure necessary to any movement outside the proximal opportunities into which one is born.
In other words, the rhetoric around the Pre’s interface promises smooth navigation of bumps only possible for an economically mobile person, a person who moves. To desire this interface is to desire not just a solution to a problem, but to perhaps desire a problem that itself carries social and economic status. This was a significant marketing innovation, about as good as one could hope for in the battle with Apple. (And I should add - I totally bought it, I’ve been wanting one of these devices from the get-go.)
Pre’s choices in support of this mission were extremely smart. They knew they had to go all-out to even approach the iPhone in cache and presence. So they went with Modernista, the “high concept” ad agency perhaps known to most of you through their work on the Product Red campaign. The firm’s first smart choice in this direction was to hire director Tarsem Singh for the video spot. Tarsem has deep experience in shooting artful television ads, and like Michel Gondry and Neil Blomkamp, established an audience for later feature films through the creation of a unique commercial aesthetic. His two films, The Cell and The Fall, both feature female leads with uncanny psychic abilities; if you’ve seen them, the character of Anima will seem more familiar to you.
Tarsem specializes in the construction of non-places, dream-spaces that seem out of time or space, especially those that are rooted in individual subjective fantasy. Through costuming and art direction, these spaces often depend on the same sort of quasi-orientalist state-lessness conjured in the Palm ad. It’s the latest in a long line of travel fantasies for Western subjects. Especially interesting about this manifestation, however, is the decision on the part of Palm and Modernista to release a significant amount of behind-the-scenes footage from the commercial shoot. The ad company’s Youtube stream carries severalshortdocumentaries about location shooting in China, and Modernista ad workers even posted images from their travels on the company’s blog.
The result of all this is a second layer of experience for the brand’s true fans. Those who are sold on the Pre’s pitch as a sign of, and tool for, social mobility and control, can take a tour of Palm’s process, where the non-place of “Anima’s World” is replaced with the non-place of the self-contained tourist. Actress Tamara Hope is barely glimpsed in these quick, actively cropped scenes, escorted to the world of the shoot by a group of men close at hand. Since we barely even glimpse her face, we know she is safe in her own world, smoothly transferred across alien cityscapes.
These short films invite fans like myself, seduced by the Pre’s promise of smooth, self-contained management through interface use, to imagine a world of creative mobility, traveling wherever art demands. And of course these scenes of safe mobility are produced through contrast with the less mobile locals, ox-driving or bicycle-riding Chinese who travel at slower speeds to create the illusion of speed for the globetrotting creatives. The picture we get of life in China, of happy children carrying on an ancient tradition, of farmers on dirt roads, is a far cry from the picture we might get from visiting the Pre’s spaces of production, south in Taiwan.
The website for Chi Mei industries describes its work environment in terms of mobile citizenship, rather than in terms of timeless national identity, and so would probably be a poor contrast for Palm’s purposes anyway. Though depictions of the less mobile will work as contrasting material for the mobile elite, better to deal with the seemingly immobile, so as to make the mobile appear to be moving all the faster. We are also spared the reminder of the labor conditions that make such movement possible.
As you may know, reception of the “Flow” campaign was mixed, and you probably know by now that the Pre could not save Palm. The company was recently purchased by HP, with some analysts suggesting that there was really no value left in the company anyway. Market shares this year put Palm way behind in the smartphone market. But still, shortly after the ad rollout, we see results like these, in which the campaign seems to have succeeded in creating interest and desire.
The ads, and the device, certainly created attention in the consumer electronics community, where the character of “Anima” was quickly dubbed “creepy girl,” inspiring a meme-storm of parodies.
'The Palm Pre girl is the first human we’ve seen who is way down in the uncanny valley.' - from the blog Geek Woman Speaks
What are we to make of this mixed reception? The smartphone definitely delivered on its design promises. Fans love the thing, and it’s more likely that a high price and an association with service provider Sprint were to blame for the its lack of commercial success. Modernista executive creative director Gary Koepke claimed to have been very pleased with the campaign’s reception, stating that “…we knew it would be polarizing people to have a woman not shout at them and tell an interesting story.” We might look at the polarized reception of the campaign through the lens of advertising critics such as crazy George Parker, who’s been proclaiming a consumer revolt against high-concept ad campaigns.
But it might also be worth considering this split through a lens of relational mobilities. To my eyes, Modernista tried to correct or adjust the campaign through a couple of lateads in which Anima never turns her back to us, and always maintains eye contact. Their testing must have determined that Anima was not occupied enough with us as viewers. Why might this be a problem? Television viewers have been comfortable watching women operate technology from a distance for decades.
Perhaps, in this case, our status as onlookers made us feel creepy, given the degree to which Anima seemed immersed in a world of her own social control. Anima’s role in the ads is something of a stationary flaneuse, a spatial mover who lets her fingers do the walking. The creeped-out audience may have also been dismayed by the control she commanded, especially as a woman at the helm – thus this blogger’s comparison of Anima to Star Trek’s Borg Queen.
So for chumps like me, caught up in the sublime order of commanding super-human complexity with ease and fluency, the Pre’s promise of mobility offered a route to pursue, an object to purchase and a network to traverse. For those not caught up in the hype, perhaps this seemed like an impossible route to follow. Or perhaps, like those alienated by abstract art, Anima’s haters would prefer not to be made so aware of the structures of command.
As in the avant-garde’s traditional relationship to “low” or popular culture, the relationship between Anima’s fans and detractors is dynamic. They set each other apart and create energy, propelling one another forward in different directions. In this regard, Modernista’s campaign was a success on multiple levels. Fans like myself could vicariously identify with users and perhaps identify as mobile through “getting” a high-concept and difficult campaign. The Pre’s true users could move to identify with a condition of easy social mobility, marked by the need for integration of disparate worlds, but also perhaps by the relational distance of identifying with the avant garde or the creepy, the uncanny. It’s not insignificant that Modernista also designed an opening animation for the phone upon initial startup by a new customer. Here, the new user sees Anima’s landscape from her perspective, and moves into the seat of control.
Thus I would argue that the Pre campaign functions much as modern art has for the last hundred years, establishing possibilities for social and economic mobility in relation to lesser mobilities, through the creation of disparate classes of users and non-users, fans and detractors. And where the center of the old avant-garde was the picture, the 2-dimensional plane, the center of this one is the interface, or what some designers refer to as a 5-dimensional experience.
I’ll conclude here with one other Anima-hater video from Youtube, but one which I offer as a teaser for my other work on representations of interface:
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Our sixth VT Audio Edition has been released! Contributed by Montreal-based Shane Turner (aka Turner of Wheels), "Blotted" is undoubtedly the most energetic submission we've received for the project yet. Turner's mix chops up a selection of found vocal material and incorporates it into a series of cascading rhythm tracks that (at times) evokes comparisons to leftfield dubstep and some of the classic output released on Phthalo records. Jump through to the release page for more info and a download link.
Earlier this month I attended parts of the transmediale 11 festival in Berlin, and I thought I would share some of the ideas and discussions I encountered during my festival meanderings, on subjects like freedom, power, knowledge, privacy and openness…all tied to the main theme of the festival itself: Response:ability. Here are some notes on some of what I saw and heard…
Mozilla’s Mark Surman, in his Marshall McLuhan lecture, focused on the idea of freedom as a framework for talking about the web. Mark has adapted Richard Stallman’s four freedoms (to run, study, redistribute and use software) to his own version of use, study, remix, share. He argued that this type of freedom, the freedom of open-endedness, of something never finished, is built into the fabric of the web itself, it is an inherent quality ‘baked in’. Or in other words, “the web sez ‘build me’”. Like Lego!
[photo: Benjamin Esham]
This open-endedness and the freedom to develop without asking permission is what fuels rapid innovation, benefiting grass roots organizations, global capital and anyone else who builds off of the tools and standards available for adaptation and reuse. We cannot take for granted these inherent freedoms, and Mark believes that we are now at an important point in time where decisions must be made about how all of this will continue to work and how freedom will continue to be built into the web. Using the example of the history of innovation and decision making in cinema, he pointed to one way in which Mozilla is trying to ensure continued web freedom: their Popcorn project which uses the native video handling of HTML5 to develop “hypervideo” tools to integrate video with content from just about any other web source. Mozilla also sponsored the first Open Web Award at transmediale this year, which went to the Evan Roth’s Graffiti Markup Language (GML) project.
Some links:
webmonkey.com/2010/08/mozillas-popcorn-project-adds-extra-flavor-to-web-video
webmademovies.etherworks.ca/popcorndemo
blog.mozilla.com/blog/2011/02/07/first-transmediale-open-web-award
I had the opportunity to interview Scott Kildall and Nathaniel Stern, whose ‘Wikipedia Art’ project was nominated for the transmediale award. I have transcribing and editing to do and will post the complete interview online when it is ready. Their project interested me because it takes as its source ‘material’ Wikipedia itself, it’s culture and the power structures that drive it. Through an intervention which took the form of a Wikipedia article and the ensuing discussion and documentation surrounding it Nathaniel and Scott have brought into question the mechanisms of knowledge production, the pursuit of truth and objectivity and the perceived authority of Wikipedia. Their project seemed to push a lot of buttons, provoking some heated debate of whether to keep the page in Wikipedia or not and whether it was in fact an act of vandalism. While Scott and Nathaniel are both proclaimed fans of Wikipedia, they hope that their project revealed the need for greater media literacy in the use of this resource.
wikipediaart.org
Recent NY Times article about Wikipedia gender gap
Tackling the issues surrounding privacy online, Mushon Zer-Aviv presented a talk called “Getting Intimate with Invisible Audiences” in which he spoke about the privacy debate and the binary opposition it promotes between public and private poles of what should actually be a spectrum of more complex concepts, like confidentiality and intimacy. This binary opposition both dumbs down social interaction online and taints privacy with suspicion – if you have nothing to hide, why do you need to keep information private? He talked about Danah Boyd’s idea of the invisible audience as a characteristic of mediated publics and the way in which the resulting state of visibility can both assure the functioning of power in public spaces, and yet also become a means of publishing. In his conclusion, Mushon highlighted the importance of not only defining the protocols for interaction in these new mediated publics, but of defining the culture that will allow a broader spectrum of relationships to exist in them.
I highly recommend reading the details of his talk, which are available here: mushon.com/blog/2010/09/21/getting-intimate-with-invisible-audiences
At the sister festival, club transmediale (CTM) I went to see a performance called “Loud Luggage / Booming Baggage” by GX Jupitter-Larsen (The Haters). This performance is documented on his website as follows: “On Feb 2, GX Jupitter-Larsen squeezed an amplified toy shovel against an amplified suitcase. (#358).” I was with a friend, at the back of a small crowded room. My friend, who is taller than me, was trying to take a photo and I asked him if he could see anything. A woman nearby replied “You don’t need to see, it is a sound performance.” I thought this comment was interesting given the CTM festival theme of #LIVE!? and the many different and illusive things that ‘live’ can mean in electronic music and sound performances. In the stage performances of the Haters, the emphasis is more on the action taking place rather than on the creation of sound for it’s own sake, so in not being able to see anything I felt I was missing something integral. Hopefully I will have a future opportunity to both see and hear a Haters performance.
jupitter-larsen.com
This field report was cross-posted to the Artengine blog.
The above embed is a hot off the press field report 'unmediated autodocumentary' filmed by KS12/Emergence Collective at Transmediale over the last week. Loads of insight from an international cast of luminaries, there are worse folks to spend 20 minutes with…
Clipped from a recent press release announcing Face to Facebook by Paolo Cirio:
In an attempt to free personal data as Facebook’s exclusive property we spent a few months downloading public information from one million profiles (including pictures). Immersing ourselves in the resulting database was a hallucinatory experience as we dove into hundreds of thousands of profile pictures and found ourselves intoxicated by the endless smiles, gazes and often leering expressions. After a few weeks we had to face the evidence. All that people wanted was to attract new people, have more relationships, to express and receive love through their digital traits. But they were trapped by Facebook owning their data and restricting their actions with primitive privacy rules. They wanted more than just their restricted circles of "friends" and they wanted it quickly and easily. Our mission was to give all these virtual identities a new shared place to expose themselves freely, breaking Facebook’s constraints and boring social rules.
…yielding lovelyfaces.com (screen capture above), a new—completely unauthorized—dating website that employs facial recognition software to sort and classify users.
Face to Facebook was executed by Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico (of Neural) and completes the Hacking Monopolism Triology (see Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir) which has provoked important dialogues about agency and the shadow cast by the proprietary web. The above demo video and the project site provide additional information, be sure to read the statement as well (one can't help but love the line about "smiling in the eternal party" – it is pure poetry).
[Skylar Tibbits / Logic Matter, 60 unit working prototype / 2010]
FABRICATE is an International Peer Reviewed Conference, Publication and Exhibition hosted by the Bartlett School of Architecture to be held on 15-16 of April 2011 in London. It will bring together pioneers in design and making within architecture, construction, engineering, manufacturing, materials technology and computation. Discussion on key themes include: how digital fabrication technologies are enabling new creative and construction opportunities, the difficult gap that exists between digital modelling and its realisation, material performance and manipulation, off-site and on-site construction, interdisciplinary education, economic and sustainable contexts.
Tickets are now on sale and can be purchased here.
In addition to a stellar lineup of speakers, Fabricate will also feature a exhibition including work by: Gramazio & Kohler, Achim Menges, Enric Ruiz Geli, Simon Schleicher, Moritz Fleischmann, Oliver Tessmann, Mark Fahlbusch, Klaus Bollinger, Manfred Grohmann, Markus Schein, Hanno Stehling & Fabian Scheurer, Joe MacDonald, Tim Lucas, Chiara Tuffanelli, Cristiano Ceccato, Paul Madden & Geoff Crowther, Lucas Epp, Gerald Epp, Santiago Diaz, AL_A, Xavier De Kestelier, Skylar Tibbits, Wes McGee, Brandon Clifford, Parke MacDowell, Diana Tomova, Kendra Byrne, Nick Rebeck, Misha Smith, Vlad Tenu, Mette Ramsgard Thomsen, Karin Bech, Martin Tamke, Ermis Adamantidis, Marco Verde, Mark David Hosale, Jelle Feringa, Nat Chard, Asbjørn Søndergaard, Per Dombernowsky, Phil Ayres, Nick Puckett, Marta Male-alemany, Jeroen van Ameijde, Victor Viña, Peter Webb, Mick Pinner, William Trossell, Matthew Shaw and Peter Donders.