Filed under: media, music, technology | Tags: cycling 74, granular synthesis, IRCAM, littlebits, max/msp, tim hecker
From a post at “we make money not art”, I found this project called littleBits. The idea is a fairly simple one:
littleBits is a growing library of preassembled circuit boards, made easy by tiny magnets. All logic and circuitry is pre-engineered, so you can play with electronics without knowing electronics. Tiny magnets act as connectors and enforce polarity, so you can’t put things in the wrong way. And all the schematics will be shared under an opensource license so you can download, upload, suggest new bits and hopefully see them come to life.
Basically, the project means to democratize the creation of physical technology in much the same way that Cycling ‘74 and IRCAM democratized the means of granular synthesis, or the synthesis of sound from the bottom up, the freeing of the most microscopic materials of sound sampling, allowing one to create their own electronic instruments. They did this first with MAX/MSP, and, in fact, even more so with PureData. (Thanks, Miller Puckette).
Tim Hecker discussed the need for granular synthesis in an electronic music issue of the now-defunct Parachute Magazine, and I think the argument he makes holds for physical, “black-boxed” technology as well as it does for electronic music. The essential idea is that the fetishization of technology or neo-naturalism are both backward ways of dealing with technological development. That is to say, we need to examine the technology insofar as it allows us to move beyond it, rather than allow ourselves to be seduced by a meditation on the state of a single technology, to fixate rather than innovate:
Perhaps a form of electronic music will come which will leave the technology it uses as only a trace — so that the aesthetic field opens up again to allow for spaces which are free from the suffocation of medium-based discourses; an electronic music which leaves its technology as just a murmur.
We do this precisely through, he suggests, granular synthesis rather than pre-programmed sound production software. The beauty computer-made music is, with relatively minimal expertise, how one gains an astounding control over the whole range of possible sounds. LittleBits seems to be making the same possible for those without a complex understanding of circuitry and mathematics (one of the problems holding the spread of granular synthesis is the grasp of mathematics it requires, though, anyone who passed trigonometry should find it well within the realm of possibility to learn).
LittleBits, if you read the interview, seems to require only that you match colors and conceive of simple circuits. It is certainly a first stage, but I think it is the first stage of something wonderful: freeing the basic materials of electronic technologies so that people can make them for themselves. Perhaps some day we will have LittleBits stores next to craft stores: it seems to be a potentially complex but basically simple kit with a nearly infinite number of interesting and cool possibilities. The number of possible basic units is both staggering and encouraging. The idea presents people with the building blocks of their own electronic experimentation, no complex machinery, start-up capital or fancy engineering education required. Maybe some will get a taste for it and move on to more advanced experimentation.
Obviously, this system by itself will not replace consumer technologies with a DIY culture, but projects like this are an exciting step in the correct direction.
Which is all to say: make yr own technology!
BBC NEWS | Technology | Stephen Fry: The internet and Me.
This article has excerpts from an interview Stephen Fry gave. He is uncommonly even-handed and gently provocative in his criticisms of both the internet and critics of the internet. Certainly worth reading for a man who personifies the concept that there is no “high” or “low” culture. Only culture.
Finer points:
From a defense of abbreviation: “Read Byron’s letters. Never was a mind more perfectly expressed and yet in this fantastically compressed form.”
On email and the liberation of the voice: Suddenly there’s wit, charm, self-deprecation, self-knowledge, understanding – all kinds of qualities.
It’s a literary form in the most basic sense that you’re writing and it’s rather wonderful. The phone will be seen, I think, as a terrible aberration.
On why books will not die with technology: And we love them. I love them. You don’t throw away your books when you buy a computer. You keep both. The beauty of living in the present day is you don’t abandon the past. The past co-exists.
Filed under: NYTimes, literature, media, oulipo, technology | Tags: NYTimes, slate, technology, twitter
Much of what we do online has obvious analogues in the past: E-mail and IM replace letters and face-to-face chatting. Blogging is personal pamphleteering. Skype is the new landline. Social networks let us map our real-life connections to the Web. It’s not surprising, then, that these new tools deliver obvious social utility—Facebook is the best way to get in touch with old friends, and instant messaging is the quickest way to collaborate with your colleagues across the country. Twitter is different. It’s not a faster or easier way of doing something you did in the past, unless you were one of those people who wrote short “quips” on bathroom stalls. It’s a totally alien form of communication. Microblogging mixes up features of e-mail, IM, blogs, and social networks to create something not just novel but also confusing, and doing it well takes time and patience. That’s not to say it isn’t useful; to some people in some situations, Twitter is irreplaceable. But it is not—or, at least, not yet—a necessary way to stay socially relevant in the information age.
via The reluctant Twitterer’s dilemma. – By Farhad Manjoo – Slate Magazine
This may be true, but this is no reason to swear off Twitter. Yes, I am blogging about Twitter, I understand the absurdity of it. But might it be valuable to introduce a new form of communication that has no direct antecedent? Doesn’t this just mean that it has untapped potential for a differentiation in our manner of communication? I’m not sold that twitter is completely useless, though I am sold on the idea that it is completely distracting. Thoreau made an interesting point on the telegraph:
We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer the new, but perchance the first news that will leak through the broad, flapping, American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.
On another point: there was a very interesting NYTimes article back in September that spoke to what sociologists call “ambient awareness,” which is, say, the awareness we gain of a person’s moods, health, etc, by sitting in the same room and consciously or unconsciously picking up on small, mostly non-verbal cues. Maybe your friend’s eyes are a bit red, or they are slower in responding than usual, seem sluggish, maybe there is just something about them that just seems different. The article compares the inundation of data we receive from social media to this sort of awareness. Granted, many people seem to view Twitter or Facebook as a contest in which you are required to make as many friends as possible, and this seems ridiculous to me, but as a tool to keep up with people you are sincerely interested in, it simply has no parallel or better in the past.
The communication media of the past had a more direct purpose of conveying an important piece of information: letters were written and rewritten so as to guarantee the truth and nuance of the prose, telegrams were studies in the economy of language, even an email is more important-information oriented than Twitter. Twitter is undirected communication, it is neither completely for someone else nor entirely for yourself. It allows for the harmless presentation of absolutely mundane details without the risk of wasting someone’s time who would rather be doing something else: “I ate a sandwich.” “My throat hurts.” “Celtics down already!” etc. The details are mundane, but may have the effect that a tv often does for people living alone: there are voices in the room. You gain an ambient awareness of those you follow. You can read a book, work on your thesis, etc, but there are voices in the room with you. Things my friends would find too mundane to tell me in an email are exactly the sort of thing they would mention on Twitter or if we were in person, just sitting down for a meal, or maybe watching tv together.
Furthermore, some people are truly masters of the short form: Felix Fenéon for instance wrote little more than tiny little stories based on the news of the day–which, incidentally, someone is posting on Twitter. Marshall Mcluhan also has a ghost-twitterer, and the form would make sense for any writer with a gift for terse, densely packed statements. As an illustration, here are some examples from NYRB’s collection of Feneon’s stories titled Novels in Three Lines:
A dishwasher from Nancy, Vital Frerotte, who had just come back from Lourdes cured forever of tuberculosis, died Sunday by mistake.
Before jumping into the Seine, where he died, M. Doucrain had written in his notebook, “Forgive me, Dad. I like you.”
The Oulipo did wonders with constraint. Michael Agger in Slate brings up the possibility of Twittering as a new sort of Zen Koan. Or what of Twitter as the possibility for a haiku?
- old pond . . .
- a frog leaps in
- water’s sound
Which is all to say that the “lowered” level of discourse isn’t as bad as some would make it out to be. Sure, people will not always put in the thought to make a Twitter post as pithy as Oscar Wilde would (nor can we be sure Oscar Wilde wouldn’t be a boring person to follow on twitter), but the form is not to blame. It allows for both profundity and banality, both of which are valuable in equal measure. As for the banality of it: living in Scotland, I can keep up with my friends in the US, and they can keep up with me. I am privy to the small details of the lives of people I love, whether they happen to be witty (as they sometimes are) or just mundane (as most of our daily details are). Is that really so terrible?
And, in honor of my father who would always remind me when I was complaining that there was nothing good on tv that “It has an off button,” I will remind you that if you don’t like it, no one is making you use it.
Filed under: media, technology | Tags: digital indexing, facebook, memory, new york times, photography
My father sent me this article this morning, from the New York Times Magazine about those who grow up not knowing a time before facebook. The author, Peggy Orenstein, seems to place a fundamental divide between those who didn’t grow up with it and those who have–she seems to think that those under the age of 25 have no past (no pre-facebook past, that is) to look back on, that facebook will fundamentally change the way that young people grow up.
Yes, I think to a certain extent, this is true. At least that many don’t really have a truly pre-facebook past to look back on. Yes, we are probably growing up differently than her generation. The pitfalls of being a child, of growing into an adult are different: as Liz Lemon notes, there are way more things for a guy not to call you on now. However, this is not better or worse, only different. The landscape Orenstein lays out is from the perspective of someone who does not accept the technology as a matter of fact, but as a generational quirk, something for the kids, the way many generations seem to view the new:
Six of my nieces will head off to college over the next several years. Some have been Facebooking since middle school. Even as they leave home, then, they will hang onto that “home” button. That’s hard for me to imagine. As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?
Fear of technology, of change, is endemic to all gaps between generations–she seems to want to question whether or not the new changes in technology are positive or negative, as if it were possible to simply return to a time before facebook or myspace when no one had any of their photos or information published on the internet. But it’s just the way it is. Since my life straddles the pre- and post-facebook landscape, I can say that it is true, it can be remarkably messy to drag an internet trail behind you, messier than simply being able to leave. A physical absence no longer means true absence, every person who has an iphone in their pocket can be triangulated and tacked-down.
- From Jay Leek and Karin Higgins (no relation) in UC Davis Magazine
It might be harder to escape your past, but this fact might present an opportunity for the consideration of a basic lesson: physically escaping the evidence or location of your past in person does not mean escaping your past. As Orenstein ably observes, Faulkner would love facebook, the haunting evidence of our undead pasts. It reminds us that simply because the past was once hidden, does not mean it was gone. I think my generation and the next will likely have to be more comfortable with their pasts, with seeing records of the radical breaks and cuts that one must make in growing up. We will learn, maybe more than the past generations, that a person is not identical to itself across time. We will learn, maybe, that one doesn’t need to leave their past to make a radical break, to grow up, to continue becoming different.
And to the idea of the entireties of our lives being encoded, digitized and indexed by facebook, google, etc. I think this idea, implicit in the article as a sort of neo-luddite critique rather than an ethical or political one, is reactionary. It reminds me of the articles people wrote when the cassette tape first became a viable commercial medium–terrified that it would kill the radio. If people could record songs whenever they wanted to, what’s to keep them listening to the radio? Or buying records for that matter? To fear or criticize the digitization of lives is a pointless and impossible task. Energy could be better spent fostering a greater critical engagement with the effects, ethics and politics of this digitization, rather than simply raging against change we fear.
The anatomy of a polaroid pack
Digitization cannot replace our memories. To take a picture is not to record a moment, to post on facebook is not to archive that moment. A photograph is not a memory. It is a suspension, a willful suspension. Our lives, in a very real way, exceed our attempts to record them, a photograph or a video is framed, our lives are not. Our sensory, spatial, and temporal experience exceeds any attempt to encode or capture it. This is all to say: our lives, even though they appear to be recorded, are still much richer and noisier, more complex and variegated than any recording would or could ever indicate. And furthermore, there is still a great deal of life lived off the internet, and that can never be put on the internet no matter how much we attempt to record. Our lives will always exceed our recordings of it. A recording is no more than a trace.
The important thing is to examine the ways that this recording affects our memories of real experience. It doesn’t kill or replace our memories, it interacts with them, it operates as a new item introduced into an already complex and dynamic system of remembering. Our memories still work in ways that supplant and alter physical evidence. To remember something is to recreate it. Insofar as memories are never strictly factual, the recording of facts or visual evidence is rather irrelevant to the process of real memory. I agree we should be critical of the system, we should pay attention to it. But people talk about this technology as if it were something that could be changed–this is not the case. They worry, their children live it is as if it were the way it had always been. It will be the same for us and our children, too.
It’s not simply better or worse, necessarily, just different. Not a thing to worry about, though certainly something we should be paying attention to.
Filed under: media, music, thesis | Tags: consonance, consonants, dissonance, language, music, waveform, wildstyle
I am going to start posting some things from my thesis as I attempt to work them out. Sometimes these ideas will be more complete than others. This one, for instance, is the beginning of an idea but could possibly be interesting to others. I have the aim of taking this further and using consonance and dissonance as organizing principles for other sorts of realms: linguistic, political, social, etc. etc. I’m just trying to bang out some relations here, as it stands.
[[[Consonan(ts/ce)]]]
While a vowel sound is formed in the larynx, and only receives its special quality by the conformation of the oral cavity through which it is sounded, a consonant sound is wholly or mainly produced in the mouth, or the mouth and nose. Vowels thus consist of pure voice or musical sound; consonants are either simple noises or noises combined in various degrees with voice. But a noise may itself be of a continuous and rhythmical character, as a (more…)
Filed under: human, media, politics, technology | Tags: ethics, facial recognition, google, memex, memory, mylifebits, politics, radiolab, slate, technology review
The MIT technology review has posted this article about the new wave of facial recognition software, which, as they succinctly state, is cool but creepy.
In their attempt to make index all information and make it universally available, Google has made another jump: they can now recognize your face in pictures. This brings up a whole new debate regarding the ethics of photography: it is not only the famous who will have to deal with their likeness being used without their explicit permission. Google, while you are tagging photos using their Picassa software, asks you for the real names and email addresses of those in your photographs. This database, as the article points out, is not stored on your computer, but on Google’s servers. Read–this is the same place they store your search history, your documents, which news stories you read, etc… Google may, in fact, someday soon have a nearly comprehensive database of each of us who use Google with photos, email addresses, addresses, pictures of your house (their map software’s “street level” option).
Now, I do not mean to be alarmist, but in light of the serious discussion that attended the birth of the camera and the ongoing discussion of the ethics of photography, should there not be more attention paid to this company that is not-so-quietly indexing our lives? This is no new idea, the indexing of our lives, but whereas it was originally posited as an option by people such as Gordon Bell and his MyLifeBits project (which creates a searchable database of everything he has ever seen, read, heard, etc…), this indexing is being placed on us from the outside, by our friends who may not be aware that they are indexing our faces, names, and addresses for Google. We all use Google and find it incredibly helpful, but this just seems ridiculous that this is passing over in a relatively uncontested manner.
As for the relationship of this tagging and indexing to human memory: I remember a radiolab (fantastic radio show, by the way) episode in which they discuss the scientific discovery of the physical mechanism used by the brain to store memories. The first step after this was to figure out how to erase them. So, they discuss erasing the memories of soldiers with PTSD–an encouraging idea. It also includes a discussion of the way that a memory is a recreation of your brain-state during the original event. When will we start using free Google software to index our memories? As opposed to Gordon Bell’s project, in which everything is stored on one’s own computer, we will be storing it on Google’s servers. The novelty of it will probably convince us to use it, and likely with little caution: we will use it to remember what we were supposed to pick up at the grocery store, but it will also remember things we may not want it to, like time spent privately with a loved one. Or maybe we do want it to remember that.
In a less ethical and more personal domain: do we really want everything remembered for us this way? Though the nuances of memory can often be frustrating, it is important to remember that to recall a memory is, in a way, to recreate the event. The recalling of a memory actually changes the memory each time it is recalled. I honestly wonder if the undiscriminating indexing of the events of our lives would be detrimental to the processes and mechanisms of our memories, of our own self-creation, of the fictionalizing of the self, for better or worse. Call it the literature of the memory: without it we would have no Proust, Nabokov, etc. etc. etc. etc. Though, it could be argued that there is a part of this mechanism that would escape indexing, I think the remainder in this equation is hardly enough to justify the subtraction of the powers and poetry of our own memories. Maybe I’m a neo-luddite, but I doubt it.
As a result of all these issues, and following the debacle exceedingly well laid out in this Slate Magazine discussion blog regarding Facebook’s “Terms of Use,” (which are not really terms of use), the not-so-distant discussion of the near-impossibility of deleting a Facebook account and your information from its server, and recent controversy surrounding internet-announced (and sometimes carried out) suicides, I think that these are ethical issues that deserve quite a bit more legal, philosophical, and political attention.
I wonder what happens when not only does The Memex nearly become a reality in terms of a consumer product, but also our likenesses and information are stored by a giant American Corporation (we already see just how little accountability American corporations have). What is to stop Google from selling this information without our knowledge? This is quite a bit of political and social power they are storing on their servers, and it seems their ability to index will only grow.
What part of our lives do we want to keep for ourselves? It will only get easier from here on in to index everything about ourselves. Will it someday be seen as daring and/or backwards to refuse the assistance of the internet and computer databases in indexing our lives? Is it daring or backwards to keep yourself to yourself?
Where is our sense of caution? Has it been overwhelmed by our magpie-like fascination with shiny objects and new technologies? Who do we want to be in relation to this new technology? I would like to call for a more stringent system of ethics in response to these developments. The prospects are too terrifying if we fail to act.
Again, the Onion is strangely prescient on this point.
Filed under: literature, media, technology | Tags: human skull, phonograph, rilke, synesthesia
In his 1919 essay “Primal Sound,” Rainer Maria Rilke details his fascination with the human skull en route to a discussion of the phonograph. “The coronal structure of the skull (this would first have to be investigated) has–let us assume–a certain similarity to the close wavy line which the needle of a phonograph engraves on the receiving, rotating cylinder of the apparatus.” Ignoring all the implications to the connections between the unconscious and media, it is fascinating to see what Rilke suggest we do with this, to run a phonograph needle across these ridges on the skull, producing “a series of sounds, music…” This is his Primal Sound.
Not long after, and in partial reference to his earlier idea, he speaks of the experience of Arabic poems, “which seem to owe their existence to the simultaneous and equal contributions from all five sense…” as nothing short of “presence of mind and grace of love.”
What strikes me most about this essay are his consistent nods in the direction of synesthesia. Media, it seems, is both synaesthesia and metaphor. Whereas a metaphor draws it’s power from the traversal of linguistic boundaries, media draws its power from the traversal of sensual boundaries, or to grossly oversimplify a neurological phenomenon, synesthesia. The phonograph takes something we can touch and turns it into something we can hear, or vice versa using the very same needle. Media is a synesthetic metaphor, translating the stuff of one sense into another.
Digital media is the logical conclusion of this synesthetic trajectory, placing all mediated sensory experience on the same plane in that they are all derived from and reduced to ones and zeroes. Now we have programs that will make music from a picture, or programs that will create a visual from a song. You can take an essay you wrote and put it in to a program and come out with a sound, or a video. The possibilities are endless. With a little bit of imagination, we can all be now synaesthetes. We can, as Rilke wanted to do with the phonograph needle and the human skull, “experience it, as it makes itself felt, thus transformed, in another field of sense.”
Media, as always, shows both the capacity to equalize (now Nabokov isn’t the only one that can see alphabets in color), but also the capacity to rob us of our own natural imaginative and cognitive abilities through overdependence.
Filed under: media
It looks like Michael Crichton was right about the immanent death of print media: http://www.slate.com/id/2192382/
What else was he right about?
