five takes a reductionist approach to the similarly obsessive practices of blogging and listmaking, presented as an open series of short and often playful lists.
It's a project that I started in 2006 but then left dormant for some time. I really liked the idea, so I'm happy to say that it's recently been rekindled with a handful of new authors.
The unspoken reliance on being wired into the system only becomes visible when the wires are severed -- which is unfortunately my current situation, as I watch my laptop go through the latest of its death-throes, beginning with optical drive issues and now mutating into what I suspect to be logic board or IDE controller failure. Whatever, I'm laptopless for the moment, so only checking email sporadically.
Inevitably, the part of me that secretly wants to escape technology is rejoicing, as it's finally allowed the time to pick up one of the many unread books that seem to continually accumulate next to my bed...
I'm playing as Ad Hoc at this Saturday's Open Source City event in Liverpool, at the tail end of a diverse week of workshops and presentations. The set is going to be built around a glitchy live cutup of Kurt Schwitters' Ursonate, rendering this arrhythmic vocal piece into something metrical and (hopefully) danceable...
Also this week is the second What They Could Do: Escape! (Herne Hill, London) with one of our strongest lineups yet. Thursday 19th June night, free.
It's times like this I ask myself, Why the hell did I skip past every herb alpert record I ever came across when rummaging through charity shop vinyl? He is in.cred.ible.
The trumpet falling into the picture frame pool! The band playing on the stalls of an empty stadium! The trumpeter running across the beachfront! The army of Charlie Chaplin impersonators! The mysterious lone man at the end - Alpert himself?
Why did nobody ever tell me?
New stuff, and some old:
Platnik is the musical spawn of me and the endlessly skilled Mimi Leung. Though her current living situation (approximately 9,648km east of here) makes recording difficult at the moment, we've just finished roughly mastering our 6-track debut EP, which lurches around the graveyards of rave, drone and post-rock, in the murgy fog of an undead comedown.
It's available online in its entirety --
>>> FEAR OF ELECTRONS <<<
I've been gigging around more as Ad Hoc over the past few weeks, from a warehouse party in the industrial hinterland surrounding the Blackwall Tunnel, to next Wednesday's Cybersonica Çonic Social. As a consequence, I've spruced up the website with a series of new photos plus a recording of last night's live set at Dust, Clerkenwell.
There's also much more original material coming soon...
Accompanying text and images are now available for Subtext, the major project that I've been working on over the past few months. It's the first time that I've been involved in creating real, physical objects for an exhibition - not to mention the first complex electronic project that I've built - and so required a significant number of skills that were formerly alien to me. Thanks to all of the people who assisted in picking up said skills.
The images documenting the process should give an insight into what the installation looks like in action, in the absence of a good-quality video.
There's been a veritable blizzard of bookmarks swarming through my browser tabs over the past few days — convenient, as I'm enjoying the relative lull after the hectic weeks around Futuresonic.
For example,
this wall-bound bestiary;
this tongue-tripping delight;
this Gallic trove;
this subaquatic cartography;
this delving profile;
and
this bit-pop artistry.
I'm intending to post some photos and video of the Futuresonic work in the next few days. In the meantime, please enjoy this image of a bird in wellingtons, sent to me by my brother.
I won't repeat verbatim what I've just written on the Ad Hoc blog - but I'm playing in this guise, along with the Capsized Smiles, in Herne Hill this Friday. Should be a good'un, and, like the rest of the WTCD: Escape events, it's freee.
I'm intending to curate one of the later editions of the Escape series, and have been harvesting appealing propositions from around the UK for a riotous bleepfest. More on this soon.
Cmd-Shift-B.
Amazing.
I'm writing this from the Contact Theatre in Manchester, one of the main venues of Futuresonic08, in the midst of last-minute preparation for an installation commissioned by the wonderful SoundNetwork. For the duration of the festival, I'll be sat in a tipi outside the Contact alongside the other inhabitants of the Autonomous Village, an interdisciplinary high-tech shanty town — in a car park.
The commission itself is entitled Subtext, a light-based generative installation which responds to the network traffic of the other workstations in the tipi. While they're electronically participating in Werner Moebius' Sonic Biographies project, the nodes of Subtext will be translating the various layers of network traffic into a series of visible discourses, via transient LED blinks and a projected transcript (above).
More information is available on the Subtext project page; full source code (Python, Processing) and schematics are available only within the networks of Autonomous Village, to be published online after the close of FS08.
I was delighted to discover that the Fragmented Orchestra won last night's annual PRS New Music award -- a thoroughly well-deserved accolade for this brilliant trio, who will be realizing the project at FACT in Liverpool over the next few months, alongside field work at the 24 neural sites around the UK that make up the project's cross-geographical cortex.
The Fragmented Orchestra is a groundbreaking composition that will mirror the function of the human brain and the way it processes sound. At the heart of this pioneering new work are 24 ‘neuron units’ placed across the UK in locations chosen for their inherent sonic rhythms. These will include a football stadium, cathedral, dairy farm, school playground, motorway crash barrier and a field. Each solar powered Soundbox contains an artificial neuron modeled on those which fire within the brain’s cortex and will be attached to a resonant surface. Inside these devices, the size of a video cassette, is a minute microphone, computer, Feonic FI drive and amplifier, which will capture the huge array of sounds made at each location.
As each of the ‘neurons’ are stimulated by sound, created by both the public and the elements, they will select audio fragments to be streamed across an invisible network or cortex created between them. Using cutting edge technology, this cortex will form a living instrument which communicates with itself and in turn its audience. The total composition is created through newly-developed software and constantly evolves as the micro-fragments of sound are heard as music.
There's also a stunning introductory video which gives a more informative outline.
I'm honoured to have been invited to develop the project's digital interactive structure, including a web-based element which will allow a visitor to explore each of the neural sites and listen to the collective output of this 'living instrument'. More news on this soon!
It's rare for me to envy Windows users, but I have a long-harboured jealousy of the unofficial Python API for Ableton Live that's been available for the past year or so -- as I'm sure the reader would agree, there's little in life that could rival programmatical access to arguably the world's greatest DAW. So, it was to my joy that I discovered that an OS X version of this API was quietly announced just a few days ago, coinciding with me delving back into Python for an ongoing project.
Expect some monstrous hacks as soon as I have a free moment...
Things change fast in the hypersphere. I've been absent for a couple of weeks, first journeying around Napoli on a working trip to EvoWorkshops 2008, then beginning intensive work on an electronics project that I'll outline shortly.
In the meantime, my friends seem to have sneakily entered productive overdrive with new written, drawn and photographed material from Scott, Mimi and Garry respectively. Mike has been involved in the Disclosures series at Gasworks, the Capsized Smiles have been furtively forging material for our impending EP, and new web projects are forthcoming from Julia and Josh (soon). Moreover, a plethora of excitable monome users have latched onto the alpha website for the Monome: Open Practice Project, an ongoing series of events that I'm involved in co-ordinating, so I returned to find a mass of unbelievable vimeo links of monome performances sitting in my inbox. Likewise, more news on this soon. Finally, my paper on AtomSwarm has been published as part of the proceedings of the above conference; to my delight, the nice people at Springer even corrected the shocking spelling error that I allowed into the camera-ready version ("anectodal", for reference).
There's also a frightening amount of exciting events happening in the next couple of weeks: lectures at Goldsmiths from Brian Massumi and Lev Manovich; a rare screening of Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europe Express at the BFI; the EYOE event series at the O2; Futuresonic festival in Manchester, and (later) Venn in Bristol; a They Did stall at the London Zine Symposium, alongside one from our cohorts at the Forest; and the first of a series of gigs that we'll be hosting in Herne Hill.
Yikes.
After months of good intentions being ousted by other priorities, I'm pleased to have finally found the time to finish cleaning up and documenting the core classes of AtomSwarm, a Processing-based framework for musical improvisation based on swarm behaviours. It's perhaps not the cleanest set of source in the world, but provides a useful basis for other swarm work and contains information on the genetic and metabolic constructs that co-determine the swarm's behaviours.
robert henke on laptop performance in the supercomputer age /
björk on stockhausen and galaxy formation /
kevin kelly on videogame ontogeny /
alex galloway on network decentralization and control /
The ideal outlet for those who share my obsessive fascination with intricate schematics: Google Image search of freepatentsonline.com.
On a related note, xkcd hits the paydirt as usual with its great two-dimensional fruit chart.
Going through old material to publish online, I happened upon the piece that I wrote to accompany Julia's article for They Did magazine. It describes the history of Teufelsberg ("Devil's Mountain"), a man-made mountain west of Berlin that later became a key NSA radar station in the cold war.
Unearthing this piece reminded me of the addendum that I've intended to write since the end of last year. In November, the David Lynch "Invincible Germany" story spread wildly around the web, implicating him alongside a Transcedental Meditation guru whose rhetoric rung a little too close to that of National Socialism. There's even the obligatory YouTube video of the lecture, and a later response from Lynch himself.
However, what really captured my attention was the fact that Lynch has purchased Teufelsberg as the site for a future cathedral to Transcendental Meditation - an "invincible university" atop Devil's Mountain, and the latest in a series of its radical reinventions. As Time observe, Lynchian indeed.
Garfield Minus Garfield is a sublime take on the abject loneliness of American suburbia.
Your Collective is a group of art students based at Camberwell College of Art (including What They Could Do's Josh Pollen) whose stated aim is to accept and execute proposals from the public realm. The resulting work will then be displayed in their online gallery space.
They're currently seeking proposals, ideas and briefs for their first call, based around photographic work.
Tell us what to do. Please include whether you want us complete your brief in an hour, a day or a week.The suggestions can be abstract or literal, should primarily be of photographic nature though. We have the last word, so to speak. We will interpret the briefs subjectively after our own ideas and select the medium (sculpture, short film, photograph...) . The final outcome will probably be some kind of interactive online gallery.
Send your proposals directly via email (yourcollective (at) yahoo (dot) com) or post it on our blog: YOUR COLLECTIVE.
Here are some possible examples for proposals:
- Find a solution
- Take a picture of dirty laundry
- Photograph your happiness
- Make somebody happy
- Look up, look down
- Be bold
- Create an image that doesn't last
Almost certainly the first and last time I'll be linking to a ringtone website, Toneshared is the exception to the rule because
a) it has high-quality mp3s from such electronic luminaries as Alva Noto, Gudrun Gut, Luomo, si-cut.db, Jason Forrest, Leafcutter John, etc
b) it's free.
You can now identify me by my 8khz telecoms emissions.
Just released: Parallelograms, a departure from the usual Ad Hoc collages of sound fragments and a return to classical DJing, albeit with a digital bent.
The first in a series of Ad Hoc DJ mixes, Parallelograms covers unintentionally international terrain in recent house and techno, with tracks hailing from Stockholm, Santiago, Berlin, Marseille, Valencia, Bremen, Chemnitz, London and Paris. But perhaps most extraordinary is Chris Watson's subaquatic recording of the creaking movement of the Vatnajökull glacier - from Iceland, via Watson's home in Newcastle.
In support of the p5_sc library, which provides the ability to communicate with SuperCollider's synthesis server from Processing, I've developed and amassed a series of basic helper functions ported from SC's client library. These provide frequently-used operations when interfacing between control and audio-generation objects, including:
It's undocumented, besides code comments, but hopefully useful.
Download sc_utils here.
Theo Burt's gridlife is an audiovisual hardware installation based on cellular automata, developed solely using open-source technologies. CA artworks are not a new concept (likewise for swarm models), but, for a digital grid of deterministically pulsing lights, it possesses a great deal of warmth.
It also makes interesting use of the perspectival listener to generate time-delayed microrhythms, evident in the creepy-crawly sounds towards the end of gridlife_audio_extracts.mp3. The subtly-phasing quantization effect suggests an insectoid mutation of Steve Reich.
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http://www.five.noise.org.uk/
