Wednesday, October 22, 2003

 
residual beads succeed the 'killing' of the lead

The Bread-and-Butterfly
Through the Looking Glass

Caduceus

"Hm?" says I.
Gregory Bateson: "A great addition to the Theory of Evolution - which theory Lewis Carroll I guess didn't like. The Bread-and-Butterfly has wings of bread and butter and a head made of a lump of sugar. Alice says, 'What does it live on?' The answer is, 'Weak tea with cream in it.' At this point she begins to perceive a difficulty: its head will dissolve in its food. So she says, 'What happens if it can't get any?' And the Gnat, who's acting as guide, says, 'It dies.' Alice says, 'That must happen rather often.' The Gnat says, 'It always happens.'
I think this was intended, you know, as a caricature of Darwinism, and it's not a bad caricature of Natural Selection, except that it adds an entirely new principle to the whole evolutionary process, which is in a word the principle of the Double Bind. The Bread-and-Butterfly does not die because its head dissolves in tea; it does not die because it can't get food; it dies because either its head dissolves in tea or it can't get food. You can't localize the cause of death."
Stewart Brand: "If paradox is the structure of the Double Bind, what drives it? Control?"
Gregory sighs. "At the first level, control, yes. To want control is the pathology, not that the person gets control because of course you never do."
II Cybernetic Frontiers - Random House/Bookworks, 1974, pages 15-16

Global Vision : Gregory Bateson : The Pattern That Connects
"Observing that the Earth's biosphere (including Humankind) is a self-organising system, Bateson remarked that "no part of (such a) cybernetic system can have unilateral control over the whole or any other part." This cybernetic law holds true not just for human attempts to control nature, but also for individuals, social groups, organisations, corporations and governments which - for whatever reason - would like to change the behaviour of others."
Michael O'Callaghan

The Creative Eye

"To know where the other person makes a mistake is of little value. It only becomes interesting when you know where you make the mistake, for then you can do something about it. What we can improve in others is of doubtful utility as a rule, if, indeed, it has any effect at all."
Carl Jung

On Fundamentalism
"But man seeks to bow down before that which is indisputable, so indisputable that all men at once would agree to the universal worship of it. For the care of these pitiful creatures is not just to find something before which I or some other man can bow down, but to find something that everyone else will also believe in and bow down to, for it must needs be all together. And this need for communality of worship is the chief torment of each man individually, and of mankind as a whole, from the beginning of the ages. In the cause of universal worship, they have destroyed each other with the sword. They have made gods and called upon each other: 'Abandon your gods and come and worship ours, otherwise death to you and your gods!' And so it will be until the end of the world, even when all gods have disappeared from the earth: they will still fall down before idols."
Fyodor Dostoyevsky

The Primordial Light: The Ecstatics' Quest

"In the dictionary of non-violent action, there is no such thing as an 'external enemy'."
M. K. Gandhi

Tunisian Intellectual Al-Afif Al-Akhdar On the Arab Identity Crisis and Education
Why Do Other People Love Life While We Love Death?
"Why is it that our countries are among the wealthiest in natural resources� and the poorest in human resources? Why does the world's human knowledge double every three years� while with us, what multiplies several times over is illiteracy, ideological fear, and mental paralysis? Why do expressions of tolerance, moderation, rationalism, compromise, and negotiation horrify us, but [when we hear] fervent cries for vengeance, we all dance the war dance? Why have the people of the world managed to mourn their pasts and move on, while we have established, hard and fast, our gloomy bereavement over a past that does not pass? Why do other people love life, while we love death and violence, slaughter and suicide, and [even] call it heroism and martyrdom�?"
The Sources of the Arab Identity Crisis
"[The answer] to many of [these questions] lies in a contrast-ridden and explosive mixture of a collective narcissistic wound and religious narcissism that has caused us collective mental paralysis� In the head of almost every one of us [Arabs] is something of Dr. Jekyll and something of Mr. Hyde: a mind simultaneously demented and wretched.
"An [historic] narcissistic wound is a frustration that makes its victim despise himself, a blow that makes [the victim] see himself as nothing� It is symbolic castration that causes a crushing sense of shame and inferiority, and in our case, a constant [sense] of this� The Arabs experienced their defeats by European imperialism and Israel on both the conscious level and the collective subconscious level� as a national humiliation whose shame can be purged only by 'blood, vengeance, and fire,' as the Arab national motto [states].
"Collective religious narcissism is distorted thought that leads the believer in a miracle-based religion [i.e. the monotheistic religions] to think that his nation is 'the best nation created for human beings'� that Allah designated it to guide and lead humanity. How then is it possible that such a nation would imitate [other human beings] and learn from them�?

Mind over Mullah
Jihad in Islam: Preemptive or Defensive?
The Nobel Peace Prize 2003 - Shirin Ebadi
Universal Islamic Declaration of Human Rights
Why Do Arabs Hate The West, Especially The U.S.? by Zuheir Abdullah
'Why Do People Hate America' by Ziauddin Sardar and Merryl Wyn Davies

"Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment."
Michael Corleone - The Godfather Part III

America and the War by Tony Judt
from The New York Review of Books, 15 November 2001
"America is solidly organized egoism, it is evil made systematic and regular." Osama bin Laden? No, Pierre Buchez, a French socialist writing in the 1840s. Anti-Americanism goes back a long way. It was not born of American global domination -- when Edmond de Goncourt wanted to express his horror at Baron Haussmann's new Paris he observed that "it makes me think of some American Babylon of the future."
[...]
"Our brothers who fought in Somalia saw wonders about the weakness, feebleness, and cowardliness of the US soldier.... We believe that we are men, Muslim men who must have the honour of defending [Mecca]. We do not want American women soldiers defending [it].... The rulers in that region have been deprived of their manhood. And they think that the people are women. By God, Muslim women refuse to be defended by these American and Jewish prostitutes."
Osama bin Laden, December 1998, from an interview with al-Jazeera television

Interactive Essays: Akbar Ahmed: Islam on a Collision Course
[...] Why is it that Islam now appears to be clashing with so many neighbouring civilisations? Perhaps because we are entering into what I call a "post-honour" world. I think that the dangerously ambiguous notion of honour - and the even more dangerous idea of the loss of honour - propels men to violence. Simply put, global developments have robbed many people of honour. Rapid global changes are shaking the structures of traditional societies. Groups are forced to dislocate, or live nearby other groups. In the process of dislocation they have little patience with the problems of others. They develop intolerance and express it through anger. And this is not a problem unique to Islamic countries. No society is immune. Even those states that economists call "developed" fall back to the notions of honour and revenge in times of crisis ..."

Context: Reading Culture: Curtis White - Our 'Pure War' with Islam
[...] Our commitment to technological rationality as "progress" is in reality a commitment to the techno/military as fate. Coming to consciousness about these matters isn't an uncommon thing; in fact, it's so common and banal that we hardly recognize it for what it is.
[...] Virilio does offer an alternative and a way of confronting the present madness, but it is a strategy of resistance that is addressed not only to the Taliban but also to our own techno-military state. What he offers is this: a pacifism that works religiously in that it returns us to our "identity as mortal beings."

[Update] Who is afraid of Disneyfication? A response to Sonja Hegasy
In spring 2003, Sonja Hegasy argued in openDemocracy that Arab intellectuals' evasion of the challenge of globalisation was central to the Arab world's culture of victimhood. Here, Mona Abaza ... responds that the seizure of Enlightenment values by an American-led imperial project undermines the search for an equal relationship between east and west.

Fear and loathing: Arab cultures need a strategy of resistance - Sonja Hegasy
Concerned by the Arab world�s culture of victimhood, a German Arabist issues a vigorous challenge to the prevailing sentiment of 'anti-globalism' among the Arab intelligentsia, typified by the prominent Egyptian intellectual Sherif Hetata.

Viewpoint: Islam and modernity
The question is not whether Muslims need to modernise, or how much they can learn from the West so much as whether we all need to find new, less confrontational ways towards progress."
Arzu Merali

Wired 10.01: In Gold We Trust - Julian Dibbell
"[...] The international gold standard was one of the technical wonders of the highly globalized late-Victorian era - a sophisticated, elegant mechanism for transmitting value from one end of the civilized world to the other. National monies existed, of course, but in effect were just local network protocols running on top of the internetwork layer that connected them all. Or as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Mundell has put it, "Currencies were just names for particular weights of gold." The dollar, for instance, was fixed by statute at 23.22 grains (about one-twentieth of an ounce), the pound sterling at 113.0016 grains, and so on. Local payments were made in local units, but all cross-border deals ultimately were settled through international bank-to-bank shipments of the universal currency - bullion.
[...] It's a hot high noon in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Faint, muggy breezes are blowing in off the Persian Gulf; and in the shopping malls, Mercedes dealerships, and air-conditioned Starbucks of this deliriously prosperous city-state, loudspeakers are discreetly broadcasting the muezzins' call to prayer.
The call can also be heard, if you listen hard enough, inside a 12-foot-square, steel-and-concrete-walled storage vault located in Dubai International Airport's heavily guarded cargo-holding facilities. But if you're inside the vault, your mind is probably on other things. Like, for instance, the $7.5 million worth of precious metal piled up around you: five flat bars of chrome-bright palladium; two large plastic jars full of powdery platinum sponge; 160 fat, tarnished loaves of silver; and - on a single shelf, laid out one next to the other like babies in a maternity ward - 58 slender, radiant bricks of 99.9 percent pure gold, about 400 troy ounces each and altogether worth more than $6.5 million.
These assets represent nearly half of the e-gold system's physical reserves, and there are, arguably, sound business reasons for storing them in this part of the world. Dubai, sometimes called the Switzerland of the Middle East, offers the financial sophistication of a major commercial hub, the low overhead of a mostly immigrant labor pool, and the high security of a politely authoritarian mini-monarchy.
But the truth is, the gold is here because Allah commanded it. Or at any rate, because the passionate believers behind e-dinar - the network's Muslim-friendly frontend - believe He did."

The Schumpeterian Gap and Muslim Economic Thought
by Ameer Ali and Herb Thompson
"At present, entire economies are organised, more or less, on Islamic principles. Islam is explicitly concerned with material life and provides numerous guidelines for the conduct of economic affairs for millions of people. While it is not the aim of this paper to examine the methodological or epistemological content of these principles, we argue that, at the very least, the history of economic thought should incorporate the work of Arab/Islamic thinkers.
The material foundation of Islam cannot be understood by students of a discipline which continues to promote a positivist, Cartesian, mathematical formalism, at the expense of understanding its contextual origins. The economies in which hundreds of millions of people live, work and produce, are being guided, for better or worse, by the epistemological premises of Islam. Until these premises are comprehended, and then critically evaluated, economists educated in the industrial west continue to marginalise themselves and their students in a manner which is no longer excusable."

Come the revolution - Interview with Abdolkarim Soroush
New Scientist: Only in a few countries could a philosopher of science be seen as an enemy of the state. Abdolkarim Soroush, one of Iran's best-known intellectuals, argues that science cannot progress under totalitarian regimes. His greatest "crime" is to suggest that this is a legitimate Islamic view.

Islam - Bearing witness to the Truth - Curious Minds
Mahathir calls for peaceful Islam

Revealed Libertarianism
Minaret of Freedom tries to square the Quran with the free market. A Reason interview
[...] Wahhabism tends to get blamed for the worst excesses of Islamism today. Is that a fair assessment?
Imad A. Ahmad: "I think it's an oversimplification, but it's an understandable one, because there's one sense in which it's true. The Wahhabis have used their oil money to influence if not dominate the Islamic movement around the world. That effort has been very harmful, and has supported the most reactionary elements in the struggle to map out a direction for the Islamist movement. They very much hurt the need for a revival of original thinking in Islam by imposing their own form of taqlid, or blind imitation. It's ironic that the Wahhabi movement was founded by a man opposed to the blind imitation that had taken over the Muslim world. But as soon as he had laid out his own ideas, his followers tried to impose them by a process of blind imitation."

Re: Darwin and Lamarck - Ton Maas
"The main intellectual manoeuvre Bateson has undertaken in his book "Mind & Nature: A Necessary Unity", is to draw a formal parallel between the process of natural evolution and the process of learning. He does, however, emphasize at least one fundamental difference between the two ..."

Oedipus Rem - Rem Koolhaas's IIT McCormick Tribune Student Center
"Mies is about reduction and subtraction, Koolhaas about addition and multiplication. A Mies building is like a Bach cantata, perfect and crystalline. A Koolhaas building is like a Mahler symphony, an attempt to capture the complexity of the world in a single work."
Lynn Becker - from the Chicago Reader, September 26, 2003

Why Peace Isn't Covered: An Interview With Sam Keen (1991)
"There will always be conflicts between persons and nations, but no gene condemns us to dehumanize or destroy those with whom we differ."
Sam Keen - Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination

"Imagine the vanity of thinking your enemy can do you more harm than your enmity."
Augustine

The Origins of Evil by Michael Maciel
[...] "To understand the origins of evil, we must first understand the origin of the ego. If evil is a matter of perspective, then the ego creates it, because the ego is what makes perspective possible. Without going too far into it, we might say that ego is what happens when Being intersects with matter. It is a virtual self having only an apparent existence, like the image we see in a mirror. The ego wants to cohere the images it perceives into a meaningful picture, and then protect that picture for the sake of its own identity (it tends to identify with what it sees). Like a living cell, the ego forms a "membrane" around its set of perceptions and meanings, warding off anything that doesn't fit and searching endlessly for things that do. This "membrane" distinguishes the ego as separate from the whole, which, of course, prevents us from seeing the world as it actually is. Nearly every spiritual discipline begins and ends with the attempt to dissolve this membrane, or at least render it transparent, so that we can glimpse, perhaps for the first time, reality. When we do, everything appears as it is - infinite ..."

To Infinity and Beyond - by Margaret Wertheim
"As early as the ninth century, the Islamic mathematician Thabit ibn Qurra pointed out the paradoxes lurking within infinity, which unlike any other number can be split into multiple parts, each in itself as large as the whole."

Magical numbers in nature
Mathematician Ian Stewart talks to Nature Science Update about snowflakes, sticklebacks and a new kind of science.
[...] Do biologists, with their focus on detail, neglect general mathematical explanations?
"I think they do. Historically they were right to. Before genetics, the kind of mathematical descriptions that I like, such as Alan Turing's models of spots and stripes, were in favour with biologists. They looked at the organisms, and the patterns, and made guesses about the general principles.
But that doesn't have much predictive power. Current mathematical models don't correspond very closely to genetics and biochemistry. When biologists began to look at DNA and protein structure it opened up a different way of thinking. Unfortunately, biology went so overboard for molecular descriptions that it lost sight of other things.
Now biologists are starting to put it all together again, which is very encouraging. Many people working in DNA sequencing say that to understand how proteins fold [& climb], we need a lot of maths. A sequence alone doesn't tell us anything about the geometry of a protein, which is the important thing.
There are other areas of biology where it's beginning to dawn on people that the same thing needs to be done. Development is full of things where the dynamics of growth matters. Understanding the genetics will give you some information, but there are mathematical constraints on how it will happen.

Robert and Ellen Kaplan: Extreme Maths: The Art of the Infinite
"Calculus, that wonderful invention of Newton (and independently, of the German diplomat, philosopher, and mathematician, Gottfried Leibniz), comes to grips with change as Seurat and the Impressionists did, by reducing reality to flickering points, and then rebuilding the world more profoundly."

Notes from G o T o 0 - Nik Gaffney
"... When bricks become pixels, the tectonics of architecture becomes informational. Worlds are portals. Woven through the worlds are several webs of non linear narrative."

Relationships: Point and Line
Point. It is the most rudimentary element of design. It may or may not derive from something seen in nature, although nature does embellish many of its forms with this device: bird feathers, sea shells, flowers, and fish. A point could arouse a certain fascination on its own, especially when viewed very closely. Yet it is too small for sustained esthetic interest. It is almost always seen in combination with other elements, with other points, lines, and shapes. Like a single note in a musical composition, the point is only one of a group or a series, of a chord or a melody -- important because of its place, its position, mainly. As Stravinsky says in Conversations with Igor Stravinsky: "The individual note determines the form only as part of the group or order."
Calvin Harlan - Vision & Invention: An Introduction to Art Fundamentals
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1986, page 21)

Pixelvision: A Meditation by Andrew Zolli / for Core77
"Though it may seem like a more recent creation, the pixel first appeared in New Jersey in 1954, the same year that Elvis cut his first record and the transistor radio was invented. At Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, mathematicians and engineers created the first computer graphic -- and the first instance of digital typography -- on a computer the size of a Manhattan apartment.
The Princetonian pixels were as primitive as one could imagine -- literally the glowing filaments of the machine's vacuum memory registers -- but they marked the beginning of a sea-change in how we represent and see the world."

Points (Lucretian Codes)
"One cannot perceive points and atoms. One only perceives their blend, shapes and shades (simulacra). [...] Collage is a fascination with detachable elements. At the same time it works with elements of larger scale than atoms. It combines simulacra. And if the world is the context of particular elements and recontextualisation means the changing of a world, then collage is the pluralisation of worlds. Furthermore, since the elements which it uses are themselves certain contexts, collage means the putting of worlds into worlds. Collage is therefore the true Leibnizian art (and James Joyce is the true Leibnizian writer), going beyond Leibniz in that it explores the plurality of possible worlds."
Ondrej Galuska

Evolution and the Medium
"Evolution is a process that explores the possibilities inherent in the medium in which it is embedded. Evolving populations of replicators constantly explore variations around their current forms, without the limitations of preconceptions. When embedded in the medium of carbon chemistry, evolution "sees" the physics of the natural material universe: the laws of chemistry, such as that carbon forms four single bonds in a tetrahedral configuration; the laws of thermodynamics, such as that entropy spontaneously increases, etc.
However, when embedded in the medium of digital computation, evolution "sees" a completely different universe with different laws. There are no laws of thermodynamics. There is no material on which to base a chemistry. It is a logical informational universe rather than a material universe. The "physics" that evolution experiences when embedded in the computer consists of the logic implemented by the processor, the unique non-Euclidean topology of the memory space, the rules for resource allocation embedded in the operating system, time based on the CPU clock cycle, etc.
[...] The topology of a space can be understood in part by examining the distance relationships between sets of points. In computer memory space, there is no meaningful concept of linear distance. The most appropriate analog of distance is the time that it takes to move information between points. Thus time becomes the metric for distance in memory space."
Thomas S. Ray

Re-embodied Intelligence Within Recombinant Poetic Networks
"Computer-mediated networks present an artistic medium that heightens the potential for an intermingling of the knowledge of the viewer with the "Re-embodied intelligence" of an author or authors. We will consider "networks" in an all inclusive manner, from the scale of a network of poetic elements housed within a single computer, to that of the distributed housing of the World Wide Web. Such computer-mediated environments can potentially facilitate new forms of inter-authorship ..."
Bill Seaman

posted by Andrew 10/22/2003 05:59:00 PM

Friday, October 17, 2003

 
encounter textual recombination machines

Mediamatic: Geert Lovink: The Archeology of Computer Assemblage
The 'Ars Combinatoria' of Berlin philosopher-engineer Werner Künzel.
Künzel: "An engineer-philosopher is someone who derives his concept of reality from the media he works with. This is a huge break with the concept of reality as it has been taught up to the present, which is still based on Plato's Dialogues. We still use a table, a chair or a tree for an example. It may sound curious, but our concept of reality hasn't changed in 2000 years. If we think from a technological media paradigm we're not supposed to take the possible loss of bodily powers of perception for granted. It's more about making a concession to the changed environment. The engineer-philosopher does not per se have to take these developments any further either, but he should at least think about them. We should at the very least realize what happens when knowledge is transferred and stored through media."

Understanding the Human Brain - CogLab Experiment: Brain Asymmetry

"Unlike animal species we are out of balance with and in the world. Speech is the consequence and maintainer of this disequilibrium. Interpretation (translation) keeps the pressures of inventive excess from overwhelming and randomizing the medium. It limits the play of private intention, of plurality in meaning, at least at a rough and ready level of functional consensus. In an ambiguity which is at one level ontological and at another ironic, idiomatic level, political or social, we speak left and act right. Translation mediates: it constrains the constant drive to dispersion. But this too, of course, is conjecture."
George Steiner - After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation
(Oxford University Press, New York, 1975, pages 281-282)

Haptics and Habitats of Reading
"Disconcerted e-book promoters complain that people "just don't like to read from a screen". Actually, people love to read from a screen as the popularity of the Web indicates. I suggest that resistance to the e-book is not related to screen resolution, but to impaired haptic features."
Gary Frost

Santiago dreaming [via Sensible Erection]
When Pinochet's military overthrew the Chilean government 30 years ago, they discovered a revolutionary communication system, a 'socialist internet' connecting the whole country. Its creator? An eccentric scientist from Surrey. Andy Beckett on the forgotten story of Stafford Beer [via also not found in nature]
"During the early 70s, in the wealthy commuter backwater of West Byfleet in Surrey, a small but rather remarkable experiment took place. In the potting shed of a house called Firkins, a teenager named Simon Beer, using bits of radios and pieces of pink and green cardboard, built a series of electrical meters for measuring public opinion. His concept - users of his meters would turn a dial to indicate how happy or unhappy they were with any political proposal - was strange and ambitious enough. And it worked. Yet what was even more jolting was his intended market: not Britain, but Chile.
Unlike West Byfleet, Chile was in revolutionary ferment. In the capital Santiago, the beleaguered but radical marxist government of Salvador Allende, hungry for innovations of all kinds, was employing Simon Beer's father, Stafford, to conduct a much larger technological experiment of which the meters were only a part. This was known as Project Cybersyn, and nothing like it had been tried before, or has been tried since.
Stafford Beer attempted, in his words, to "implant" an electronic "nervous system" in Chilean society ..."

Giordano Bruno writes:
"In 1979 I heard Stafford Beer lecture at the Open University, on "Project Cybersyn" a system of teletext machines he had installed in Allende's Chile, to make the economy cybernetic.
Only departures from planned targets would be communicated, a vision of a nation under instant feedback control. Like any Central Planning guru, he failed to grasp the key ideas of complexity and de-centralised networks. A monolith center can only create. Once created, bureaus and departments persist forever, pretending to produce. Only Capital with corporate takeover and bankruptcy, has solved the problem of removing dead wood. Just maybe, Beer's teletypes might have been able to identify dud departments. Thanks to Kissingers cowboys we will never know."

The Allende Myth + Cybernetics for the People
Autopoietic Theory and Social Systems: Theory and Practice
Slashdot: Cybersyn And Early Uniminds

The Televisionary - by Malcolm Gladwell
"The idea of television arose from two fundamental discoveries. The first was photoconductivity. In 1872, Joseph May and Willoughby Smith discovered that the electrical resistance of certain metals varied according to their exposure to light. And, since everyone knew how to transmit electricity from one place to another, it made sense that images could be transmitted as well. The second discovery was what is called visual persistence. In 1880, the French engineer Maurice LeBlanc pointed out that, because the human eye retains an image for about a tenth of a second, if you wanted to transmit a picture you didn't have to send it all at once. You could scan it, one line at a time, and, as long as you put all those lines back together at the other end within that fraction of a second, the human eye would be fooled into thinking that it was seeing a complete picture.
The hard part was figuring out how to do the scanning. In 1883, the German engineer Paul Nipkow devised an elaborate and ultimately unworkable system using a spinning metal disk. The disk was punctured with a spiral of small holes, and, as it spun, one line of light after another was projected through the holes onto a photocell. In 1908, a British electrical engineer named A. A. Campbell Swinton suggested that it would make more sense to scan images electronically, using a cathode ray. Philo Farnsworth was the first to work out how to do that. His image dissector was a vacuum tube with a lens at one end, a photoelectric plate right in front of the lens to convert the image from light to electricity, and then an "anode finger" to scan the electrical image line by line. After setting up his laboratory, Farnsworth tinkered with his makeshift television camera day and night for months. Finally, on September 7, 1927, he was ready."

Philo Farnsworth
"... was actually born in a log cabin, rode to high school on horseback and, without benefit of a university degree (indeed, at age 14), conceived the idea of electronic television -- the moment of inspiration coming, according to legend, while he was tilling a potato field back and forth with a horse-drawn harrow and realized that an electron beam could scan images the same way, line by line, just as you read a book. To cap it off, he spent much of his adult life in a struggle with one of America's largest and most powerful corporations. Our kind of guy."
Neil Postman on Philo Taylor Farnsworth

Social Critic Neil Postman dies aged 72 by Elaine Woo
... Postman's most powerful idea was that "the media are not merely transmitters of information but environments in which cultures grow," said Terrence Moran, a former student of Postman's and a colleague at NYU. "He was always interested in how the structure of communications systems shaped people."

Marshall McLuhan - "With TV, the viewer is the screen."

Touched Potatoes: An Everyday Tale of Farming Folk
"Television, distributed globally, might be said to have developed itself into an agri-cultural technology - whose incessantly harvested crop is us, is human attention." Ray Coder - Man a Plant

"Death needs time for what it kills to grow in." William S. Burroughs

Aeons Past & Present by Gyrus
The Neolithic passage grave at Newgrange in Ireland is famously connected to the winter solstice. It is constructed so that as the solstice sun rises, a thin shaft of light penetrates the tomb through a narrow slit, illuminating the back wall of the burial chamber for about seventeen minutes. Such an elaborately constructed monument shows how important the cycles of the sun were to the agricultural Neolithic.
Time is connected to sex, and to death. The reborn sun's shaft of light is seen by some to represent a big cock penetrating the darkness of the tomb/womb, bestowing life on the concealed dead. The connection between time and death has been most succinctly expressed by William Burroughs: "Death needs time for what it kills to grow in." (Dead City Radio) It is also expressed mythically in the Indian black goddess Kali, "the symbol of the active cosmic power of eternal time . . . she signifies annihilation: through death or destruction creation, the seed of life, emerges." (Mookerjee & Khanna, The Tantric Way) So we might tantrically elaborate on Burroughs by saying: "Time needs death for what it grows to die in."
When discussing the sun 'reanimating the dead' in Newgrange, we may well be moving into metaphorical realms ...

PDA RIP - Handheld computers - Economist.com
Why carry both a phone and a PDA around, when you can carry a single hybrid device?

Wired 10.04: Televisionary
"There was a time when Philo T. Farnsworth was considered the perfect picture of inventive brilliance. On September 3, 1928, a photograph of him appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle alongside bold type hailing the "young genius" who was "quietly working away in his San Francisco laboratory" on his "revolutionary light machine." Just 22 years old, he had recently grown a mustache to mask his youth. His unsmiling expression barely hinted at his inner exhilaration. The article described the pair of mason jar-sized devices he was holding as the first all-electronic "sending and receiving tubes of his new television set," a system that transmits "20 pictures per second," each frame containing "8,000 elements, or pinpoints of light, to insure detail."
The night the story was published, Farnsworth was driving down Market Street in an open-air roadster ..."
Evan I. Schwartz

The Last Lone Inventor
The Boy Who Invented Television
The Pioneers of Electronic and Mechanical Television

The Boy Who Invented The Future
"While the great minds of science, financed by the biggest companies in the world, wrestled with 19th century answers to a 20th century problem, Philo T. Farnsworth, age 14, dreamed of trapping light in an empty jar and transmitting it, one line at a time, on a magnetically deflected beam of electrons."
Paul Schatzkin

Cellphone Chats, Courtesy of the Television Airwaves
"A company in Ridgeland, Miss., is developing technology that would send and receive cellphone calls on a little-used part of a broadcast television signal. If used to augment current cellphone sites, it could mean fewer dead spots in reception at a comparatively low cost. It might also help usher countries without widespread cell networks into the wireless age.
[...] To get even this far, the technology has had to overcome several major obstacles. The biggest is the "big signal, little signal" problem. Although a television station puts out a big signal, one that is easy for the phone to receive, it is so big that it could overload the phone, causing a call to fail. At the same time, a cellphone's signal is so weak that a TV-station-based receiver might not be sensitive enough to separate it from other signals."
Roy Furchgott

Cellular Phone Company Gains by Thinking Small - Wayne Arnold & Carlos H. Conde
"Despite being a developing country, the Philippines' obsession with mobile phones has long made it surprisingly advanced when it comes to the adoption of cellular technology. In big cities like the capital, Manila, it is hard to find anyone who does not have a mobile phone.
It is also hard to find anyone who actually talks on his or her phone. In a nation where the average annual income is less than $1,000, most Filipinos rely instead on cheaper text messaging. "Texting," as it is known, has cult status in the Philippines, and everyone from the poorest student to the loftiest government official uses it. Executives tap out messages during business meetings. When hot news or juicy rumors erupt, they spread like wildfire over the country's text networks, which have become a kind of hand-held national chat room."

The Birth of Television
Who Invented Television?
Who Really Invented Television?
Who is the inventor of television?
A Pilgrimage to 202 Green Street, San Francisco
[We interrupt this post to join Logie Baird]
Eye of the World: John Logie Baird and Television (Part 1)
Visioneer: John Logie Baird and Mechanical Televison by Trevor Blake
BBC - History - John Logie Baird (1888 - 1946)

R.I.P. Cathode ray tube monitor
"Confusion surrounds the birth of the tube monitor, with some putting its age at 106 (though a German birth certificate has been found dated 1855).
It appears unlikely the centenarian ever knew the true identity of its father - with X-ray pioneer William Roentgen, electron experimenter JJ Thompson and Nobel prize-winning physicist Karl Ferdinand Braun all in the frame.
In its youth, CRT devoted its considerable energies to the pursuit of empirical scientific knowledge, primarily acting as an oscilloscope to give electric signals a visible representation.
However, tiring of the fusty confines of academia in the roaring 1920s, CRT began what was to prove a lifelong affair with showbiz in the form of television."

Neil Postman (1931-2003): Some Recollections by Jay Rosen
The greatest sentence he wrote will, I am sure, give comfort at some time in the future. It's the first sentence in "The Disappearance of Childhood." "Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see."

Neil Postman, 72, Mass Media Critic, Dies
Wolfgang Saxon writes for the New York Times: In "Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business" (Viking, 1985; Penguin, 1986), [Neil Postman] indicted the television industry on the charge of making entertainment out of the world's most serious problems.

Children of the Information Age: A Reversal of Roles - by Edna Aphek
An African proverb says that when an old person dies an entire library is set on fire. In the intergeneration program we preserve whole libraries, treasured in the minds of the elderly, by the means of the new technologies and mostly through the assistance and effort made by the "Computer and Internet Children."

Creativity at Work Newsletter - April 2003
Children of the Information Age: A Reversal of Roles - Part 2 by Edna Aphek
"The Internet, according to Tapscott, is the Antithesis of the TV kingdom. Tapscott explains that whereas TV is controlled by adults, children control much of their world on the Net. "They", The N-Genres as Tapscott calls them, "do not just observe, they participate."
Tapscott characterizes the N-Genres, the Children of the Computer and the Net, as tolerant, inquisitive and eager to learn."

The myth of Generation N
"Certainly, more kids today are growing up wired - but millions of them are not. Meanwhile, we're rebuilding our society in ways that make things increasingly difficult for people who aren't online. For example ..."
Simson Garfinkel

BW Online - 20 November, 2002 - Learning from the Thumb Tribes
Author Howard Rheingold sees the next big tech trend in Tokyo and Helsinki, where teens busily tap text messages on their cell phones ...
Q: What started you on this particular trend you call smart mobs?
A: Early in 2000, I was walking around Tokyo and couldn't help noticing that people were looking at their telephones rather than listening to them. And they were thumbing messages into them rather than talking into them.
A couple of months later, halfway around the world in Helsinki, I was sitting at an outdoor caf?. Three teenagers came by, encountered two older adults, maybe their parents, and one of the kids looked at his phone and smiled, and showed his phone to the other two kids, and they smiled. But they didn't show it to the two adults. Suddenly, a circuit closed. I thought, O.K., something is happening in Japan, it's happening here, it has infiltrated both societies. It's now happening in the U.S. What's going on here?
It wasn't until [later that] it was explained to me that those telephones had persistent Internet connections. Then I thought, "Oh, the Internet -- now it's in people's pockets." It's everywhere. People who wouldn't even own a computer or sit in front of a computer at work have these things.
Q: Why is the combination of phones and the Net so different?
A: The PC was not a mainframe with a television screen. It was a new medium with its own properties that was available to people who wouldn't have been interested in just a fancy computer. And the Internet was not just something where a PC could connect to other PCs by telephone. It was a new medium with its own properties.
So I realized that the mobile Internet wasn't going to be getting stock quotes on your telephone or surfing the Web on a tiny screen. It was going to make things possible that weren't possible before ...

Escher and Lego - Tuesday, October 14, 2003
Andrea Frick

Louis Armand - From Symptom to Machine: James Joyce and the Perversions of the Textual Apparatus
Hypermedia Joyce Studies, 3.1 (2002) [excerpt includes added links]
[...] As Marshall McLuhan and others have pointed out, the invention of moveable type made Gutenberg's press one of the first Western machines of mass production. The limited set of variables required for the press (twenty six Latin characters, plus blank spaces, punctuation marks and diacriticals) provides a basic conception of a typographical grid or matrix, within which a virtually infinite number of permutations and combinations are possible - depending upon assumed conventions of grammar, syntax and orthography used to determine any particular typographical sequence. As Alan Turing has noted, however:
"If we were to allow an infinity of symbols, then there would be symbols differing to an arbitrarily small extent. The effect of this restriction of the number of symbols is not very serious. It is always possible to use sequences of symbols in the place of single symbols. [...] Similarly in any European language words are treated as single symbols."
The Turing "grid" provides a secondary means of organising language as a whole in terms of material combination and recombination, by assigning single values to entire terms, or to any linguistic, rhetorical or schematic unit whatsoever. In this way the cyclical notions of Giambattista Vico or Friedrich Nietzsche, or the structural repetitions of Homer's Odyssey and the Bible, can equally be thought of in acrostic terms.
One of the questions raised by Joyce's writing, however, is how to account for the possibility of this acrostic grid exceeding its own rules. In other words, how to account for the assigning of multiple values to individual terms, or to the multiplication of terms within the same grid-space? Moreover, the apparently mechanical nature of the acrostic grid poses questions similar to those raised by Noam Chomsky about the relatedness of such things as grammar and syntax to semantic coherence. This question is partly answered by the contingency of contextuality, or the way in which the acrostic grid motivates a multi-dimensional connectivity between each of its elements. Each connection provides a trajectory of possible interpretation, such that we can say each term is in place within its particular context(s).
A simple example of this is the referential function of an index or concordance, in which a basic system of co-ordinates employing two sets of variables (word or phrase and numerical page reference) provides a type of basic hypertextual site map or primitive cybernetic apparatus. In most cases, the first term remains constant for a variable number of second terms. "Plotted" against two-axes on a Cartesian plane, any set of co-ordinates sharing the first term will describe a straight line. The indexical value of the first term thus appears strictly linear.
The difficulty arises with a classic Wittgensteinian problem of determining the relative value of the first term, which without appearing to differ, also does not remain constant across all of the contexts in which it appears (which is not its indexical value). Plotting the set of co-ordinates as a point-to-point vector across the body of the text, however, will produce a very different diagram - a transversal passing through a topological, "acrostic" space, whose values are not linear in any straightforward sense of that term. Other means of plotting these co-ordinates can also be determined to produce different hypertextual configurations, evolving the acrostic possibilities of the textual co-ordinates in increasingly elaborate ways. As Joyce himself suggests:
"The proteiform graph itself is a polyhedron of scripture. There was a time when naif alphabetters would have written it down the tracing of a purely deliquescent recidivist, possibly ambidextorous, snubnosed probably and presenting a strangely profound rainbow in his (or her) occiput." [FW 107.08-12]
But while such acrostic possibilities are conceivably infinite, they do pose questions of formal significance which ask whether or not an apparently random constellation of texts whose resemblance is always fractional can exert mutual simultaneous influence at a level which is not merely trivial or at best a fabulation ("a strangely profound rainbow").
[...] Lacan goes on to argue that the structure of Finnegans Wake should, in fact, not be described as circular but rather as knotted, comparing the signifying relation of "the" and "riverrun" to the topological metaphor of Borromean knots.
[...] The plane of intersection, the monas, according to [Giordano] Bruno: "contains its opposite" (Immo bonum atque malum prima est ab origine fusum). Leibniz, in the conception of monadology, similarly argued that "in the labyrinth of the continuous the smallest element is not the point but the fold ...."
Pierre Soury: "What was our point of departure? There was the transition from knot to braid in the special case of the Borromean knot."

The Grid of Time by Steven H. Cullinane, 3 October, 2003
Part II: The Folding of Time
IIA... From a conversation on myth and time...
"We must conceive or imagine how Hermes flies and gets about when he carries messages from the gods - or how angels travel. And for this one must describe the spaces situated between things that are already marked out - spaces of interference, as I called them in the title of my second book on Hermes. This god or these angels pass through folded time, making millions of connections. Between has always struck me as a preposition of prime importance.
Follow the flight pattern of a fly. Doesn't time sometimes flow according to the breaks and bends that this flight seems to follow or invent? Likewise, my book Rome describes in its own way the baker's transformation... a certain folding of half a plane of dough over the other half, repeated indefinitely according to a simple rule, produces a design precisely comparable to the flight of the fly or the wasp, the one Verlaine in his famous sonnet describes as drunk from this crazy flight."
Michel Serres and Bruno Latour - Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time
Translated by Roxanne Lapidus (University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 1995, pages 64-65)

Indiespace.com - PXL THIS Film Festival (PXL 2000 shorts & features)
PXL THIS 13 will premiere on SAT, Nov 15, 2003 at 7 and 9pm (two different shows) at Midnight Special Bookstore ...

PXL THIS TWELVE, the twelfth annual festival featuring videos made with the PXL-2000 toy camera, premiered on Saturday, November 9, 2002 at 7:00 and 9:00 pm (two different shows) at Midnight Special Bookstore ...
Gerry Fialka's WHAT HAVEN'T YOU NOTICED LATELY? hoicks the "open past" while double delving into Giordano Bruno's theory that everything in nature is realized through interaction with its opposite and Marshall McLuhan's percept that "objects are unobservable, only relationships among objects are observable" simultaneously probing the option of "see-say" in moving pictures. "Do you hear what I'm seeing?"

posted by Andrew 10/17/2003 05:12:00 PM

Sunday, October 12, 2003

 
delving with mammalian spacecraft

Alpha and Omega: Mysteries of the Cosmos
"The past decade has been a golden era for observational cosmology. After a century of trying, we have finally pinned down many of the fundamental dimensions of cosmology that seemed impenetrable even 20 years ago. We have determined, with reasonable precision, the age of the universe, and even its geometry. We have discovered that space, which Einstein's general relativity theory tells us can be curved into interesting geometries in the presence of matter, is flat on the largest scales we can observe. In the midst of these significant developments, one discovery is truly revolutionary: the expansion of the universe appears to be speeding up, not slowing down, as gravity should cause a universe full of stars and galaxies to do."
Lawrence M. Krauss reviews Alpha and Omega by Charles Seife

Jon Turney - The stuff of the world

"One by one Mendeleyev began writing on the blank white surfaces of the cards. First he printed the chemical symbol of an element, then its atomic weight and finally a short list of its characteristic properties. When he had filled sixty-three cards he spread them out face upwards over the desk.
He began staring at the cards, ruminatively combing his fingers through the ends of his beard. One long moment stretched into minutes on end as he concentrated on the sea of cards before him, his mind following trails of thought and half-thought, lost to the world. But still he could discern no overall pattern.
An hour or so later he decided to try a different tack. He gathered up the cards and began laying them out in groups. Another timeless hour; his eyelids were beginning to flutter now with exhaustion. Finally, in despair, he decided to try the obvious course, laying out the cards in ascending order of their atomic weights. But this couldn't possibly lead to anything. Everyone else had tried it. And besides, weight was just a physical property. What he was looking for was a pattern which linked the chemical properties. By now his head was beginning to nod, falling forward over the cards as he checked himself, on the brink of sleep. It seems he became aware of the horse-drawn sleigh waiting outside the window. Was it still there? Or had it come back? Already? Was it time to catch the afternoon train? That was the last one, he couldn't possibly miss it.
As Mendeleyev's eyes ran once more along the line of ascending atomic weights, he suddenly noticed something that quickened his pulse. Certain similar properties seemed to repeat in the elements, at what appeared to be regular numerical intervals. Here was something! But what? A few of the intervals began with a certain regularity, but then the pattern just seemed to peter out. Despite this, Mendeleyev soon became convinced that he was on the brink of a major breakthrough. There was a definite pattern there somewhere, but he just couldn't quite grasp it ... Momentarily overcome by exhaustion, Mendeleyev leaned forward, resting his shaggy head on his arms. Almost immediately he fell asleep, and had a dream."
Paul Strathern - Mendeleyev's Dream: The Quest for the Elements
(Penguin, 2001, pages 6-7)

Q & A
Gerald E. Stearn: Will there ever be silence?
Marshall McLuhan: Objects are unobservable. Only relationships among objects are observable.

The indivisible man - Andrew Anthony reviews The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy
"Gottfried Leibniz, Newton's contemporary and competitor, observed that 'music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting'. And du Sautoy, a trombonist and pianist, seeks to help us tune our ears to a rhythm that, if we could only hear it, hums with cosmic truth.
Ever since the ancient Greeks, mathematicians have laboured to understand the apparently chaotic distribution of the primes (2,3,5,7,11,13,17...). There is, it seems, no discernible rhyme or reason to when or where they crop up. And in maths, which is all about symmetry, elegance and beautiful patterns, the randomness of the primes, what the great Cambridge don G.H. Hardy called their 'diabolical malice', has caused no end of head-scratching, sleep loss and, in some cases, mental breakdown."

Amleth-Hamlet

"Vico was astonishingly modern, even post-modern ... He argued that the human mind gives shape to the material world, and it is this shape, or coherence, that allows people to understand and relate to the world in effective ways. The world is shaped by, and in the shape of, the human mind, despite the fact that people see the world as 'natural' or 'given'. In performing this task of shaping the world, humanity created itself. This being so, there must be a universal 'language of the mind', common to all communities. Structuring, making something coherent out of the chaos of the natural world, is the essence of being human." David Lewis-Williams - The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art
(Thames & Hudson, 2002, page 51)

The Noise
The title of Marcel Duchamp's little Readymade sculpture, put together in 1916 with the collaboration of Walter Arensberg, contains a total of three words, whether the name is called in English or in French: With Hidden Noise, A Bruit Secret. Duchamp himself gave us a clue about the logic of the piece in a famous note to Arturo Schwarz, referring to it as an "exercise in comparative orthography."

Edward A. Shanken - The House That Jack Built: Jack Burnham's Concept of Software as a Metaphor for Art
"The computer's most profound aesthetic implication is that we are being forced to dismiss the classical view of art and reality which insists that man stand outside of reality in order to observe it, and, in art, requires the presence of the picture frame and the sculpture pedestal. The notion that art can be separated from its everyday environment is a cultural fixation [in other words, a mythic structure] as is the ideal of objectivity in science. It may be that the computer will negate the need for such an illusion by fusing both observer and observed, "inside" and "outside." It has already been observed that the everyday world is rapidly assuming identity with the condition of art."
Jack Burnham - The Aesthetics of Intelligent Systems (1969)
In E. F. Fry [ed] On the Future of Art - Viking Press, New York, 1970, page 103

Peter Weibel - The Intelligent Image
"... we may say that if 1895 was the birthday of the cinema, then the 19th century was pregnant for nearly a hundred years, before it was able to give birth to this machine. This hundred-year pregnancy started, in fact, in 1824, when a doctor of medicine, Mr. Roget, discovered the persistency of vision. The persistency of vision discovered by Roget, who is the same person who later gave us the famous thesaurus, made possible the development of a specific kind of machinery which produced optical illusions. Therefore, the cinematic machine was above all a machine of vision. One of the great Polish filmmakers, Wojciech Bruszewski, started also with machines of vision, but now is making a dictionary of phraseology, a machine which creates texts, because there is always a link between automatic machines of vision and automatic machines of letters. Roget not only discovered the persistency of vision, but also gave us the first great dictionary, the famous 'Thesaurus.' Upon the discovery of what we call today the after-image, or after-effect produced by the laziness of the retina, another scientist, Michael Faraday, built his first machine in 1830, the so-called Faraday-disc, an optical disk for optical illusions. Following the path of Roget and Faraday, we will make a kind of parallel listing."

Music is Math - Is the universe flat?

"The elementes turned in to themselues, like as whan one tune is chaunged vpon an instrument of musick."
Coverdale Bible, Wisdom, xix, 18

Music for Matisse
"For Alfred Appel Jr, the flying forms and colours of late Matisse define a subgenre he terms "jazz modernism". Embracing the gritty energy of modern life, jazz modernist works are "accessible" and "tonic", irreverent and playful, uninhibited by the divisions of high and low. Their creators, Appel claims, are "rag pickers", turning trash into artistic gold; Picasso's 1912 collage "Guitar, Sheet Music and Glass" serves as Exhibit A. "Rag pickers", of course, is a pun by which Appel connects Picasso's rebus-like assemblage of newpaper and sheet music clippings with the African-American music that first appeared as ragtime, but exploded into jazz during the First World War. "Rhythm saved the World", Appel claims, echoing the title of a 1936 number by Louis Armstrong; when art aspires to the condition of jazz, it jitterbugs between the ordinary and the extraordinary."
David Schiff

FAQS - Marshall McLuhan

"The Eddas are not entities in themselves, but more like magazines, or anthologies of history, poetry, myths, proverbs and even statements of the complex rules of poetry itself. At the beginning of the thirteenth century the acknowledged master, Snorri Sturluson, wrote the most memorable contributions to the genre."
Ted Edwards - Fight the Wild Island: A Solo Walk Across Iceland
(Salem House, 1987, page 162)

"The thunderclaps of Finnegans Wake have, from the first, been embedded in as much obscurity as the relation of the work to the five parts of rhetoric. Perhaps this difficulty can be clarified by a note on the magazine wall. The mystery of the magazine is revealed in Emerson's words: "The human body is the magazine of inventions ... All the tools and engines on earth are only extensions of its limbs and senses." With each extension of man, each new invention, Joyce's 'magazine wall' rocks and rumbles. At the outset of the Wake, the fragmentation and visual specialism represented by the bricks themselves was enough to end the integrity of the Sphairos - the integral and 'mystical sphere' of Empedocles.
Thunderclap 1, quite naturally, enacts the resonant effects of the first inventions/extensions of man, which propel him from the palaeolithic Garden into the neolithic age, from primal integral hunting and food gathering to the specialisms of the Willingdone Museyroom of weaponry. As the first 'act' of the first five-part 'play' the mode is inventio, the first division of rhetoric. As part of the unified logos (which was rendered by the Romans by the phrase ratio et oratio) or the all-resonant word, each division of rhetoric assumes and resumes the other divisions, just to the degree that any moment of consciousness simultaneously includes as its complements all aspects of mental activity."
Eric McLuhan - The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake
(University of Toronto Press, 1997, pages 261-262)

Greeks 'borrowed Egyptian numbers'
"The astronomers, physicists and mathematicians of ancient Greece were true innovators. But one thing it seems the ancient Greeks did not invent was the counting system on which many of their greatest thinkers based their pioneering calculations. New research suggests the Greeks borrowed their system known as alphabetic numerals from the Egyptians ..."
Paul Rincon

Nordic Salt Legends
"There are several related Fenno-Scandian myths dealing with how the ocean became salt, the tale of the Sampo from Finland and the tale of the Grotti from Scandinavia. These salt legends all are based around a central concept, that of a hand-mill being used to grind salt, grain, or ore.
The hand-mill used in Viking Age Scandinavia consisted of a flat, stationary stone with another on top, the top stone being turned by a handle fixed at the edge and pierced through in the middle where the raw material to be ground was introduced. Turning such a mill was heavy, laborious work, and almost always reserved for thralls or slaves. It is no wonder that in areas where such mills were used that legends would arise of a magical mill that would turn of itself, and from there it is only a short leap to an even more magical mill that will produce wondrous things from nothing. [Salty Tales From Hagar the Horrible]
Interestingly enough, the tale of the magic salt mill, grinding away on the sea floor, is actually truer than one might suspect. Scientists began discovering hydrothermal vents in the 1970s and have found that many minerals, including salt, make their way into the sea through these vents: in other words, the hydrothermal vents act like the Fenno-Scandic "magic salt mill" at the bottom of the sea."

The Joy of Bricks - Anthony Lane from Nobody's Perfect (Picador, 2002, page 596)
"Lego" is a contraction of the Danish "leg godt," or "play well" and it's one of those blessed names, like Coke or Kodak, that get their hooks in the auditory imagination and never let go. Rivals have failed to devise anything that can boast a fraction of this universal snappiness: Lego headquarters, in Billund, sports a fabulous display of Lego ripoffs, including Bildo, Blocko, Loko, Moto, Klip, Polly Plus, Hobby Land, Playgo, LocBlocs, OK, NA, and the tragically unambitious Toy. There is even one product called Ego, which is presumably all stud and no hole.

Joel Spolsky - Unicode and Character Sets
Ever wonder about that mysterious Content-Type tag? You know, the one you're supposed to put in HTML and you never quite know what it should be?
Did you ever get an email from your friends in Bulgaria with the subject line "???? ?????? ??? ????"?

For the World's A B C's, He Makes 1's and 0's
"Michael Everson, a 40-year-old typographer who lives in Dublin, considers himself blessed because he has found his life's work: to be an alphabetician to all the peoples of the world. Mr. Everson's largest project to date - a contribution to a new version of Unicode 4.0 [...]
Most people don't even realize Unicode is at work. "Unicode is like plumbing," said Rick McGowan, the vice president of the Unicode Consortium. "Yet it's the most far-reaching and ambitious multilingual project in history."
[...] As vast as Version 4.0 seems, it is still not complete, and nearly 100 writing systems remain to be encoded ..."

Unicode and multilingual support in HTML, fonts, Web browsers and other applications

"This post-Euclidean finite but unbounded space ..."
F. M. Cornford - The Invention of Space

Hints of a finite universe
Scientists have announced tantalising hints that the Universe is actually relatively small, with a hall-of-mirrors illusion tricking us into thinking that space stretches on forever.

The Universe could be football-shaped - John Whitfield
"A journey of 60 billion light years across a dodecahedral Universe would bring you right back to Earth. Like a circumnavigation of the globe, it would be a seamless ride: there would be no obvious point at which one 're-entered' the Universe."

Notes and numbers - Graham Farmelo on Marcus du Sautoy's The Music of the Primes
"Scientists have often found that the universe dances to the most beautiful mathematical tunes, but it was initially a surprise to find that the spacings of the energy values of some atomic nuclei look pretty much identical to those of the prime numbers. Later, the leading Bristol physicist Sir Michael Berry (coiner of the phrase "music of the primes") showed that the same spacing also occurs in quantum billiards ..."

The Mill of Time
Pythagorean Tuning and Medieval Polyphony
Musical Theory and Ancient Cosmology

Harmony of the Spheres
The astronomy of the Pythagoreans marked an important advance in ancient scientific thought, for they were the first to consider the earth as a globe revolving with the other planets around a central fire. They explained the harmonious arrangement of things as that of bodies in a single, all-inclusive sphere of reality, moving according to a numerical scheme. Because the Pythagoreans thought that the heavenly bodies are separated from one another by intervals corresponding to the harmonic lengths of strings, they held that the movement of the spheres gives rise to a musical sound - the "harmony of the spheres."
Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia 2000

The World Outside the Web - by Paul Boutin
"[Neal] Stephenson's new book, Quicksilver ... is but the first of a three-book series dubbed the Baroque Cycle due to be published at 6-month intervals over the coming year. Based around the life of Isaac Newton, the series isn't just Stephenson's withdrawal from cyberpunk ..."

Neal Stephenson Rewrites History
"Neal Stephenson has always been fascinated by history. Cryptonomicon explored the science of secrets during World War II, and The Diamond Age riffed on Victorian sensibilities. Now he's looking backward even further. He spent the last seven years immersed in the 17th century, working on a three-book series set during the scientific revolution. Certainly, The Baroque Cycle has scope ..."

Art Mirrors Physics Mirrors Art
"The French mathematician Henri Poincar� provided inspiration for both Einstein and Picasso. Einstein read Poincar�'s Science and Hypothesis (French edition 1902, German translation 1904) and discussed it with his friends in Bern. He might also have read Poincar�'s 1898 article on the measurement of time, in which the synchronization of clocks was discussed -- a topic of professional interest to Einstein as a patent examiner. Picasso learned about Science and Hypothesis indirectly through Maurice Princet, an insurance actuary who explained the new geometry to Picasso and his friends in Paris."
Stephen G. Brush reviews Einstein, Picasso: Space, Time, and the Beauty That Causes Havoc by Arthur I. Miller

Werner K�nzel - Raymundus Lullus and His Invention [via Tesugen]
"When, in about 1275, Raymundus Lullus invented his logical machine, the Mediterranean Sea was a kind of interface for three expanded cultural streams ...
[...] An archaeology of our own century of electronic communication reveals its tracks and traces in the Baroque era. There we find, with the experience and the background of the Thirty Years' War, a new beginning of a formalised logic of combination connected with a theory of communication, which is now based on artificial languages."

The Atlantic - September 2003 - E.T. and God - Paul Davies
"Some scientists believe that life on Earth is a freak accident of chemistry, and as such must be unique. Because even the simplest known microbe is breathtakingly complex, they argue, the chances that one formed by blind molecular shuffling are infinitesimal; the probability that the process would occur twice, in separate locations, is virtually negligible. The French biochemist and Nobel laureate Jacques Monod was a firm believer in this view. "Man at last knows he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance," he wrote in 1971. He used this bleak assessment as a springboard to argue for atheism and the absurdity and pointlessness of existence. As Monod saw it, we are merely chemical extras in a majestic but impersonal cosmic drama -- an irrelevant, unintended sideshow.
But suppose that's not what happened ..."

Daniel Pinchbeck - Ten years of therapy in one night
"Iboga is the sacred essence of the religion of the Bwiti tribe of Gabon and Cameroon. Most members of the tribe ingest it just once in their lives, during an initiation ceremony in which massive amounts of the powdered bark are consumed. Through this ritual, they become a baanzi, one who has seen the other world. "Iboga brings about the visual, tactile and auditory certainty of the irrefutable existence of the beyond," wrote the French chemist Robert Goutarel, who studied the Bwiti. The iboga bark's visionary power is produced by a complicated cocktail of alkaloids that seems to affect many of the known neurotransmitters, including serotonin and dopamine. Its complex molecular key may lock into the addiction receptors in a way that resets patterns and blocks the feedback loops that reinforce dependency."

Life Seems To Be Inevitable Consequence Of Existence
Is life a highly improbable event, or is it just the inevitable consequence of a rich chemical soup available everywhere in the cosmos?
Scientists have recently found new evidence that amino acids, the "building-blocks" of life, can form not only in comets and asteroids, but also in the interstellar space.
This result is consistent with (although of course does not prove) the theory that the main ingredients for life came from outer space, and therefore that chemical processes leading to life are likely to have occurred elsewhere.
This focuses attention on an already "hot" research field, astrochemistry.

Theory Challenges Darwin Doctrine Of Common Descent
"Cellular evolution, [Carl] Woese argues, began in a communal environment in which the loosely organized cells took shape through extensive horizontal gene transfer.
Such a transfer previously had been recognized as having a minor role in evolution, but the arrival of microbial genomics, Woese says, is shedding a more accurate light. Horizontal gene transfer, he argues, has the capacity to rework entire genomes. With simple primitive entities, this process can "completely erase an organismal genealogical trace."
His theory challenges the longstanding Darwinian assumption known as the Doctrine of Common Descent -- that all life on Earth has descended from one original primordial form."

Customised humans - Prospect Magazine - September 2003
"The distinctively human story began several million years ago when, for a variety of reasons (discussed in my book The Hand: A Philosophical Inquiry into Human Being), people started parting company from the other beasts. From then on, what was absent in most animals and only fleeting in higher primates became increasingly central in humans: self-consciousness stabilising into selfhood; instinctive behaviour evolving into agency, regulated by often quite abstract customs and rules; tools sustaining a network of culture in which partially collectivised experience forms the basis for the creation of a world of signs, symbols and artefacts distant from nature; sentience becoming objectivised and pooled as knowledge; uncertainty becoming the basis of institutionalised inquiry, and so forth. Even sophisticated "biologistic" accounts of humans sideline this, and tend to see humans as organisms, rather than as people whose behaviour is primarily governed by considerations for which there is no equivalent in the animal kingdom. They will, therefore, like their environmentalist or geneticist predecessors, be several million years out of date, overlooking the thousands of generations of cultural development, the self-transformation of humanity, made possible by the second-order awareness that first arose in that remote past when hominids set out on their lonely path."
Raymond Tallis

posted by Andrew 10/12/2003 06:11:00 PM

Sunday, October 05, 2003

 
sonic fiction

Sample Culture Now
"Since the early 20th Century witnessed the advent of collage, artists have sought to reprocess cultural residue from the past to create new systems of representation. As the flow of cultural and visual data continues to proliferate in society, new sampling strategies have emerged to further redefine the comprehension of history, information and their depiction.
Emerging forms of art practice increasingly cannibalize fragments of sound, image, music, dance, and performance to create new spaces of possibility. These hybrid projects use sampling, collage and recombination to generate live or time-based events that complicate our notions of time and space, artist and audience, virtual and actual."
Tate Modern, Starr Auditorium - Saturday 8 November 2003, 12.00 � 18.30

McLuhan 2003: Toronto International McLuhan Festival of the Future
The McLuhan Festival, a multi-faceted four-day event that runs October 17 to 20, 2003, is based around the "percepts," probes, writings and musings of Marshall McLuhan, Canada's leading visionary.

The Garden of Cosmic Speculation
"Covering 30 acres in the Borders area of Scotland, the Garden of Cosmic Speculation is conceived as a place to explore certain fundamental aspects of the universe. What are atoms made of and how should we conceive of them? How does DNA make up a living organism and why is it essential to celebrate it in a garden? Charles Jencks will explain how he has created a series of new, expansive, visual metaphors that challenge misleading and frequently misunderstood concepts, such as the Big Bang and the Selfish Gene."
Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle Street, London, W1S 4BS
7 October 2003 from 7.30pm

Futurhythmachines:
Sukhdev Sandhu reviews 'More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction'
From The Heliocentric World of Sun Ra, George Clinton's Mothership Connection, right up to 4-Hero's Parallel Universe, Eshun celebrates those artists who are star-struck, those who, like the pioneers of Detroit techno, create soundscapes that transmit 'along routes through space, [not] grounded by the roots of any tree'.
[...] What we're escaping is, in part, 'Blackness', a category imposed both from within and without the 'community'. Samplers and other soundmachines allow noise to be ripped apart from its original sources. It becomes decontextualised, 'mutation-positive'.

Geert Lovink - 'All the adventures are still here' - A Speculative Dialogue with Kodwo Eshun
"When painters paint, they are theorizing immanently in the field of paint. Sonically, when you compose, you are theorizing tonally. That was a key breakthrough. When I wrote my book it did not have to be historical. It could be a sonology of history, it did not have to be contextualization of sound. It could be an audio-social analysis of particular vectors. Sound could become the generative principle, could be cosmo-genetic, generate its own life forms, its own worldview, its own world audition. That's still the key break between my book and most cultural studies analyses. They still have not understood that sonology is generative in and of itself. Like every field is. Every material force can generate its own form."

Sonotronic Manifesto - fringecore [magazine]
Dee Sounds Out the Thoughtware of Kodwo Eshun
"The engineer's job is to stop feedback, stop errors, but Hendrix decided to say no, its not an error, it's something that's been charted, listen to the frequencies, listen to the harmonics, listen to the oceanic roar of the feedback. He realised that what sounded like a crisis was in fact an opportunity, so he turned an error into a feature, and the feature into a new organisational principle. So ugliness repeated became beauty.
You can see this a lot in Spooky. He organises all sorts of interruptions, all kinds of frequencies, glitches, static.
[...] Spooky realised that the electronic aesthetic was the new place to be, at the point where it doesn't feel like there is any human presence at all. This point of flux is a great place to start to make alienation audible, a way of making the feeling of social existence audible ...
It is not the social setting that creates the music, but the other way around."

Mediamatic: Dirk van Weelden: Some Excursions into Sonic Fiction
A two-step with Kodwo Eshun (May 1999)
KE: "Sonic thinking has to do with what John Cage used to say about listening as an active process. Sometimes listening to music is more about listening to your own ways of listening, hearing your own ways of hearing. Wondering what you're hearing. And sometimes you need time to do it, and that's when the anxiety sets in. Everyone around you says that listening is time-wasting, but you have to remind yourself that listening is an active form of creating."

Poetry rhythm

"Art used to be the teaching machine. Not anymore. We can now see that the [media] environment is the teaching machine." Wyndham Lewis

Goodfoot - report by Jessica Johnson
"The first thing you notice about Goodfoot is that it stands out from everybody else on the block. Past the aged furriers and a kitchen supply store on Toronto's industrialish Richmond Street West just off Spadina Avenue, the opaque exterior shows a solitary pair of sneakers dangling in front of a painted background.
It looks like the work of some sneaker-obsessed artist. In fact, the dimly lit interior displays about 30 rare and vintage reissue running shoes on a backlit wall."

The eye wakes up - in the horn of plenty

"Civilized man is so enveloped by his own artefacts and technological whims that he has forgotten himself, has lost the ability to perceive and read them as 'signatures' or signs, has become subject to them and spends his days ignorant that he lives in a wild fairyland of his own making. Restoring awareness is a Herculean labour."
Eric McLuhan - The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake
(University of Toronto Press, 1997, pages 10-11)

Speak, memory - Andrew Motion relishes accents and voices on newly released recordings of authors reading aloud
"Tennyson himself (in this respect, at least) does what one would expect: delivers "The Charge of the Light Brigade" at a decent canter, while preserving a melodious smoothness. Other aspects of his reading seem more remarkable, even if not exactly unexpected: the Lincolnshire accent, the gruffness and roughness of his address, the variety of pace between the verses and their refrain. It's altogether a breath-taking two-and-a-half minutes, with the strong sense of fragility made positively torrential by the various hisses and clunks that overlie the recording."

In 15 minutes everybody will be famous

"Apollonian intoxication alerts above all the eye so that it acquires power of vision. The painter, the sculptor, the epic poet are visionaries par excellence. In the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the entire emotional system is alerted and intensified; so that it discharges all its power of representation, imagination, transfiguration, transmutation, every kind of mimicry and play-acting, conjointly. The essential thing remains the facility of metamorphosis."
F. Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ - translated by R.J. Hollingdale
(London, 1968, page 73)

So that the vines burst from my fingers ...
"For Pound the auditory powers of poetic language are an instrumental part of intelligence and understanding, rather than lying deeper down below them; Pound frequently asserted his belief in 'absolute rhythm' and composition 'in the sequence of the musical phrase' (Literary Essays, e.g. pp. 9, 3), but this is more a performance model -- overall he will prefer to remember a sentiment like Thomas Campion's, in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie ... (1602): 'The eare is a rationall sence and a chiefe judge of proportion' (Campion, Works, ed. W.R. Davis [London, 1969], p. 294)."
J.H. Prynne - Reading Pound : Seven

MINDTRENDS mosaics of the mind - manTRANSforms speakers
... or to isolate i from my multiple Mes

Sneaker Stories: Following the Trail of a Cultural Shift - by Eric Demby
"During the blackout of 2003, one of the few sites where looting was reported in New York was a tiny boutique for sneaker connoisseurs on the Lower East Side called Alife Rivington Club. It was a stark reminder that sneakers are among the most coveted consumer goods in America, with more than $15 billion spent on nearly 430 million pairs in 2002. But there was a time in New York when sneakers were just fun and games.
Robert Garcia, 37, who goes by the name Bobbito, has been studying the soles and uppers of sneakers on everyone from his former classmates on the Upper West Side to Walt Frazier in his early-70's heyday to the superstar rapper Jay-Z. "Every kid in every seat in every period -- I knew how many sneakers they had, when they wore them, how they wore them, and when they needed new ones," he said of his grade school days. "I concentrated on class, but I was tuned in to people's feet." Being a proud veteran of two of New York's most influential subcultures over the last 30 years -- street basketball and hip-hop -- only furthered his fixation.
Three years ago, he began collecting his childhood memories and interviewing old friends from his cadre of street-basketball and hip-hop sneaker fanatics, who called themselves the Pound. The result is his first book, "Where'd You Get Those?: New York City's Sneaker Culture 1960-1987" (Testify Books). Weaving together anecdotes from his childhood and photographs of groundbreaking sneaker moments in basketball action from New York City playground tournaments, the N.B.A. and the A.B.A., Mr. Garcia underscores the implicit connection between a shoe's success on Big Apple asphalt and its subsequent popularity with the American masses.
[...] Ironically, Mr. Garcia and other members of the Pound have been partially responsible for the commercialization of sneaker culture since 1987, having made the leap during that time from studying playground feet to advising corporations on how best to appeal to the global playground.
[...] Last year, according to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, two-thirds of Americans bought sneakers for casual or lifestyle wear, rather than their intended athletic function."

AlterNet: Air Jordans
"Consider, if only for a minute, that the vast majority of the developed world has a view of athletic footwear that couldn't have existed without Nike's black and red high-tops. Gone are the thoughts of pure function, of rubber soles and leather uppers. Because of Air Jordans, sneakers are now a part of the bright, brash, mesmeric and often-flawed Leviathan that is American culture."
Damien Cave

Synthesis: Music: Interview: Bobbito Garcia, a godfather of hip-hop culture, expounds on his quiet empire
What's so great about vinyl?
"It's just warmer, bro, and that's not just an opinion, it's fact - analog is warmer than digital, it hits more points on the sound curve and that's what makes it warmer. It also picks up more ambient sound, and that's why it sounds cracklier, but I like that. Digital might sound clearer, but that's because digital isn't picking up all those extra sound waves."
Bobbito aka D.J. Cucumberslice

Heteronyms
"Like Underground Resistance as X-102, World 2 World, Galaxy 2 Galaxy, The Martian, like Kool Keith as Funk Igniter Plus, Rhythm X, Dr Octagon, like 4 Hero as Tek 9, Internal Affairs, Tom & Jerry, Nu Era, Juan Atkins multiplies himself into machine names: M500, X-Ray, Channel One Frequency, Audiotech and Infiniti. The producer disappears into each alterego but the machinate name is not a pseudonym, a fake name. Rather it's a heteronym, a many-name, one in a series of parallel names which distributes and disperses you into the public secret of open anonymity. I is a crowd: the producer exists simultaneously, every alterego an advertisement for myselves. The Rhythmachine actively sets out to manufacture as many personalities as possible. Alteregos are more real because you choose them. Ordinary names are unreal because you didn't. Multi-egos are more real still because they designate your parallel states.
Children, instinctual animists, identify with toys and dolls, subjecting themselves to and projecting onto the Inanimate: every 12-year-old knows that I is an other and another and another. In the 70s, the Bowie heteronyms - Major Tom, Aladdin Sane, Thin White Duke - were serial. Now heteronyms come in parallel. Today, the Futurist producer is always greater than one, always multiplying into omni-duos, simultaneously diverging selves that never converge into knowledge of self. Instead of disciplining others through the despotic standard of keeping it real, staying true to the game, representing or staying black, Alien Music proliferates mindstates which never amount to one mind. To unify the self is to amputate the self."
More Brilliant Than The Sun: Adventures In Sonic Fiction: Kodwo Eshun
Quartet, London, 1998, 07[106-107]

Thunderwords of Finnegans Wake
"There are ten thunders in the Wake. Each is a cryptogram or codified explanation of the thundering and reverberating consequences of the major technological changes in all human ..."
Marshall McLuhan

The Nine Muses presided over the arts and sciences ...

"In [Giordano] Bruno's time, alchemy was a part of the curriculum of grammar, and all of the great grammarians were also alchemists." Eric McLuhan - The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake
(University of Toronto Press, 1997, page 63)

Arthur Rimbaud: Alchemy of the Word - Andrew Jary
Rimbaud's experiential poetic technique was synaesthesia. That is, the multisensory intoxication of poetry, a poetry 'containing everything, smells, sounds, colours'. Rimbaud called it an 'alchemy of the word' ...

Finnegans Wake Concordex Page 404
"We expect you are, honest Shaun, we agreed, but from franking machines, limricked, that in the end it may well turn out, we hear to be you, our belated, who will bear these open letter. Speak to us of Emailia."

The Mailed Art of Ray Johnson by Clive Phillpot
Mail art, simply defined, is art that utilizes the postal service, or, in a secondary manifestation, is art that takes a form relating to postal products or apparatus - for example, artists' postage stamps and artists' rubber stamps. On many occasions, Ray Johnson has been named the father of mail art, also the grandfather, and even the "sugar dada".

Sonic Space Scribe by Jamie Cason
"It's not often you'll find musicians Kate Bush and Erik Satie in such proximity, but this is only one of many unlikely connections that pepper David Toop's Ocean of Sound: Aether Talk, Ambient Sound, and Imaginary Worlds ...
Toop ... shows us a way of listening differently. He teaches us to enjoy the environmental sounds of pneumatic drills, police helicopters, and tree frogs. He tells us to appreciate the silence between sounds. Perhaps one day we will be able to extend this practice to other forms of information ingestion, savoring the darkness between individual frames of film or the gaps between words in print."

Joan Anderman - Hip-hop setting the beat - Boston Globe - 4 October 2003
For the first time in the 50-year history of the Billboard charts, all Top 10 songs in the country this week are by black artists - signaling the culmination of hip-hop's ascent as the dominant force in popular music and culture.
Once an underground, controversial style characterized by gangsta mythology and all-too-real turf wars, rap music is now embraced across the radio dial and across the nation by a diverse, multiracial fan base. Heavy beats serenade shoppers at the malls. Street rhymes are the soundtrack to suburban sleepovers. Rappers are pop stars, pop stars rap, and the sound is as integral to the cultural landscape as country music or rock.
[...] ''There's a vacuum in music made by white kids for white kids,'' said musicologist Arthur Kempton, author of ''Boogaloo: The Quintessence of American Popular Music.'' ''White pop and rock is fragmented into so many different strains and when that happens black music fills the vacuum. It happened in the early '60s, before the British Invasion, when Motown was established. Today 70 percent of hip-hop is bought by white kids.''
But the difference between the two is hardly, pardon the pun, black and white. In the last five years pop and rap artists have merged their sounds in chart-topping, genre-busting, and race-erasing collaborations. Justin Timberlake - one-fifth of the fresh-scrubbed boy band 'N Sync - is the featured vocalist on Black Eyed Peas's ''Where is the Love?'' Former teen-pop idols Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera have reinvented their sound by working with such cutting-edge beatmasters as the Neptunes, Rockwilder, and Rodney Jerkins - blurring the color line and helping pave the way for the mainstreaming of hip-hop.
At this point, ''you don't necessarily need the white face to cross over to the nonurban audiences,'' said Erik Parker, music editor at Vibe magazine. ''Before you had Eminem as a huge success because he's a great rapper and he's white. Justin is a great singer and he's white. Now you have Nelly and Lil Jon crossing over - black artists doing black music. I do think that rappers are more conscious of a growing market and they're creating records to accommodate that market.''

Mary Mitchell - 'Ghettopoly' is what happens when hip-hop is celebrated - Chicago Sun-Times
"The symbols found in "Ghettopoly" are an accurate reflection of what hip-hop heroes are selling to White America. Ironically, people are outraged about Urban Outfitters' selling a foul board game, but few people of influence seem to care that every record store in America is selling music that glorifies the very stereotypes the game promotes.
How can black people be outraged over a board game when black superstars have gotten rich by promoting those same stereotypes? These performers aren't boycotted. They are worshipped.
There's something else that is sad about all this ..."

Hal Foster: In Sync with the Buzz - Slumming with Rappers at the Roxy
London Review of Books - 21 September 2000
"Not surprisingly, Seabrook's findings boil down to hypotheses about identity and class. 'Once quality is deposed', he argues, identity is 'the only shared standard of judgment'. For Seabrook this identity must be 'authentic' (somehow authenticity survives as a value), and it can only be made so through a personal sampling of pop goods at the Megastore: 'without pop culture to build your identity around, what have you got?' For an old guard of American highbrows like Dwight Macdonald and Clement Greenberg, this statement would be grotesque: mass culture is the realm of the inauthentic, and there is no more to be said. For Seabrook (and here he has learned from cultural studies since Williams), it is not absurd at all - in large part because he views pop culture not as mass culture but 'as folk culture: our culture'. Yet this semi-paradoxical turn of phrase doesn't solve a basic problem: given his account of the Megastore, is the 'sampling' of an identity � la hiphop any different from the 'branding' of an identity � la George Lucas? British cultural studies gave us the notions of 'resistance through rituals' and 'subversive subcultures'; American cultural studies has given us the Post-Modern subject that is 'performative' in its construction. But with the near-instantaneous time to market from margin to Megastore (or from Small to Big Grid), how much resistance or subversion can subcultures offer today? And is the Post-Modern subject so different from the consumerist subject, that 'perfect hybrid of culture and marketing', as Seabrook calls it, 'something to be that was also something to buy'?"

Jon Caramanica - This Was 'Spinal Tap' for the Hip-Hop Generation
"Fear of a Black Hat," the rap mockumentary that today seems just as prophetic as it was satirical, is now on DVD.
It's been 25 years since its genesis in the South Bronx, and still hip-hop remains a mystery to Hollywood. Despite the influx of rapper-actors like Ice Cube, Method Man and Queen Latifah, film representations of hip-hop tend toward the clich�d. They have only rarely gotten beyond the spate of super-amateur mid-80's films -- "Wild Style," "Beat Street," "Krush Groove" -- that aimed to translate the nascent street phenomenon for the masses.
Attempts at hip-hop parody have proved particularly futile, a fact made all the more egregious by the existence of a Hollywood film that, nearly a decade ago, got it very right. "Fear of a Black Hat," from the novice writer and director Rusty Cundieff, was "This Is Spinal Tap" for the hip-hop generation -- a loving, knowing poke at the genre's sanctimony that only someone with intimate access could have pulled off.
Developed at roughly the same time as Chris Rock's limp "CB4," Mr. Cundieff's film chronicles in mockumentary style the creation, success, implosion and ultimate redemption of the fictional hip-hop group N.W.H. (Niggaz With Hats). Its members are political gangsters with juvenile ideologies ...
[...] Wanton ostentation, glamazon arm candy, unrepentant gangsterisms: Hip-hop is in a self-parodic free fall, and no one seems to notice. Furthermore, artists like Master P and Beanie Sigel have starred in their own straight-to-video "rapsploitation" films -- now a subgenre in its own right -- that regurgitate, without irony, the same thug iconography that "Black Hat" so effortlessly poked holes in.
"There are so many things right now that are ready for a humorous take," Mr. Cundieff says. "50 Cent. Eminem. Puffy with his name changes, the gun in the car, the guy who follows him with the parasol -- it's all ready to be unpacked."

Seamus Heaney praises Eminem
American rap star Eminem has been praised by leading poet Seamus Heaney for his "verbal energy". Mr Heaney, 64, also said Eminem had "sent a voltage around a generation".

A microphone is not a gun
"Tupac, Biggie Smalls and Big Pun are gone, and right now there just isn't anyone else but Eminem who can rhyme 14 syllables a line, spin a tale, write a speech, subvert a whole genre, get metaphorical, allegorical, political, comical and deeply personal - all in the one groove of vinyl."
Zadie Smith

'Scratching' records to create new sounds has become wildly popular. But are scratchers really musicians?
Elizabeth Armstrong - Turning the tables on music - csmonitor.com (May 24, 2002)
"On the one hand, scratchers might be seen as distorters of music, relying on the recordings of others to produce the desired effect. On the other, they might in fact be composers, drawing upon various recordings to create new works of their own [...]
"A scratcher is reinterpreting and recontextualizing snippets of music, much as a jazz player reinterprets a standard 'head' by improvising around it," says Virgil Moorefield, a guitarist who teaches a course on The Producer as Composer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. "Good scratching is as difficult to master as any other instrument. It takes time, practice, dedication, and talent."
[...] Although "scratching" is rooted in African-American "hip hop" music, today's turntablists are multicultural. The Invisibl Skratch Piklz, a disbanded Bay Area collective that remains highly respected as the nation's top scratch performers and instructors, are Filipino. The Automator is Japanese-American. The SoleSides Crew consists of Puerto Rican, Anglo, African-American, and Japanese-American players [...]
How to scratch out tunes
Since the invention of the turntable, DJs have been spinning records. Two turntables allow them to fade one song out while bringing in another, creating smooth transitions.
The ingredients for "scratching" records are simple: two turntables with a mixing board in the middle. But the moves are increasingly complex ..."

Stories of Modern Migration -- "In This World" and "Dirty Pretty Things" are more harrowing than any studio thriller.
"... journeys like Jamal's, once undertaken, cannot be reversed, even by the physical act of return, because both the traveler and the world he inhabits have changed as a consequence of his movement through it."

Turning the Tables, the Establishment Takes On Hip-Hop - New York Times
"Joseph Saddler, known as Grand Master Flash, was the man who found his calling in the breaks between the grooves in records. For three years in the 1970's he sat in his room spinning records, composing riffs that could be tucked inside the beat."

The Medium Is the Message - Marshall McLuhan
"Just before an airplane breaks the sound barrier, sound waves become visible on the wings of the plane. The sudden visibility of sound just as sound ends is an apt instance of that great pattern of being that reveals new and opposite forms just as the earlier forms reach their peak performance."

As the lion, in our teargarten remembers ...
"Yes, the viability of vicinals if invisible is invincible. And we are not trespassing on his corns either. Look at all the plotsch! Fluminian! If this was Hannibal's walk it was Hercules' work."

Kurtis Blow Presents The History Of Rap, Vol. 1 The Genesis - Liner Notes
"In the early 1970s a musical genre was born in the crime-ridden neighborhoods of the South Bronx. Gifted teenagers with plenty of imagination but little cash began to forge a new style from spare parts. Hip-hop, as it was then known, was a product of pure streetwise ingenuity; extracting rhythms and melodies from existing records and mixing them up with searing poetry chronicling life in the 'hood ..."

Hip hop's frontier scout
"Since most hip-hop careers don't last much longer than the pair of sneakers you wear when you sign the contract, perhaps the best tribute to Grandmaster Flash is that 30 years after he helped start the hip-hop game, he's still out there playing it.
Flash is working the clubs, touring Europe, spinning on Sirius satellite radio - doing the things deejays like Grandmaster Flowers and Pete Jones started doing in the parks and basements of the Bronx in the early '70s, when this new dance-and-party sound barely reached beyond the five boroughs."
David Hinckley

Masters of Innovation
"In 1877, Thomas Edison was hunting for a way to take sound transmitted over a telephone and turn it, directly, into written copy that could be delivered like a letter or like the telegrams of the time. He experimented with a carbon transmitter and a stylus to make impressions on paraffined paper. To his surprise, the almost invisible impressions produced a representation of the original sound when a stylus was pulled over them and connected to a speaker.
Edison refined what he'd found and introduced a phonograph with tinfoil, instead of paper, in December, 1877. He thought it would be a great success.
He could already see lots of uses for his phonograph. Why, you could record the last words of people who were about to die. You could teach spelling. You could make a talking clock. You could have a dictating machine for your office.
What wasn't important to Edison was using the phonograph to play music. Maybe it was because he had hearing problems, but Edison thought that the reproduction of music was a frivolous use of his wonderful invention and cheapened its image.
Other people didn't think the same way. They liked the idea of using the phonograph to play music. When they wanted to create an early jukebox that would play music at the drop of a coin, Edison objected. It took him almost twenty years to accept the fact that playing music was the use that mattered most to people, that mattered most to the market.
Edison simply had trouble getting the message that the market was sending him. Grand Master Flash got the message all too clearly the first time he went public.
By this time Flash had been working on his system for years. He'd learned the electronics and modified all kinds of equipment. He'd developed systems to let him know precisely where to drop a needle on a record. That system, the clock system, is still used by DJs. It was time to go public."
Wally Bock

Godfather of hip-hop still spreading the message - The Age
"Flash, who must now be aged close to 50, came on stage to a montage of footage ..."
Shannon Morris

Crooked Tongues - Sneaker Resource
"A void currently exists within sneaker culture with many heads sharing in the view that there is a big gap between what they want and what they are given. From an actual shoe perspective, things are cool: it�s always been about keeping your ear to the ground; utilising your contacts; being first in line etc."

A Different Utopia: Project for a New Kalakuta Republic - 2003
By Paul D. Miller a.k.a. Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
"Unlike the European notion of "Utopia" as a planned and designed place of Reason and Rationality bequeathed from Thomas Moore, Plato, and Francis Bacon - Fela's republic would be made invisible and modular - he created a mini-world [...]
In the here and now, "A Different Utopia" is a bridge between the visions of reason that held together Europe and Africa, the U.S. and Nigeria - and proposes a philosophy of rhythm. The text becomes shareware. The beats and pulses, bass-lines and sounds, they are threads of a sonic tapestry woven out of desire and dreams. They are vanishing points on the landscape of the imagination - that's to say that they're points alright, but they punctuate a different architectural syntax, a place that Rem Koolhaas would call the "culture of congestion" ..."

The temporary autonomous zone by Hakim Bey
(On Pirate Utopias & Music as Organizational Principle)

Space Race - Black Science Fiction Writers Explore Future Worlds - by Charles Mudede
"Black science fiction in musical form (which British critic Kodwo Eshun calls in his book, More Brilliant Than the Sun, "sonic fiction") is to be found in the late-jazz of Sun Ra, the electro of Newcleus, Mantronix, and Soul Sonic Force, and the cyber-funk of Dr. Octagon and the marvelous MF Doom. Agreed, many of the speculative fictions produced by black writers are great and underappreciated, but still none of them comes close in popularity and creativity to even Keymatic's 1984 sonic fiction "Breakers in Space," which imagined, with great detail and beauty, a space station that's occupied by the best breakdancers in the universe."

Black Secret Technology (The Whitey On The Moon Dub) by Julian Jonker
"Thinking about music in terms of science or technology immediately brings to mind Brian Eno's accusation: "Do you know what I hate about computers? There's not enough Africa in them". But what then is the link between the futures envisioned by new African diaspora music, and the real world presence of technology? It is problematic to imagine Africa's rhythmical technology as being in opposition to the west's digital technology, a problem which Eno blithely sidesteps. Yet if anything, the new music of the past two decades indicates that we should ignore received distinctions between white technological agency and black technological funk.
[...] Juan Atkins, Derrick May and Kevin Saunderson, the three DJs responsible for inventing Detroit techno in the early 80s, came from middle-class backgrounds, their parents having risen in the ranks at the Ford and General Motors plants that were Detroit's economic engine. Like Samuel Delany, the three friends were amongst a very small group of black kids at an affluent white school, and found themselves thrown between two different worlds with no home ground."

American Mavericks: Program 11: From Moog to Mark II to MIDI to Max
"When commercial recording tape became available in 1947, America got in, for the first time, on the ground floor of a musical technology. Not in this field would American composers have to follow Europe - the two continents, plus Japan developed the technologies and the artistic responses to it in tandem.
Electronics were the perfect musical medium for the eccentric composer who wanted to hide away in his studio, freed from the necessity of ingratiating oneself with chamber music groups and orchestra conductors. And every new technology that came along - the splicing block, the tape loop, the oscillator, MIDI, the sampler, and ultimately the home computer - seemed to bring an entire new musical movement in its wake."

John Naughton - Limit copying and we may end up copying the USSR
"The essence of the studios' case is this: in a digital age, every computing device is a digital copier - a tool for piracy. Although they are seeking technological ways of preventing people making digital copies, they know that ultimately the task is impossible. Thus the only 'solution' is to compel the computer industry to cripple its products to safeguard the intellectual property of film studios and record companies.
Their ideal outcome is a world in which anyone wishing to purchase a general-purpose - that is unrestricted - computer would have to obtain a government licence ...
This is preposterous. It is as if the Victorian telegraph industry had demanded that the telephone system be modified to make it incapable of passing messages."

Encyclopedia of Afrofuturism
"For better or for worse, people are becoming more and more accustomed to thinking and interacting in asynchronous modes (like email and lists), detached modes (like chat rooms) and what I'll call digisected modes (like your pseudo-spiritual awareness of all the corporate entities that manipulate electronic representations of you). These transformations are on such a subtle level, such a HUMAN level undefinable even by the marketing engineers who would hope to harness them, that theories often distort one's perception of them. But the energy that is produced by people adapting to new ways of thinking exists nonetheless ... like fucking gravity ... pulling, stretching, bending light, shaping time."
[David Goldberg (aka Mr. Bollweevil)]

Those who cannot imagine the future are condemned never to reach it

posted by Andrew 10/05/2003 04:32:00 PM