“Rhythm Science” OR “Digital Cave Paintings”

This will be here tomorrow. It will be here the day after that and the day after that and the day after that and the day after that… But how long? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years if I keep posting, if I keep coming back to trigger the counter? These etchings that I make on my virtual cave, who will dig through the layered terabytes of html and Java to find this? What digital-archaeologist will come down through the cybertera and download these words, these glyphs. What will they think...

Spooky said to me, “Technology is a collective hallucination, and we are able to send our visions and ideas in ways our ancestors would have thought were godlike.”

God like. I like that, Spooky.

I am not a man scratching images and marks into the digital cave. I am a god bring something to the nothing of the infinite digital canvas that will keep unfurling as long as I keep chasing the flashing cursor. My messages, as soon as I hit publish, stream through the phone line, through to a hub, through to another hub, out through the ether, carried by pelicans, and finally set down to rest in on the internet, in this blog, there for anyone to load. It exists no where. It exists only on the screen, when it’s called, like a spell to conjure ghosts. This is magic, this is wizardry. This is witchcraft.

Spooky said to me, “Future generations won’t have a ‘dependence’ on technology. They will have technology as a core aspect of their existence – as much as the languages we speak, the air we breathe, and the food that we eat are all aspects of technology.” DJ’s shouldn’t try to be prophets. Leave the prophesizing to Nostrodamus. Spooky contradicts, we need the air we breathe, we are dependant upon the food we eat, and we survive through the language we speak. Technology will become one of theses needs; we already need it to communicate. MSN, ICQ, AOL, YAHOO!, hotmail, gmail, VOIP. Ours is a globe of condensing. The other the side of the world is at the click of a cursor, earth as an acronym. I think what Spooky meant to say was dependence upon things is “part of being human”. But is this true? Is being dependant a prerequisite to being human? I don’t like that. That thought doesn’t sit well at all.

Beat factories reduce, reuse, and recycle. There should be a law, or at least a social understanding that one cannot take a beat and relace the track with new vocals if the beat is less than 5 years old. Who remembers Ashanti? Skinny girl, hairy arms, murder inc labeless? What about her song “Foolish” and the biggie beat? That was fine… but then the beat was used again in “Unfoolish”. Spooky whispered, “They propagate what Amiri Baraka called ‘the changing same”: offering iterations of versions and versions of everything, all change all the time. Inertia – it’s not just boring, it’s against the basic principles of physics.” Spooky is right and wrong, depending on what time and how you look at him.

in·er·tia n.
Physics.

The tendency of a body to resist acceleration; the tendency of a body at rest to remain at rest or of a body in straight line motion to stay in motion in a straight line unless acted on by an outside force.

Biggie’s “One More Time” was a hit in its day; it sent ripples through the industry and through the fabric of time. We all do it; we do it all the time. By example, “Foolish” is a reaction to the waves set off by “One More Time”. I don’t agree with what I just said, but finding a counter example to a proposition is the only way to break it. Spooky, I’m sorry, I break. Foolish was fine, Unfoolish was ridiculous. There is a time and place for the changing same. EG. “Everyday Rude Boy” Kardinal Offishal.

My fingers grow weary pushing the words to the wall. The cursor flashes dimly.

“Something Borrowed” OR “Well… that’s comforting and scary at the same time.”

“The ethics of plagiarism have turned into the narcissism of small difference: because journalism cannot own up to its heavily derivative nature, it must enforce originality on the level of the sentence.”

While this isn’t an all encompassing view of the ethics of plagiarism, it does offer another view not usually taken. When I usually think of plagiarism I’m more worried about getting caught doing it. I’m not saying that I am a plagiarist; I’m saying that it’s so easy to take in something and forget that the idea isn’t yours. It is strange though, the idea of the ethical stances concerning plagiarism, to think about why we have these rules in the first place. It’s even more interesting to think about how they can be problematic. Right from the outset it’s problematic in that you can’t own an idea. Actually, I should retract that, you can own an idea, but you really shouldn’t be able to. Yet I can understand from a creative stand point why laws and rules against plagiarism should exist. Still, the fact remains that you can’t have it both ways. While the laws of plagiarism are important for those who have created valuable things, they also inhibit those who could build on those already valuable things and make them priceless. I’ve got a great example.

Let’s talk about the XBOX. Microsoft came out with this gaming system a couple years ago. It was revolutionary in its design. Basically if you opened one up you’d see that it looked identical to a computer. Hard Drive, VPU (video processing unit), DVD Drive, Ethernet port, Motherboard… It was revolutionary because it broke the boundaries of what console game system could be. Eventually people decided that the full potential of the XBOX wasn’t being used. People, voiding their warranties, decided to open up the XBOX and see what could be done. The result, here at the pinnacle of XBOX modding (it will get no better than this) the XBOX can do so much more. With a modchip and the proper software installed it can play any type of media from MP3 to AVI, it can utilize the DVD playback function without the use of the DVD dongle that is sold separately, and the hard drive can be upgraded to any size. This is a prime example of how a public effort can make a private product more… productive. But yes, there is a down side, and it’s quite a steep down side.

Since the XBOX can now copy just about anything put in the DVD drive, people aren’t just backing up games they already own to their XBOX. People are pirating games like mad. You can even download video games and transfer them via FTP straight from your home PC to your XBOX console. “Thou shalt not steal” right? Shit, think about all the bad karma we’re wracking up.

Back to the article for a moment. The story of how Lavery had taken bits and pieces from other peoples work and lives is very intriguing, but I can’t help but question why she did not ask for permission from Lewis to use parts of her life. Yes, she was using Lewis’ biography as research, but when you use that much of someone’s biography you have to think about the legal implications. I mean, come on. That’s just careless. Too careless. Being a writer myself I might be inclined to understand where Lavery is coming from. Maybe she felt that had she revealed that her creation “Frozen” was a mash of various sources she might be seen as less of a writer. And it’s sad that we think this. We tend to think that originality = talent. Yes, the fact that that’s true isn’t being debated, that fact of how talent can manifest itself is though. Talent is just marked by originality; it’s the ability to see what in life connects and how it can be transformed to become something more. There are many modes in which talent can manifest, originality though seems to be the main way, the only way we can see it.

I hate to say it: but the more you know, the less you enjoy.

“Mix Tapes” or “The Death of Mixes [Both CD and Tape(in my eyes, at least)]”

I remember making mix tapes. I loved doing them. Setting to paper first what artists and what songs, then drawing arrows to designate which song would go first and how the rest would fall into line. I would test how each song would “feel” coming after the other, and when it was all said and done, I’d have a masterpiece. Things were difficult before mp3, but they only became worse when CD-Rs became mainstream. Sit back and kick with me for a moment, this is how mix tapes and CDs died, for me anyway.

Before the age of MP3, making tape mixes off of CDs was an involved process. I consider myself lucky though. I had a 5 disk CD player that I could program to play songs in certain order. That was hard enough making sure I inputted the right songs, but I also had to make sure that I did the math on the songs I wanted to put on the tape right. Otherwise something would get cut off half way. That way of making Mix Tapes became obsolete soon enough.

I was probably around 16 when mp3s were becoming popular. My room was in the basement and for a desk I had a huge twelve-foot by four-foot plank of wood resting atop two three-foot speakers. On top of the desk I had a tape deck, a 5-CD disk changer, an amp, and an equalizer all hooked up to a total of 2… 4… 6… speakers. I also had my computer. I remember when I first realized how I could make it so that I could play mp3s off my computer through my dad’s old school hi-fi equipment. It was all about the “audio out, y-splitter”. It was around the time that I’d just gotten my license when I made my first mp3 mix. I made because I wanted to celebrate the rite of passage.

While I chatted with my online friends I queued songs into my winamp. I deleted, rearranged, revised, and when it was finally a masterpiece, I recorded it. I loved that tape so much and that summer my friends came to love it too. They knew what song was coming up next, and even though it was predictable, it was the best train of music I had ever heard or made. I regret the day that I tried to make a better one. I copied over it and didn’t make a play list or copy of the original. I still think about the Mix Tape and would pay dearly for something to remember how it went.

When CD-Rs and the Writer Drives dropped in price, everything changed. Now I made CDs just to have the music in the car. I hardly ever put any thought into the compilations (they’re not mixes, just ingredients thrown together and not properly stirred) and some times *gasp* I don’t even fill the entire CD. I’ve even once only put 4 songs on a CD, just to show some one some songs that turned out they weren’t interested in *double gasp!*. It’s just become so easy. You load your blank into the drive, fire up Nero, slap-dash a playlist of songs, at more or remember, then click “BURN”. There is no more checking and rechecking, watching for flow or discord. Usually my compilations are of junk, a deep, dark, possibly lovely cacophony.
To redeem myself though I have two points.

I do not own an ipod. I cannot justify the price tag, nor do I have a want for a glut of music to hang around my neck. I am not a trucker, no do I walk from my home to York. I just don’t need that much music.

The last CD Mix that I made was for my girlfriend. It came with a collection of poetry, the song lyrics, and why I included the particular songs on the CD.
It was the shit.

“The Image World” or “Please, no moore pik-toors”

Yes, that’s my phonetic approximation of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s accent. Pretty bad, huh?

My decision to write about Susan Sontag’s essay The Image World was two fold. First, and least importantly, I was intellectually drawn to the piece by the ideas surrounding the act of taking pictures. Not many people really think about it, in fact, it’s become such a forsaken technological leap that it’s tacked onto just about everything as an “option”. I’m talking about cellphones, ipods, and anything that has the secondary function of being an image taker. My second reason why I wanted to write about Sontag’s essay was because for some strange reason the name has stuck with me all week. Sometime last week I was looking at the reading and I think my mind hooked the name Sontag and reel it into my unconscious. I’ve found myself thinking the word “Sontag” randomly and upon catching myself I wondered where I got the word from!

If you didn’t notice, I’m big on signs. I guess that makes me superstitious. Oh well.

Thumbing through the article after my first full read-through, it looks like I’ve highlighted at least a third of the work. There so much really interesting stuff here. Let’s do a “quote and reaction” post. I like those.

Quote: “Such images are indeed able to usurp reality because first of all a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”

Reaction: Sontag is obviously working with the understanding that with every painting the painter paints something of themselves into it. Unlike photographs where the lens is not biased, it “sees” what is there. The analogy to a footprint and death mask is odd, I really don’t know what to make of it.

Quote: “Photography has powers that no other image-system has ever enjoyed because, unlike the earlier ones, it is not dependent on an image maker. However carefully the photographer intervenes in setting up and guiding the image-making process, the process itself remains an optical-chemical (or electronic) one…”

Reaction: This quote address some of the issues I have with photography being considered art. Here’s a story. My friends and I drove across Canada 3 years ago. In the van we had 2 painters, 1 self-styled poet, and 1 photographer. I can understand the art in painting, I can understand the art in writing poetry, but I find it difficult to reconcile how it is that photography is art. I can understand it as photographs are being taken in a setting where the photographer has full control over the lighting and all that jazz, but out in nature, what is it? It’s along the lines of “discovery” I suppose. People that discovery things, especially dealing with science, are really only finding and labelling what already exists. But still, the fact that they’ve “noticed” what others have not makes these findings important. It seems so strange that that’s the case.

Quote: “every body in its natural state was made up of a series of ghostly images superimposed in layers to infinity, wrapped infinitesimal films… Man never having been able to create, that is to make something material from an apparition, from something impalpable, or to make from nothing, an object—each Daguerreian operation was therefore going to lay hold of, detach, and use up one of the layers of the body on which it focused.”

Reaction: Balzac was one crazy son of a bitch. That’s truly my favourite part of this essay, the inclusion of Balzac’s belief of how a camera worked. It kinda plays along the lines of a theory I heard in a first year NATS course. The theory, from what I remember, had to do with a kitten in a box with atomic particles or something that give a random something something translating out to “ON” or “OFF” if it the atomic particles gave off the random “OFF” something something, that would tell a mechanism in the box to release poison gas, effectively killing the kitten. If it were the case that the atomic particles gave of the random “ON” something something, the kitten would stay alive. Since the box was closed and you didn’t know what had happened to the kitten, it was posited that the kitten was in a state of superposition. Meaning, it was dead, alive, and nothing at the same time. It was everything at once, until you looked at it. I think it was called Schrödinger’s Kitten. I’d look it up, but the internet is down.

Quote: “It is common now for people to insist about their experience of a violent event in which they were caught up—a plane crash, a shoot-out, a terrorist bombing—that “it seemed like a movie.” This is said, other descriptions seeming insufficient, in order to explain how real it was.” AND “People in industrial countries seek to have their photographs taken—feel that they are images, and are made real by photographs.”

Reaction: I disagree with the whole “It seemed like a movie” being used as a way to further the realness of an experience. In fact, I am sure that most people when they say “It seemed like a movie” mean to add the idea that what they experienced was surreal, something that could ONLY happen in the movies. I’m not sure when this essay was written, and it might be the case that the ideas are dated, but really, I don’t see what she’s saying as true.
The second quote is also something I have to disagree with. Case in point: when I was younger and we had trick or treaters come to our house, my mom would always have the camera ready so she could take a picture of all the goblins and witches that came around. Now it’s not so kosher to do that, people are afraid of everyone else, they’re afraid that maybe some how the pictures will be used in some sick way on the internet. People are very conscious of where and how their images are used, and it’s not just celebrities. I once had a professor who I asked if I could tape her lecture. She said “Sure, just don’t put it on the internet.” It seems that the internet has changed a lot of the feelings towards having your picture taken. There’s something about the ease at which you copies can be produced that frightens a lot of people.

Quote: “Knowing a great deal about what is in the world (art, catastrophe, the beauties of nature) through photographic images, people are frequently disappointed, surprised, unmoved when they see the real thing.”

Reaction: This is so true. It’s the whole “you seen one, you seen them all” idea. It is strange that though I’ve never seen the real Mona Lisa, I can actually go online and find a hi-res image wherein I can open in photoshop and actually see more detail than would be possible in real life. What does that mean about the original then? What is the relationship between the copy and the original? One is not surely better, they are almost the same, only one is old, the other timeless, multiplied, and not considered rare.
There are so many other things that I would love to react to in this essay, but I just can’t do it all. I guess in closing I should say something profound. Well, here goes:

Photography is something. What it is, I am not sure. It was, before this essay, just something I did with my digital camera. Now, it’s something that I cannot name. I should always keep in mind that one thing can always look like another, and I guess that’s one thing that photography cannot point us to. It cannot tell us what it shows us, it has the eyes, but not the words.