3spds

Medium = Message. This is a ‘type’ identity. The message or content of a particular piece of media is always another medium. A corollary to this could be that we are always extending our extensions, since McLuhan also defines “media” to be an extension of ourselves.

Language = Medium. Also a ‘type’ identity. This statement I see as an elaboration on McLuhan’s discussion of light. Language, grooming, and fire I believe are some very early human media. I think if we were to really get down to it, I would say that we ourselves are extensions or physio-linguistic legacies and prosthetes of each other.

Hot media: a chimpanzee grooms her daughter.

Cold media: her daughter grunts, coos and swats back at her mother.

I’m pretty sure McLuhan mentions the fact that media cools and heats up depending on the generation or individual that re-interprets it. The temperature changes because strategies for appropriate interaction with the world changes. Actually both of those statements are different ways of saying the same thing.

Ultimately I am of the mind that this process of prosthetics and amputation of our extensions is the essence of human drama. Also, I would say that the reincarnation/samsara story is a metaphor or explanation (redundant?) for this process. (of course it’s redundant; you’ve done this a squillion times already!)

I would also go on to say that these extensions of ourselves are exactly the antithesis of material pleasure, because if you are extending something you’re not experiencing it. So:

Medium != Present

Reality, as we tend to think about it, being a phenomenon (albeit an immersive one) described or defined by its emergent properties and its overarching stories/metaphors/”Laws” is just a concept. Actually it’s a very abstract, sophisticated concept. Composite reality in terms of “what-is-happening” is in truth immediate. (note the etymological presence of the very word “MEDIA” in that one!) Another way to put it is that it is ineffable, unable to be uttered. Unable to be extended.

However, human culture is incredibly good at extending itself. To quote Mr. Watts “we are menu eaters, we eat the menu instead of the food”.

here are some current re-workings of that infamous undead cat.

cat3

cat2

cat1 <—– CommLab Final

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i have posted this under phys-comp not in error, but because i’m going to interface this application with tubby and my performance on thursday. i think it would be only fair to start by tuning/playing tubby and then moving on from there, so that it’s apparent who does what.

)

i am writing this post to set down that a breakthrough has occurred. i have written a patch that achieves a level of machine listening and autonomy of note event selection hitherto unattained in any of my previous work with computer music. this is the culmination of 2 years of struggling with conceptual limitations and hacks.

allow me to explain (or try minimally and fail). sorta how tubby now knows how to speak, i have given similar autonomy to shrod. a large part of it is his improved filterbanks. now he’s got 539 analysis bands, localized in time and frequency. he also has 3 stages of amplitude resolution, and the microsounds he triggers can be scaled accordingly or be completely different depending on these stages. I guess that’s what I mean in terms of autonomy. The data coming in to this puppy gets categorized and analyzed in ways that have come out of the study of psychoacoustics. for example his analysis bands are logarithmically spaced (at least for now) at 50 bands/octave. what shrod does with these osc messages is entirely up to me as well, so i can do realtime transforms which range from attempts at reconstructing the data (a venture whose success hinges upon what the material is and how it relates to the reconstructing ‘vocabulary’) to pattern detection and counterpattern deployment (realtime software automata that can realize any number of strategies such as tone clusters, counterpoint, rhythmic motifs, etc). this thing has a view from within the sound and is able to not just change the stimulus but produce strategic responses. Eventually, he will use a bank not of constant-q filters, but of cq driven phase vocoders arranged to do multiresolution analysis across multiple time/frequency scales. although at that point each octave will be divided linearly, over each octave the stimulus will be analysed with an appropriate window and provide identically scaled time/frequency resolution. The phase vocoders will similarly not be driving cosine summation oscillators but triggering note events, so the strategy will be similarly variable. This will also give us data about the phase structure of the stimulus, making wavelet and matching pursuit operations extremely straightforward. at this moment i have attempted a few tricks with him, including reproducing him with a live updating wavelet shape derived from an envelope function and the current stimulus, transposed across the spectrum. i have also tested out assigning different wavelet shapes to each of the 3 levels of dynamic resolution. also i have used a few synthetic wavelet shapes such as banded whitenoise with a formant (always a favorite) and straight sinusoid tone pips with a von hann envelope.

I hope to use this patch as an automaton to trio with tubby and me, since tubby i see as his hardware hacker, physical computing, evil jamaican twin.

I am also experimenting with the idea of remixing (or something) this album I recorded in 2004 on a beautiful, impeccably mic’ed concert grand. It was called “Animals Should Wear Clothes”, and it is largely solo piano with some hand percussion and bowing the strings, etc. I have already produced a few starting points, using shrod. there’s actually a piece on the album called “Schroedinger’s Cat” which I have started working with. It was unconscious I swear! One of these remixes was my CommLab final because I was so excited about this thing for the past few waking cycles. I’ll post links to the music when I upload it in some fashion or another.

in other news, i’ve lost my mind.

hehehe

sorry the drawings suck.  it will be creepier (and thus funnier) as an animation i swear.

time bomb

click to progress through the frames.

there must be some kinda way outa here…

ps here’s a mock-up version with the original storyboard Adam and I drew.

Re: Blogs of War

War is repugnant to me.  The internet is cool though.  War has definitely become progressively more mediated as telecommunications improved since WWII.  Hopefully this means that civilians will feel more connected to the war that’s going on, and eventually war will go out of style… But that’s doubtful.

Re: Everquest

I don’t see how a system like Everquest could be considered “self-contained” in any way.  Yes, it’s nice that everyone starts flat broke, but we are nesting this system within the larger economy.  And nobody starts out equal here.  So this Castronova guy seems to be barking up the wrong tree.  I think he would agree with me now that things have progressed as they have within the game world.   I have no idea what we’re going to do when one of those game economies collapses.  But more importantly: what are we going to do about the larger economy when we run out of oil?

you tube seems a lot more streamlined.  I had to resize my video to get it on ifc, which is kind of an issue if I want to put my other animations up there, because the window size is an ‘initial condition’ that affects everything about the system.  I also occasionally don’t really have cast or crew, or win awards, or some of the other extraneous things ifc asked me about my animation.  honestly I prefer just throwing my stuff onto an ftp and then linking to it from some other source, like a blog or SNS because then I can contextualize it how I want.  I understand why ifc might be a better resource for a film maker, but, to put it simply, I am not a film maker.