Collagy Software Synth Piece

Percussion Tweak

Taking some of the preset drum sounds found in Logic Studio, distorting them beyond recognition, and composing with them in ametric fashion; adding some chords for variety.

DANM 210: Haraway and Kember

In attempting to create – or make possible the creation of – artificial life, we not only arrive at a frontier of knowledge, we are operating at the edge of what we can know As Sarah Kember makes clear, the development of evolutionary systems and “autonomous agents” is at all times wrapped in our metaphorically constructed understandings of what life is, and what it is for life to come into being. Early efforts (which is certainly not to say that the whole project isn’t still in an early stage) at developing artificial life have been driven by masculinist, monotheistic mythologies (alliteration, anyone?) with the practitioners scarcely being aware of it. These myths are part of our inheritance with respect to our understanding of life-as-it-is, so it makes sense that they would filter our sense of what it means to create organisms within a machine. It is definitely important to critique these background epistemologies that govern the ALife discipline. Kember presents us a coming-of-age scenario for the whole endeavor.  The image of Richard Dawkins giddy with excitement over having created a program that reproduces and mutates does have a hint of the mad scientist about it. With the help of critique from various perspectives – surely feminist and queer epistemologies are two of many approaches – the ALife discipline could mature into something more self-aware, ethical and useful for deepening and broadening our understanding of life and its workings.

 

Something that nagged at me while reading Kember’s piece was that although it is indeed important to critique narrow epistemologies connected to the ALife discipline in order to expand its possibilities and effectively wrestle with the ethics of an endeavor which will likely have profound consequences for the future, the stage of ALife work at present is really about concocting simulations of important aspects of living organisms: reproduction, mutation and such. The creatures of ALife projects are akin to cells and viruses; not even anything so complex as bacteria. Life on earth consisted pretty exclusively of bacteria for a billion years – give or take – before it kick-started itself to become anything more complex. The enthusiastic claims of some of these practitioners is reminiscent of the hyperbole associated with other arenas of technological innovation. Life on earth began, as near as we can tell, when the chemistry happened to be right, and was essentially spontaneous. When software begins reproducing and mutating independent of the intention of any programmer, then we can really talk about the ghost in the machine. It seem to me that ALIfe work is far more interesting as a way of illuminating actual biological processes, as well as providing new approaches to understanding what life is. I think this is what Kember is getting at when she speculates – quoting Helmriech – about turn ALife work would take if feminine viewpoints predominated.

I haven’t said much about the Haraway piece. Both she and Kember deal with the notion of life as information. For Haraway, this understanding of life presents an opportunity for a new kind of feminism, a new politics and a new freedom, as well as the risk of new hegemonies. A progressive politics in this moment insists on the hearing of a multiplicity of voices, and of coalitions and unities based on mutual affinity, rather than some mythologized, essential likeness. I find that to be an encouraging notion indeed.  

 

DANM 201 Journal for 15, October. Surveillance: Foucault, Burgin, Zizek

Victor Burgin’s article about Jennifer Ringley is primarily concerned with what the experience means to Ringley, and its significance for her personal development. The use of the camera and the establishment of the website are thought of here as part of the risk-taking and reality-testing which go hand in hand with the displays Jenni sometimes staged. There is a suggestion throughout the the article that Ringley’s actions, rather than being pathological, as expressed in the early press coverage she received, are in fact developmentally appropriate, and that the camera is her extension of the kind of experimentation in which we all engage at one time or another. What Burgin fails to adequately address is the significance of Ringley’s the relationship between Ringley and her viewers for the culture generally. The Jennicam “project” may in some way be a variation on a child’s solitary play-acting before an imaginary audience, but the significant difference is that Ringley is allowing her life to be viewed by real people, and is fully aware of the fact. Technology now allows us to unreflectively externalize inner psychic processes and impose them upon one another. It is worth asking what effects this externalization might have on individual and collective mental and emotional development.

Something else I observed was the way her attitude toward the camera’s presence evolved over time, as revealed in her own comments. In her response to one of the FAQs earlier in the project, she claimed that she felt no loss of privacy, and that she was indeed alone in her room. Later when she reestablished her camera after moving out of her dormitory, she said she did so because she felt lonely without the camera. Clearly the presumed presence of viewers held significance for her.

This thought ties in tidily with Zizek’s speculation that we need to be gazed at in order to validate our own existence to ourselves. We want to be watched all the time. These realities (to tie all the week’s reading together more tightly) could be seen as part of the triumph of the panoptic mechanism. People have internalized the power structures to such a degree that they can only move within them and crave their exercise. Or… has panopticism arisen partly out of an innate need for an audience: the external realization of the gaze of an Other that previously resided only in the imagination.

Foucault speaks of the panoptic enterprise as a machine; a technology, irrespective of whether the means employed are literally mechanical.. The point is that once set in motion, the panopticon fulfills relentlessly the demands of it’s own logic, irrespective of the individuals who are it’s agents. In his book In the Absence of the Sacred Jerry Mander speaks of the modern corporation in just these terms.

So the manifest exercise of power and subjection are indeed everywhere. It’s not just me being paranoid.

I will have to devote more space to the Foucault chapter sometime. The essay is pretty virtuosic. Here I’ll just mention that there is a moment in the piece where he lets his own values seep through the cogent analysis. On page 226, where he speaks of the growth of various sciences out of the early Inquisition, he expresses his contempt for certain bodies of knowledge with a few choice adjectives and even a bit of sarcasm. He also makes a distinction in this same paragraph between the sciences that seek to describe and analyze human beings and inquiries into the workings of nature. The strangeness here is that each of these branches of investigation seems, earlier in the essay, to emerge from the same mechanisms of partition and control, yet Foucault hints strongly at a qualitative distinction between them. I wholeheartedly agree that this distinction is real (and I have a persistent sense of these values moving underneath the surface of the entire text). It simply means that the analysis, compelling though it may be, is incomplete, and that other paradigms must surely come into play. The essay is purely diagnostic, and begs the question of how we might extricate ourselves from such thoroughly interwoven power relations. The next step is to begin to imagine what a society that was free of such subjugation might look like. It would be profoundly different, to say the least. This imagining is one of the larger tasks of the artist.

DANM 201 Journal entry for 8, October

Walter Benjamin’s essay very much reminded me of the Barthes, and to some extent Foucault, I’m often struck by the way Structuralist thinkers take a rather freewheeling approach to their use of metaphors. These metaphoric structures are useful devices for articulating important insights: the painter vs. camera operator = magician vs. shaman makes sense. This is perhaps essay-as-poetry, inducing a richness of interpretation.  Metaphors, however, can conceal as much about a concept as they reveal, and when such structures are wielded with an air of great authority – which is a sense I get when reading these writers – a healthy skepticism is in order.

Benjamin’s concept of the “aura” represents a valuable insight, but the implication that the aura of all artworks is somehow being destroyed by the ubiquity of mechanical reproduction is a bit of a stretch. If that were so, then galleries should disappear; painting and sculpture would not persist as art forms into the 21st century. If anything, the pervasiveness of mechanical reproduction has given rise to a renewed desire for the very sense authenticity Benjamin describes as being on the wane. The nature of the aura has changed certainly. It is possible that this idea of authenticity has evolved to accommodate mechanically reproduced works as well. On the one hand, it’s great to be able to borrow a copy of a book of poetry at the library. It’s also great to have a copy signed by the author on one’s own shelf. Even work originally produced for a digital medium can carry with it a trace of the author’s persona for a knowledgeable audience; something which has always been true.  Neither the aura nor the author are dead, they just have to make room for computer graphics, blogs, etc. Benjamin is quite right when he says that to wring one’s hands over whether photography is art is to ask the wrong question, and woven throughout this essay is the sense that, when the new developments are understood, fully and without fear, the prospects for art-making have been broadened, not diminished. It is perhaps a product of the times.

Espen Aarseth’s chapter does a nice job of giving perspective to the use of new-media buzzwords. Terms such as “virtuality” and “interactivity” (a word I’m rapidly burning out on, though it seems necessary to continue to use it, at least for now) came about as the information age approached adolescence, and conveyed conceptual frames of rapid, continual progress and endless boom times, that were heavily promoted by those who have a large economic stake in the various technologies. The words invoke frames for an agenda, irrespective of it’s consequences for nature and culture. When I read sentences in the piece such as ” ‘The digital medium’ … is a vague and confused phrase that completely lacks analytical value and should be abandoned”, I swear I could hear raucous applause.

Oh, The Things You Can Like

It is fair to say that I have broad, even wildly eclectic, tastes, and It’s not at all uncommon for me to leap and skip in time and/or cultural milieu in a single sitting. Once in a great while I stumble on a sequence in my listening that leaves me feeling a little weird. 

Last week around this time I was listening to Abra Moore at her artist page on Fuzz.com. Moore was a founding member of Poi Dog Pondering back in the day. Her recent work that I’ve heard is robust and in the Austin-americana vein. It’s also very feminine, in a robust, Austin-alt-country sort of way. I have a real sweet tooth for this stuff. Certain women SSs (singer songwriters) have a way that just gets gets to me like nothing else can. 

A Little while later, I was catching up with Squandermania, a blog by poet and scholar Don Share (breaking news: Share seems to have abandoned this site, and is now doing his blogging at Harriet, the weblog of the Poetry Foundation). He posted a YouTube bit by an electronic avant-art-pop group called Silver Apples, which was active in the late 60’s.

This is groundbreaking stuff. Silver Apples’ main composer, Simeon Cox, built his own crude synthesizer and invented a system of keys and pedals to control it. The music often has an off-kilter, machine-like quality, with bleeps and tweets, and fragments of melody cycling maniacally. The song lyrics share the obsessive, repetitive quality. Though the instruments were primitive as synths go, there is a vibrancy and color in both the rhythms and the tones that suggested – to me – at once exhilarating freedom and crippling neuroses: a quality that I suspect would be difficult to replicate with the sophisticated synthesizers we have nowadays.  The group was years ahead of its time.

After listening to a couple of these tracks, I began to feel…hmm… confounded. I’m not convinced that that’s the word I need here, but I experienced a subtle yet forceful strangeness. Abra Moore’s sounds put me in this particular emotional space, and the Silver Apples’ music shone an intense clashing light on that space, giving rise to – again, subtle – emotions I may never be fully able to describe, or replicate by any other means. Of course this little episode will also color my understanding of each of these artists henceforth. None of this is to say that I have any regrets about the incident. To the contrary, It was enriching and instructive, in a mildly disturbing way.

Just some of the unintended consequences of art’s power.

Not So Fast

I was listening the other day to Hillary Hahn’s recording of Bach Violin Concertos from way back in ‘03. It’s a decent record, except that all the fast movements are just too damn fast. I was particularly disappointed by the D minor concerto for two violins. I have a special fondness for that piece. J.S. arranged it for two harpsichords, and that version appeared on a Nonesuch recording from the seventies. It was one of the very first records I bought with my own money, and I played that thing to death. I loved every piece on it, and the D minor double kicked the whole thing off. I can’t now recall who played on it, but I’m pretty sure I still have the vinyl somewhere. I should dig it up. 

There are times when the sheer rhythmic relentlessness of up-tempo Bach lights me up. That’s my head-banging jam. I get a pleasure from that steady chugga-chugga barrage of notes not too dissimilar from that which I get from a good crunchy electric guitar.  Taken too fast, however, it sounds frantic, it’s just not sexy anymore. It doesn’t rock. I can’t help feeling that Jeffrey Kahane was setting it up so Hahn and company could show off, but if you want to demonstrate how fast you can play, there’s plenty of music out there that suits that purpose much better. At any rate he and I disagree on the tempo for those pieces.

Short Pentatonic Piece

Remember when I wrote about pentatonic scales way back when? I said I’d continue that thread. Here’s a little study using only a C pentatonic scale. It’s definitely not a polished realization; just a raw Finale file, but it shows that one can do a lot with just five pitches.

From the Wonders-of-Language Beat

As reported in the NYT (Gretchen Morgenson also has a good piece in the Business section) it looks like the government wants to step in and try to shore up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Something it wasn’t supposed to do, even though the companies always operated under the opposite assumption. Both firms (the term seems ironic at the moment) are teetering, and their stocks have taken a nose-dive.

On the same NYT page with the article is a sponsored link (I’m not sure if this instance really qualifies as an advertisement) to a press release from Freddie Mac. The statement insists, as you might imagine, that FM is adequately capitalized and fully solvent; there is nothing to fear and by the way, pay no heed to the bad press they’re getting. 

It’s the second paragraph that got my attention:

Beyond that, there are a number of options to manage our capital position. The average rate of run-off on our retained portfolio is currently about $10 billion per month, and not replacing that run-off would free up approximately $250 million of capital per month. Over the course of a year, this would free up approximately $2.5 to $3 billion of additional capital if this run-off rate remains constant. We also could consider reducing our common stock dividend. Our current annual common stock dividend is approximately $650 million.

I’m a stranger here myself, but I did manage to learn that “portfolio runoff” is a term for a decrease in assets of a mortgage-backed security portfolio, due to the pre-payment of the mortgages. This usually occurs when homeowners refinance when the value of their home goes up, or interest rates go down. This means – if I’m understanding this right –  that the original loans are paid off, and the new loans stand to generate less in interest than the previous one, thus devaluing the securities. That’s part of the risk assumed by buying mortgage-backed securities. I suspect, however, that here the FM people are defining runoff more loosely to include asset losses due to defaults. 

The FM spokespeople are trying very hard paint the situation in a rosy hue. The use of the word “options” makes sense by itself, but there are some key turns of phrase that are just astounding. They write that not “replacing the runoff” – which we can read as “we are unable to generate fresh revenue” – would “free up” $250 million in capital per month. The term “free up” suggests that the situation presents some kind of new opportunity, when what is really happening is Freddie Mac is hemorrhaging money (to the tune of $10 billion per month), and they need to dip into their capital reserves to stay afloat. This gaudy euphemism is designed to deflect attention from the gravity of the situation. 

The other ingredient in this PR spell is the use of repetition. The repetition is not literal, but the invocation of the notions of liquidity are drummed into reader’s minds. Please bear with me as I list instances of this.

 

Freddie Mac is adequately capitalized


highly liquid


we will have a substantial capital cushion


much greater surplus above the statutory minimum capital requirement


we are adequately capitalized


we hold capital well in excess of regulatory minimums


we are adequately capitalized


and have liquidity resources

 

And all this occurs in the first paragraph, which contains a total of just 132 words. Did you get the message? The other repetition that caught my attention was the use of the “free up” phrase, which is invoked twice.

Once the reader sees past the spin, the whole thing becomes a display of spectacular desperation.

Betrayed Again

I figured that by now no degree of lameness from our Congress could surprise me, but Thursday’s Senate vote on the the FISA Amendment bill – yes, I know it was expected, but still… – left me sad and very angry. I read through most of the bill last night. The bulk of the text has to do with procedures the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is supposed to follow when certifying surveillance authorizations, and fol-de-rol the Justice Department’s goes through when submitting authorizations for review. That’s all a lot of hot air, because the court is quite impotent. There are plenty of provisions in the bill that allow the Intelligence people or the Attorney General to get around the FISC, and the bill doesn’t give the court any teeth.

The real nastiness, as we all know, lies in the grant of retroactive immunity to all the telecommunications companies for the Bush administration’s spying when it was illegal – not merely illegal, but unconstitutional. As Senator Russ Feingold and others have noted, we don’t even know the extent of the telecoms’ activities in this mess. We don’t know the extent of the crimes that were committed. Now, without a radical overhaul of the legislation, we’ll never know.

But this needs to be repeated often as bluntly and as publicly as possible. George W. Bush is a felon, many times over: a felon, a crook, a criminal. His violations of the fourth amendment have been public knowledge for several years now.

But Congress has voted to cover up a whole bunch of his crimes.

The passage of this bill is a profound betrayal of Americans – and the very idea of America. The irony is that the original FISA of 1978 was enacted in the aftermath of the Nixon administration’s intelligence-gathering abuses (Nixon was of course facing the distinct possibility of criminal prosecution when Gerald Ford pardoned him), in order to regulate such activities. So the laws conceived in the aftermath of Presidential criminality has been tinkered with to cover up more Presidential criminality, and every legislator who voted for it is an accomplice. We voted in all those Democrats in ‘06, and they just cave in every time it counts. Is there a bottom to all this? When will Democrats at last grow so sick of not getting anything done that they get something done. Are they so cozy inside that beltway that they’ve not only lost touch with the American people, and the most basic principles of democracy, but lost any desire to be in touch? Wait, maybe I just answered my own question.

Obama’s ‘yes’ vote was the most serious betrayal of all. Here he had a chance to walk his talk, and he sided with behemoth corporations. I suppose I’ll still vote for him, but I had concerns about his progressive credibility from the beginning. Now he’s starting to look like little more than the lesser of the evils. I’m lowering my expectations of any genuinely progressive action coming out of an Obama administration. Making history by being the first African American President is just not enough.

What the hell are the Democrats afraid of? I think the American people would love to see something real happen: to get at the truth and see some justice done, even if – especially if – it shakes up our politics in a serious way. All these Democrats seem to think that they have something to loose if they so much as mention the elephant in the room. I think the public’s opinion of the Dems would skyrocket if they showed some guts. This unending capitulation is painfully tedious. They could do the right thing, bring some genuine excitement to the theater of politics, and get folks interested. 

On to the next battle, i guess. There are plenty. Let us slog on, and create some theater of our own in the process.

Ups and Downs of Light Construction

This is a Summer of major projects, many of which involve home improvement. Gods help us, we’re installing hardwood floors in the hallway and alcove ourselves. The floor is part of a larger makeover of our apartment which also involves painting, and new carpet in a few rooms. We’ve done nothing to the place besides fill the closets with s t u f f for the past ten years or so. We’ve been talking about the floor, etc. for at least two years. A genuine Spring cleaning did indeed take place, in which we must have given away at least a hundred pounds of clothes, among other accumulations. The contents of one room currently occupy another and force us to do our daily living in a fraction of our usual modest space. I’ve looked forward to this time with equal measures of anticipation and dread.

This is not my favorite kind of work. There, I said it. Over the years my father-in-law (My wife’s folks own a couple of small apartment buildings, including the one we’re in. Yes, it’s a form of subsidized housing. It’s unlikely we could afford to live decently in this town otherwise.) has spent a considerable amount of his time setting tile, installing large appliances, doing drywall, snaking out sewer lines, and spreading countless gallons of off-white paint on many walls. We’ve helped out on quite a few of these jobs, working on every apartment in our building at one time or another. I have enormous respect for his multitude of skills and for how hard he works; still cranking as he approaches eighty. Though I’ve had some experience with all this, It’s just not how I want to spend my time. I’ve got other things on my mind, other ways I would much rather work and contribute. Before you call me a snob, let me reiterate that my respect for anyone who does such work is profound. It all needs to be done, and it requires considerable skill and thought (now call me a snob if you wish). When I have to do such chores, I can’t help feeling that I’m being distracted from other things that also really need doing; writing and composing and practicing and studying. Yes that’s all work I enjoy, but that certainly doesn’t mean it’s not hard work. This is particularly true this Summer, since I’m preparing to return to school, and the list of things I need to study and review and create before classes start just keeps growing.

That was a lot of whining just now. Please accept my apologies. I’m not a huge whiner, I swear. I just had to get that off my chest, as they say. As usual I’m feeling at least a couple of things at once. Even as I wish I was playing music instead of painting or nailing boards, I’m glad to have a clue about how to do this stuff, we are saving quite a bit of money, and it’s good to watch the place slowly transform into something quite a bit spiffier. There are certainly interesting things about working on an old building. Our building is nearly a hundred years old, and everything is just a bit crooked. We constantly have to cajole and bend and shove things into place. The old floor undulates, and we must occasionally stand on boards to get them to fit. There’s archaeological aspect to the project. The original (1917) wood floor has been temporarily exposed, We take more notice of evidence of past construction, which sometimes takes the form of quirks and flubs. There are also remnant layers of paint which you don’t see unless you take up the carpet or remove moldings. It’s hard to understand what drove previous occupants to paint the wood trim a slightly-brighter-than-olive green.

I realize that a certain amount of DIY light construction and handypersonage is inevitable. In spite of myself I’ve become semi-proficient at using a nail gun and several types of powered saws; cutting floor boards to length and making notches in them in order to make them fit around ancient moldings just so. All the little conflicting emotions balance out, and I know I’ll be happy with the end result, part of which will include a much nicer space in which to attend to all that other work.