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I know it's been ages since I've updated my Podcast. But here's the latest:
Deric Carner and I toss sounds and images back and forth. Right now he's drawing a series of horizons, and I am translating them into sound. This is one of his images.
You can download the sound I created for this latest horizon by subscribing to Fundamentally Soundcast or just download it here.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb tells us about how little we can actually predict and how we should never ever listen to experts. An immigrant taxi driver in San Francisco can predict what will happen in Afghanistan much better than a college-educated Afghan studies professor.
His basic idea is that the world is full of black swans, events that are completely unpredictable and are going to happen when we least expect it. These are the events that cause history to jump, in personal as well as geo-cultural ways. He says we live in Extremistan, a world we have been making for the last thousand years, one in which the black swan plays a huge role.
In his book 'The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable' he points out how we are very good at predicting the outcomes of simple encounters, like a police raid. But we are almost always wrong at predicting complex encounters, like a war.
And yes, isn't it always a fool's errand to predict events a year from now?
His philosophy is very liberating. On a warm pseudo-summer day when I am dreaming of moving to Berlin, and just ridding myself of all the American paranoia and hysteria that I absorb on a daily basis, his ideas of embracing chaos and giving up on control are almost enough to make me just book the ticket and go.
Digiki's new album Beat Vacation is out. And it sounds great! Not least because, well, it might have a few of my samples on it... Ahem...
Anyway, it's a great album by a super musician and all around fun guy who looks good in a skinny tie and a white shirt. What else do you need? Just go buy it, you won't regret it.
I finally had the pleasure of meeting Siona yesterday for lunch, we've been trying to meet for months now, somehow our schedules just never allowing it to actually happen. We had an iteration of the conversation I seem to have with all of my best friends these days, something along the lines of Why Do I Want To Live In San Francisco When It Feels Like I Am Living In A Fishbowl. But her answer just reaffirmed why I am staying here, she also believes that if you don't see what you like, then you make it. It's such an opportunity because nothing has solidified here yet, you can actually have a big hand in creating the channels your work flows through, influencing the way it gets consumed and read. How fun! And admittedly exhausting as well. But there is a sense of the city being a blank slate, with an audience starved for stimulation.
Here are a few examples of people filling in the blanks and connecting the dots:
Overlap – A bi-monthly series of electronic music organized by Christopher Willits and his crew. The next one happens this Saturday night at Rx Gallery.
Three Pieces – The quarterly series that Deric and I put together. The next one is scheduled for July 24th and we've already booked an amazing electronics duo from Hamburg called Incite. It will be our first "international edition."
Wilde Chats – A bi-weekly discussion series for gay men to talk about philosophical ramifications of gay life in San Francisco, at the Orbit Cafe. I've not been yet, but if it is actually anything like it is described, I'm fascinated.
F.
Knowing that Hiro admired her work was a source of pride. After all, it was Hiro who had documented the Interracleft community in Harajuku, pushing the Ward's seven-pronged brand identity into radical new areas.
Michiko, thinking of her somewhat secret liaison with Hiro, felt a jolt of nervous energy. Hiro played her like a fiddle, strange physical and psychological intercourse involving restraint, double-blind submission and penetration, mixed with mind games so intricate in their complexity that she could not even attempt to understand, choosing instead to just ride them out enjoying their particular flavors of play and innuendo. Hiro was a minefield and each step led to explosions of pleasure or high G-force intellectual vertigo.
She went shopping at this store to buy him a new T-shirt before their meeting at 11:00 that night.
OK, I've updated the site a lot. Doing this has forced me to use XHTML with CSS in ways that I had never tried before and it was a lot of fun. I want to keep sharpening my skills now.
It was in March of 2004 that I posted my first entry on this new site. I had a blog before that but it got lost in a few errant keystrokes.
Pole's new album Steingarten has been the perfect soundtrack to all this coding.
Hopefully this spring cleaning will inspire me to be a little more active around here. After all, it's the 21st century!
One new feature here is the archives. Just checking it out now produced a stiff dose of nostalgia.
Before the show last week at Meridian Gallery I had a workshop with the Gallery's teenage interns. Here are some pics taken by Jai of the workshop as well as the performance that night.
Too funny... Lil' 9/11
And who might this be? Is he the leader of a small nation? Ian Mckellan's new boy toy? My long lost brother who got all the good looks? No, it's the one and only Seamus Cater, a dear friend living in Holland who, with a little luck, I can convince to come to California again sometime. I'm going to be presenting his score for Love's Geography: Revisited in LA with Sara Wookey next month, May 12. Last time we showed the work at the Hammer Museum, this time at the 24th Street Theater.
So, I've been busy... This past Wednesday night saw the performance of my new piece Here. There. (Distance Study 1), a collaboration with Jano Cortijo. His video was great, and I was excited with what I came up with musically. Lots of questions/interest afterwards. I got to chat with Philip Blackburn for a few minutes, who was in town working on his podcast. Thanks Adria and everybody who helped with that show. Pics should be up soon.
In May I'm collaborating with Sara Wookey again, something that I always look forward to. We're going to present her piece Love's Geography: Revisited at 24th Street Theater on May 12, in Los Angeles. I can't wait to get back down there.
E.
Monday morning, waking up, her head reeling from the previous days events. Her pay wasn't docked for destruction of the Thompson Web last week, it was the fault of the machine itself, the cost passed onto the insurance company.
Today's assignment was a big one, Tokyo Disney needed tighter chromasonic integration in its latest attraction called Goofy Gravity.
Michiko's hand slipped hesitantly and with slight friction into the new Thompson Web. Her skin was slightly pushed back as the thin ropes acclimated to this new guide, her hand doing the same, the ropes wrapping gently but not without urgency around her every finger. With just a few minutes of learning by both human and machine she was guiding the low frequency sine waves into correct correspondence with the bright blue hue projected directly into her retina from the Pixel Spray.
From the next room Hiro smiled as he knew they Ward could do no better than Michiko as Officer of Cultural Boundary and Discretion.
from Sign and Sight.
"Too much of our world's data is hidden by stupid passwords."
Prof. Hans Rosling (on YouTube) mines UN and world data to get an accurate picture of how the "third world" has changed since the 60's and 70's, presenting a view of the globe that is much more complex, flat, and interesting than the blunt designations of "first" through "third" are able to convey.
D.
Sensing a strong disconnect between the ethereal world she worked in day after day, full of refined contingencies between delicate components, always subject to slight offset, continually gaining velocity while only becoming more deeply intwined with such whimsical data as the current 2nd favorite sweet soda in sector 77-D, and the rest of her time with its sexual and fashion concerns, Michiko couldn't go to sleep tonight, her head buzzing with vague worry.
I love you Jitter. (and you too Paqui!).
"There's more plastic surgery here than LA."
Luckily somebody is looking at how people there really live. It's a fascinating BBC4 documentary on life inside Tehran.
C.
With little in the way of expertise on matters such as these Michiko realized that she would be unable to haggle the price down to her budget. The World Trade Center had just fallen three weeks beforehand and the Thompson Machine had not yet been publicly released. But she had attended a Halloween Party in San Francisco a couple of years back where they showed a prototype. She was in awe of it back then, although a bit bulky, its ability to not only pull but push, with tactile data visualization and real-world conceptual solidification, she knew they'd be all over this back in Tokyo. But that was later.
Clipping the strings she worried the auto cut-off wouldn't block the solidification module. Maybe all of her day's work in beat-matching and full-spectrum sound/color coordination could be lost in the process. But finally, snip snip snip, her hand was released.
The emphasis was on tactile sound and image, feelings, and emotion. Not so abstract. Great audience and thanks to the artists. Next Three Pieces is tentatively scheduled for July 24.
B.
When she thought about her days passing and their inevitable culmination she considered herself lucky to be in this position. A lifetime of discrete educational landmarks prepared her for this role. Her title is that of District Officer of Cultural Boundary and Discretion, Shinagawa Ward.
This Thompson Web was one of surprising tenacity. Normally the ropes were preternaturally respondent to the most subtle of gestures. Perhaps she had missed, in the morning brief, a city-wide backlash to the latest missive. The 5th rope from the bottom, 265 degrees off center, was now the main culprit, restricting her to non-kinetic motion. With her free hand she pulled the nail scissors out of her miniature Louis Vuitton bag.
A.
As she tried to pull her hand out of the hole she could could feel the thin web of intricately tied ropes pull ever more taut. While not an entirely unpleasant sensation, this obviously wasn't going anywhere. After a long day of beat-matching and full-spectrum sound/color coordination the last thing she needed was a Thompson web that refused to cut her slack.
The soft yet waxy edge of the third rope from the top slid slowly back and forth against her wrist, the fibers simultaneously moving tip to rear, back and forth. The tightness of the knot itself growing ever more insistent, refusing to be tricked by her intuitive squirming.
"Oh," she told herself, "stop worrying about the delicacy of the machine and just use your nail scissors. Cut the ropes, and set yourself free." The Thompson machines were common, every Sakura-ya had three in their window. A multi-use interface, she used them primarily for beat-matching and sound/color coordination.
The April edition of Three Pieces is happening tomorrow.
Three Pieces is a quarterly series that we've organized to feature three artists, all working in different media, to present current or in-progress work as well as allow the audience to interact with the artists, usually with a brief discussion period after each piece.
This month we are featuring the work of sound artist Gregg Kowalsky, visual artist Chris Cobb, and installation artist Scott Kiernan (Zenith Foundation). Gregg will be giving a live performance using vintage boomboxes as amplification devices, installed throughout the space. Chris Cobb has made sculpture with Sonya Derman. Scott Kiernan will be presenting an immersive installation.
THREE PIECES
Platform for Art and Ideas
NEXT EVENT: April 3, 2007, 7-9 pm
Doors close at 7:30
1112 Larkin St. #307 @ Sutter St.
San Francisco, CA 94109
415 651 4638
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Presented by Roddy Schrock and Deric Carner