a bow-shot from her bower eaves

Thoughts about sound.

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #8: The Automation of Irksome Labor and the Role of the Human

First and foremost, I will admit that accelerationism does not mesh well with my brain. Purely intuitive and speculative projections without observable, recordable, and concrete effects often move beyond my mental grasp. For all the theory that I’ve read, the implementation of such a concept in ways that are tangible evades me. I do not understand how the acceleration of capitalism would even begin to be practically implemented or what aesthetic self-cultivation would look like.

That being said, I have researched further in an attempt to discover how this sort of society would begin to emerge, and I have found that theorists consistently bring up the automation of labor. Theorists seems to widely agree that the progression of current technology would eventually enable robotics to replace most manned jobs on the market, enabling humans to pursue their own cultural interests, resulting in aesthetic self-cultivation. And although I am by no means an expert in predicting technological progress, I have doubts that technological progress will ever transition in perfect working order as cleanly as these theorists seem to predict.

Consider present attitudes about technology—as it has always been, large factions of people hold Luddite attitudes about progress. As we’ve discussed in class, this attitude is summed up by Douglas Adams in his set of rules:

“1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

Widespread resistance toward unfamiliar technology would provide a hindrance for the implementation of tech into everyday life—at least to an extent. Another factor to take into account is the frequent need for human intervention to maintain the operation of technology. Ask anyone who has ever worked in an IT department, and they will have stories to tell about the frequent tendencies of even advanced technology to encounter all sorts of operational problems.

Additionally, humans are currently responsible for updating the technology installed in offices and businesses all over the world. It’s not uncommon to walk into a small business office in an inconsequential town and see that their computers and other machines are severely outdated and obsolete.

The implementation of state-of-the-art technology will most likely never be homogeneous; little pockets of human labor would still exist even in an automated world. Additionally, human intervention would still be required for tech maintenance to some degree; even if tech reached such a point where it could be enabled to self-diagnose and self-repair, such a process may never be entirely foolproof.

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #7: Private Eye and the Implications of Masking

In Private Eye, the concept of a mask is largely explored through its primary function: the obscuration of one’s identity. Following the Flood that leaked all private information from the Cloud for forty days and forty nights, it’s no surprise that masks would first and foremost be desired for their benefits in hiding any and all who could be implicated by the secrets of their private lives.

However, what I love about Private Eye and Brian K. Vaughan’s approach is that it displays an understanding of a fundamental part of human nature: nothing ever stays as it was designed. Some sort of functional innovation will always be adapted to the desires and personal preferences of its users. People will find ways to appropriate the circumstances they are given for their own means of living. Much in the way that people create “life hack” items based on a system of altering the function of items they already own, the society in Private Eye has taken the widespread cultural norm of masking themselves and tailored it to their own preferences.

Vaughan and his cowriters take a particular pleasure in providing panel upon panel of the people that inhabit their envisioned future, each wearing a “nym” of their own choice that allows them to develop a persona of their own design. Not only do these nyms allow their wearers to obscure their own identity; they allow the wearer to express their inner selves freely without any worry as to how that expressed might be connected to their true appearance or reputation. What initially seems to be a hindrance of their expression turns out to be a better-functioning outlet for creative expression than our current standards of street fashion - taking notes from today’s haute couture and design, such as Nick Cave’s soundsuits.

But the masks’ alternative, appropriated purposes don’t stop there. Though not directly addressed, Private Eye subtly introduces all the nym’s implications for economics and social status. Just like current society, the complexity of people nym’s depends on their wealth and can be a public signifier of their economic status. Owning a standard nym with a mask but be usual, but the very wealthy can afford holographic heads that completely obscure the wearer’s facial structure, alter their voice, and provide simultaneous transmission of their facial movements – a kind of advanced tech puppetry. The subtlety with which these differentiations are given attention within the course of the story truly amazes me.

For some instances in which real life fashion has merged with security masking, check out this project on camouflage from face detection.

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #6: Ontology and Meaning in the Biofuture

With an overview of definitions from varying sources, an organ is generally defined as something living which serves a specific function within an organism. But with our exploration of biotechnology and the biofuture in today’s reading, this definition begins to change as speculative designers and scientists have delved into the processes of culturing synthetic meat and other living tissues.

This development leads me to this question: if the organ in question has been grown in a laboratory, in which it does not support any organism with its function, can it still be called an organ? What if it has the potential to serve a function after implantation? Is it just a potential organ?

With the synthesis of organic matter outside of its origin and context, the way we understand meaning and reality for these products may have to change. Will they be discussed in the same sort of context as prosthetics? Will they be something more? What if they are never used for an organism? And, as Dunne & Raby ask in “Consuming Monsters,” what kind of potential realities could we accept from their production? Where do we draw the ethical line about considering the synthesized organs as either alive or unalive?

Once an organ is considered alive, as Victimless Leather was when it was euthanized by the MoMA curator, the subject raises endless ontological questions. Of course, as Dunne & Raby make it clear, we should avoid the natural tendency to project our own emotions onto products that exhibit certain animal-like behaviors. But what kind of consciousness does such a thing have? Should it be afforded rights? What kind? Do these rights differ from an organ that occurs naturally within a living body? Do the creators of such organs have different responsibilities for the synthesized organ that they don’t have for their own internal organs? Since an organism can be said to be an amalgamation of its organs, is a living, independently created organ actually its own organism? Is the environment that houses the organ its body?

No two people will be able to develop the same answers to these questions. No matter how simple its implementation, the knowledge that the organs are technically alive (or as the Living Culture and Art Project calls Victimless Leather, “Semi-Living”) will always have some effect on the way we perceive them. In the New York Times coverage of Victimless Leather, MoMA curator Paola Antonelli stated that she “felt cruel when she turned it [the incubator] off.” However, SymbioticA, the company that produced the project, seem to feel that the situation has produced all sorts of useful thoughts. “The piece,” Director Oron Catts wrote, “was able to regain some of its irony that was lost” when it was put in “an optimistic design show.” They hoped that the project would remind its audience that it was alive and would make them consider the responsibilities for these creations.

Now that sounds exactly like something a speculative designer would say.

(Oron Catts, next to the Victimless Leather project)

The Living Culture and Art Project’s discussion of Victimless Leather

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #5: The Chasm Between Art and Design

While reading “Design as Critique” in Dunne & Raby’s Speculative Everything, I found myself troubled by the authors’ discussion of art and its difference from the purpose and standards for critical design.

Doing a bit of additional research, I found this article written by designer Addison Duvall that discusses the difference between art and design. Like Dunne & Raby, Duvall claims that art and design are two fields that appear on the surface very similar but are founded in entirely different purposes and functions. However, many of the purposes of art that the author claims were claimed by Dunne & Raby as purposes for speculative and critical design. Duvall proposes that one of design’s core differences from art is that art exists to ask questions and design exists to answer questions. However, in some ways, speculative design provides scenarios, hypothetical “answers,” to society’s big questions about the future, but doesn’t it seem that these scenarios are meant to raise questions in the minds of viewers? Dunne & Raby have made a point to stress that speculative design operates differently than mainstream design; but their claim that critical design “might borrow heavily from art’s methods and approaches, but that is it” doesn’t seem quite convincing. The line between art and speculative design seems much thinner than they give it credit for.

However, since Dunne & Raby seem to assess this difference from a mainstream audience’s point of view, I think it’s necessary to acknowledge that this difference has a lot to do with the purposes that people attach to art and design respectively, even if both fields create products for similar purposes or with similar methods. First of all, as Dunne & Raby have indicated, art is seen to exist more for the purpose of the artist’s assertion of identity and self-expression. Therefore, because of this association, people are more likely to disregard the opportunity for art to strike them with a particular insight and dismiss an art piece as simply shocking or quirky without thinking further about it.

Design, however, holds a fundamentally different association – it is attached to function and purpose in ways that art is not. When people view a piece as designed rather than artistically created, they know that the piece cannot be blamed on the artist’s indecipherable whims but must be attributed to some social function. Through terminology and context alone, the audience is forced down different pathways of association, and, as Dunne & Raby would phrase it, are willed to create new realities through these means.

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #4: Disabilities and the Privilege of Progress

Bret Victor’s “A Brief Rant on the Future of Interaction Design” helped me come to conclusions about current interactive technology that I had not been able to articulate before. He pinpointed exactly what I felt was missing from our current technological developments: a format suited to natural human capabilities.

However, when pointing out the flaws of the “Pictures Under Glass” tech trends, I was surprised that Victor did not point out another problematic component that I found obvious: new tech innovations seem entirely willing to leave behind those who are not endowed with all the capabilities of an able-bodied person.

If future technology depends on the user’s ability to see images, where does that leave those who are blind or seeing impaired? The Vision of the Future from Microsoft’s video seems to be one tailor-made for those who can rely entirely on their sense of sight. Although developments exist in niche areas, such as the smartphones for the seeing impaired seen below, if developments to accommodate those who need them have not crossed the minds of mainstream developers, then they deny an equally distributed privilege of progress to all parts of society.

[scrapboard]

(via superfuture :: supertalk :: Durrty Dozen 2 offical threak - page 40)

[scrapboard]

(via superfuture :: supertalk :: Durrty Dozen 2 offical threak - page 40)

[skunkandburningtires]

Deadpool marketing is on point

[ulanji]

nobody takes this fucking thing seriously

[cockswastika-blog]

U.S. elections be like

[karrius-deactivated20220725]

The madden gif maker has banned the use of the word “capitalism”.

“Too many people were using our videogame football gif maker to make communist propaganda. We need to put a stop to that.”

[watchthelightfade]

[gayfarm-archive]

[neil-gaiman]

I love Amanda so much. This is an animation that uses a voice memo from her phone of a conversation she had with me while I was asleep (I can have conversations while I am asleep, I am told by people who have tried it). 

She found the message she had left for herself on her phone a year or so after she’d left it, and played it to me. I said it sounded like an animated film, and she agreed, and used her Patreon to make it happen…

Only watch it if you want to know what the inside of my head is probably like while I am asleep.

(via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QlDX8mPAcc)

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #3: Razia’s Shadow as a Fan-Accessible Source

As I read AOS’s assessment about how transmedia narratives are crafted and subsequently affected by their fanbases, it began to remind me of my own experiences with the musical concept album Razia’s Shadow, way back in 2008 (when I was a 9th grader – teeny tiny).

Razia’s Shadow was created by the Fueled by Ramen band Forgive Durden (or, more appropriately, by the band’s one remaining member, Thomas Dutton, with his brother, Paul). As the album was being launched, the band established a website that featured blacked-out images with release dates posted on them. As each release date passed, an image of one of the featured characters from the story was released, accompanied by a brief sound clip from that character’s featured song. To voice each of these characters, Thomas Dutton used not only his own voice for the parallel characters Ahrima and Adakias but employed the talents of other well-known musicians from his band’s circle, such as Brendon Urie from Panic! at the Disco and Max Bemis from Say Anything. These guest features drew the band’s primary fanbase, establishing spreadability by pulling the attention of fanbases of other related bands. By staggering the release of these clips, Forgive Durden fostered elements of drillability by encouraging the fans to continually check back in on new developments.

The album was released on iTunes, and, later, a video of the album’s performance (without most of the original musicians), Live @ Joe’s Pub, was put online. Several years later, the brothers teamed up with librettist Lonnie Angle to produce the musical as a stage production – a change which enacted revision to the major plot points of the original story.

However, Razia’s Shadow’s development is not as clean-cut as some may gave it credit for, and I and others have at times criticized the story and its presentation for its messy development. The album’s original story has received criticism for its open ends, lack of consistency, and plot holes. Then, with the development of the stage production, the story was refashioned in the public eye after it had already been exposed to its fans for many years, and some fans like me had trouble keeping up with the major changes. In this case, Razia’s Shadow’s use of multiplicity did not result from intention but from a public and disorganized process of development.  

Despite this disconnect, the band clearly encourages the participation of its fans in interpreting its story. The website’s front page is covered in a collage of fanart of all different styles, from photography to digital paintings to hand-drawn graphite. Many of the pictures I recognize from my own days patrolling DeviantArt for the newest fanworks. No two of the fan interpretations are exactly the same; for some, the characters look almost exactly as they are depicted in the album art, and for others, they have taken their own liberties to make the characters reflect the images produced in their head when they listen to the musical. My own fanart, for instance, tends to stray pretty far from the original art but retains a few key aesthetic elements from the concept:

Though Razia’s Shadow presents a loosely composed story with open-ended plotholes, I and others continue to embrace the musical because its messiness enables us to stake a claim in its authorship. The album has become an ultimate of drillable, accessible media, with Tumblrs devoted to fan interpretations, indie musical productions, and fanart that covers the entire spectrum of style, character design, and aesthetic. The vague references to negative capabilities and the open-ended nature of the plot have allowed fans to imbue the story will all sorts of character motivations and lost histories. Though the fandom is small, it continues to produce creative benefits for those who pursue them.

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #2: The Backlash of Public Privacy

The invention of the Walkman in the early 80s and its resulting privatization of public listening, which, as Weber’s essay states, represents “an individual, self-determined ‘domestication’ of the acoustic environment, commonly defined as shared and public,” evolved socially as a response to a fundamental insistence that privacy should not be taken into the public sphere. I found it interesting that, though it could not have been foreseen in its entirety at the time, the same undercurrents of policing behavior in public spaces fuel the contemporary, Luddite reaction to the use of smartphones and other communicative technology in public.

The above sign, posted in a coffee shop, spread across a few different avenues of social media and was soon replicated in other coffee shops. Online, people applauded these attempts to return to a more social, interactive public state.

It is particularly interesting that these signs commonly refer to the 90s as a sort of ideal state of public interaction. Very similar criticism and repulsion occurred with the invention of the Walkman in the 80s; like the dawn of the smartphone, it altered public interaction, and the public was forced to adapt. The Walkman’s effect on the public has certainly carried over into latter technology through the 90s and 00s, and yet people treat smartphones as if their privatizing effect is entirely new.

I believe that this effect stems from the common and erroneous belief that current events always introduce new ways of being that were unheard of in previous times. I would propose that, in reality, the effects of technological and social change amplify certain ways of being over time but never wholly create new ones. 

Here is an article from NYT writer Sherry Turkle that expresses different stances on communicative technology versus public interaction.

[bowereaves-blog]

4399 Course Post #1: Jónsi and the Scrambling of Sound

When Michael Chion discusses the acousmatic dimension in “The Three Listening Modes,” he emphasizes the usefulness of reduced listening of separating sounds from the significance carried by their sources, allowing us to appreciate the sound for “its own qualities of timbre and texture.”

The notion of sounds that separate in meaning from the attributes ascribed to them by regular listening reminds me of experiments done by the Icelandic band Sigur Rós – and particularly by the band’s guitarist, Jónsi.

The members of the band already have a reputation for unconventional methods of music-making, taking bows and drumsticks to their guitars and basses in order to produce altered sounds. However, Jónsi in particular has attracted critical attention for singing in what he has termed Vonlenska, or Hopelandic, which Douglas Wolk describes as “an invented pseudo-language that uses Icelandic phonemes but doesn’t quite coalesce into words with particular meanings.” Although his use of Hopelandic began as a placeholder in the composing process when he created the melody before the words, Jónsi has on many occasions allowed Hopelandic to be the language spoken in the album versions of his songs. Hopelandic words become both less and more than words; they evoke color and emotion through their sound alone without linguistic meaning.

I believe that by scrambling the traditional methods of pulling sound from particular instruments – by scraping a violin bow over the strings of a guitar – and by producing vocal sounds without signifiers, Jónsi and the other members of Sigur Rós force listeners to participate in reduced listening and attune their focus to the essence of the sounds rather than the meaning derived from their sources.

[iconiclandscapes]

Zadar, Sea Organ, Nikola Bašić, 2004-2005

The air, pushed by waves, flows from wider to narrower tubes, accelerating and producing sound in the pipes located in the resonating cavity below the promenade. The section of the flight of steps makes it a perfect grandstand for watching the sunset over the sea and the outline of the neighbouring island of Ugljan, while listening to the musical compositions played by the sea itself.

2006  European prize of urban public space 

[geowillart]