readings

"Around 1960, John Cage and David Tudor discovered that they could get some startling results by..."

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:35:47 +0000

“Around 1960, John Cage and David Tudor discovered that they could get some startling results by using a phono cartridge as a kind of contact microphone. The cartridge is designed to pickup the vibrations present in the groove of a vinyl audio recording. It does this by way of a needle or stylus that runs in the groove of the record. The vibrations are then converted into electrical signals that are amplified. Cage and Tudor made their new sounds by detaching the cartridge from its tonearm, replacing the phonograph needle with objects such as toothpicks, Slinkys, and straight-pins, and then amplifying the results of physical contact between the surrogate “needle” and other objects.”

- Holmes, Thom. Electronic and Experimental Music. Pionners in Technology and Composition. 1985. 2 ed. New York: Routledge, 2002.

"[Futurism] was probably the first time in history that sound artists shifted their focus from the..."

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 16:35:47 +0000

“[Futurism] was probably the first time in history that sound artists shifted their focus from the foreground of musical notes to the background of incidental sound.”

- Cascone, Kim. “The Aesthetics of Failure: “Post-Digital” Tendencies in Contemporary Computer Music.” Computer Music Journal 24.4 (2000): 12-18.

"If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand..."

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:35:07 +0000

“If today, when we have perhaps a thousand different machines, we can distinguish a thousand different noises, tomorrow, as new machines multiply, we will be able to distinguish ten, twenty, or thirty-thousand different noises, not merely in a simply imitative way, but to combine them according to our imagination.”

- Russolo, Luigi. The Art of Noises. 1913.

"A glitch is stunning. It appears as a temporary replacement of some boring conventional surface; as..."

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:33:50 +0000

“A glitch is stunning. It appears as a temporary replacement of some boring conventional surface; as a crazy and dangerous momentum (Will the computer come back to “normal”? Will data be lost?) that breaks the expected flow. A glitch is the loss of control.”

- Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Fuller, Matthew. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 110-19.

"Avant-garde artists inspired or disgusted by technology and its societal influence have created a..."

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“Avant-garde artists inspired or disgusted by technology and its societal influence have created a range of artistic responses, the aesthetics of which today’s glitches strangely seem to comply with. A glitch reminds us of our cultural experience at the same time as developing it by suggesting new aesthetic forms.”

- Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Fuller, Matthew. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 110-19.

"A glitch is a singular dysfunctional event that allows insight beyond the customary, omnipresent,..."

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:33:49 +0000

“A glitch is a singular dysfunctional event that allows insight beyond the customary, omnipresent, and alien computer aesthetics. A glitch is a mess that is a moment, a possibility to glance at software’s inner structure, whether it is a mechanism of data compression of HTML code. Although a glitch does not reveal the true functionality of the computer, it shows the ghostly conventionality of the forms by which digital spaces are organized.”

- Goriunova, Olga, and Alexei Shulgin. “Glitch.” Software Studies: A Lexicon. Ed. Fuller, Matthew. Leonardo. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 110-19.

"I think that Arnulf Rainer is the film that best approximates to the essence of cinema as it exists..."

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“I think that Arnulf Rainer is the film that best approximates to the essence of cinema as it exists because it uses the elements that constitute cinema in its most radical, purest form. There’s light and the absence of light, there’s sound and the absence of sound and their becoming in time. Just that.”

- Peter Kubelka, interviewed by Christian Lebrat. 1988.

"Glitching represents an attempt to understand the liminality between translation and interpretation..."

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:33:46 +0000

“Glitching represents an attempt to understand the liminality between translation and interpretation though methodical alteration and systematic intervention of digital files.”

- Meaney, Ewan. “On Glitching”. 2008.

"(…) still, many artists seem interested in keeping the technical medium silent in their work...."

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:33:46 +0000

“(…) still, many artists seem interested in keeping the technical medium silent in their work. Notable exception can be seen to the world of avant-garde filmmaking, those celluloid scientists who scratched and warped and, through a process of their own hands, reminded us that cinema was a medium and not just a vehicle.”

- Meaney, Ewan. “On Glitching”. 2008.

"Visual representations also undervalue the knowledge we have by virtue of having bodies. Sensitivity..."

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:33:46 +0000

“Visual representations also undervalue the knowledge we have by virtue of having bodies. Sensitivity to changes in our environment through time develop best if we learn to use all our senses, not just sight. (…) In his 1945 book The Phenomenology of Perception, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is a process in which an active body enters into a “communion” with its surrounding. Perception, for Merleau-Ponty, is a continuous interaction that involves the subject’s intentions, expectations, and physical actions. There is no purely active “sender” nor any purely passive “receiver,” he wrote; without action, there can be no experience of anything “external” to the subject. “The body is our general medium for having a world; sight and movement are specific ways of entering into relationships with objects,” he wrote. For Merleau-Ponty and other critics of visuality as a privileged medium of understanding, it is meaningless to talk about perceptual processes of seeing without reference to all the senses, to the total physical environment in which the body is situated.”

- Thackara, John. In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005.

"These systems [John Conway’s Game of Life] are not models or representations of something else but,..."

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“These systems [John Conway’s Game of Life] are not models or representations of something else but, rather, evolving, self-organizing entities whose behaviour cannot be described as the sign production of a human programmer. It would be wrong to classify them as simulations (dynamic models that mimic some aspects of a complex process), since there does not have to be any external phenomenon they can be said to simulate. The fundamental question, however, is whether a system capable of producing emergent behaviour based on an initial system and a set of generative rules should be considered a semiotic system at all. Since it can exist without any semiotic output, as a closed process running inside a computer, the semiotic aspect is clearly arbitrary and secondary to the process itself. To the researcher, the semiotic aspect is indispensable as a front end, a practical means to observe and gain knowledge of the evolutionary process going on inside, but this does not imply that the process is basically a semiotic one or that the studied object should be classified as a sign, only that the activity of observation by necessity has to involve a semiotic system of some sort.”

- Aarseth, Espen J. Cybertext, Perspectives on Ergodic Literature. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.

"In all this, process is still not present as something essential, only as something mechanical. In..."

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 16:33:47 +0000

“In all this, process is still not present as something essential, only as something mechanical. In our profession of architecture there is no conception, yet, of process itself as a budding, as a flowering, as an unpredictable, unquenchable unfolding through which the future grows from the present in a way that is dominated by the goodness of the moment.”

- Alexander, Christopher. The Nature of Order, an Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Book Two: The Process of Creating Life. 1980. Berkeley, California: The Center for Environmental Structure, 2002.

"In the mechanistic view of architecture we think mainly of design as the desired end-state of a..."

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 16:33:46 +0000

“In the mechanistic view of architecture we think mainly of design as the desired end-state of a building, and far too little of the way or process of making a building as something inherently beautiful in itself. But, most important of all, the background underpinning of this goal-oriented view — a static world almost without process — just is not a truthful picture. As a conception of the world, it roundly fails to describe things as they are.”

- Alexander, Christopher. The Nature of Order, an Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe. Book Two: The Process of Creating Life. 1980. Berkeley, California: The Center for Environmental Structure, 2002.

"The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally..."

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“The primary consequence of the computational nature of the universe is that the universe naturally generates complex systems, such as life. Although the basic laws of physics are comparatively simple in form, they give rise, because they are computationally universal, to systems of enormous complexity- Besides encompassing the Standard Model of elementary particles and leading at least part of the way to a theory of quantum gravity, the computational universe provides an explanation for one of the most important features of the universe: its complexity. In the beginning, the universe was simple. Now it isn’t. So what happened?”

- Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe. A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.

"Are these images “art”? Perhaps no more than simple circles are “art” by themselves. Regardless, the..."

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“Are these images “art”? Perhaps no more than simple circles are “art” by themselves. Regardless, the concept where man — with his artist’s eye and his imagination — stands in relationship to high art is bound to change in view of this new universe of fractal images generated not by man, but by a simple one-line mathematical formula. (Mandelbrot 2001, p. 212)”

- Cope, David. Computer Models of Musical Creativity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005.

"(…) Boltzmann’s explanation of the origins of complexity is demonstrably incorrect. The vast..."

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:33:46 +0000

“(…) Boltzmann’s explanation of the origins of complexity is demonstrably incorrect. The vast majority of sequences of coin flips exhibit no apparent order or complexity. If complexity arises only at random, then no matter how much ordered or complex behavior has been revealed so far, what occurs next will be random. No matter how far into Hamlet a monkey may get, its next keystroke is likely to be a mistake. In a universe where everything arises at random, our next breath is definitely our last, as our atoms immediately reconfigure to a random state. (In Borges’s story, a book taken off the shelves at random will be gibberish, and the call number for any book is as long as the book itself. The Library of Babel is useless.)”

- Lloyd, Seth. Programming the Universe. A Quantum Computer Scientist Takes on the Cosmos. London: Jonathan Cape, 2006.

"(…) the distinction between creativity and randomness had little relevance prior to the..."

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“(…) the distinction between creativity and randomness had little relevance prior to the computacional age, because random behavior and creative behavior seemed so apparently distinct.”

- Cope, David. Computer Models of Musical Creativity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2005.

"Ross Ashby long ago pointed out that no system (neither computer nor organism) can produce anything..."

Sun, 08 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“Ross Ashby long ago pointed out that no system (neither computer nor organism) can produce anything new unless the system contains some source of the random. In the computer, this will be a random-number generator which will ensure that the “seeking,” trial-and-error moves of the machine will ultimately cover all the possibilities of the set to be explored.
In other words, all innovative, creative systems are (…) divergent; conversely, sequences of events that are predictable are, ipso facto, convergent.”

- Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979.

"Each subsystem has two components (as is implied by the word stochastic): a random component and a..."

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 16:33:45 +0000

“Each subsystem has two components (as is implied by the word stochastic): a random component and a process of selection working on the products of the random component.”

- Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979.

"In that stochastic system to which Darwinians have paid most attention, the random component is..."

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 16:33:48 +0000

“In that stochastic system to which Darwinians have paid most attention, the random component is genetic change, either by mutation or by the reshuffling of genes among members of a population. I assume mutation to be nonresponsive to environmental demand or to internal stress of the organism. I assume, however, that the machinery of selection which acts on the randomly varying organisms will include both each creature’s internal stress and, later, the environmental circumstances to which the creature is subjected.”

- Bateson, Gregory. Mind and Nature. A Necessary Unity. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1979.