Posts Tagged ‘music’
“Archive as if the future depends on it”*…
UbuWeb, an open online collection of avant garde materials created by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, went live almost 30 years ago…
Founded in 1996, UbuWeb is a pirate shadow library consisting of hundreds of thousands of freely downloadable avant-garde artifacts. By the letter of the law, the site is questionable; we openly violate copyright norms and almost never ask for permission. Most everything on the site is pilfered, ripped, and swiped from other places, then reposted. We’ve never been sued—never even come close. UbuWeb functions on no money—we don’t take it, we don’t pay it, we don’t touch it; you’ll never find an advertisement, a logo, or a donation box. We’ve never applied for a grant or accepted a sponsorship; we remain happily unaffiliated, keeping us free and clean, allowing us to do what we want to do, the way we want to do it. Most important, UbuWeb has always been and will always be free and open to all: there are no memberships or passwords required. All labor is volunteered; our server space and bandwidth are donated by a likeminded group of intellectual custodians who believe in free access to knowledge. A gift economy of plentitude with a strong emphasis on global education, UbuWeb is visited daily by tens of thousands of people from every continent. We’re on numerous syllabuses, ranging from those for kindergarteners studying pattern poetry to those for postgraduates listening to hours of Jacques Lacan’s Séminaires. When the site goes down from time to time, as most sites do, we’re inundated by emails from panicked faculty wondering how they are going to teach their courses that week.
The site is filled with the detritus and ephemera of great artists better known for other things—the music of Jean Dubuffet, the poetry of Dan Graham, the hip-hop of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the punk rock of Martin Kippenberger, the films of John Lennon, the radio plays of Ulrike Meinhof, the symphonies of Hanne Darboven, the country music of Julian Schnabel—most of which were originally put out in tiny editions, were critically ignored, and quickly vanished. However, the web provides the perfect place to restage these works. With video, sound, and text remaining more faithful to the original experience than, say, painting or sculpture, Ubu proposes a different sort of revisionist art history based on the peripheries of artistic production rather than on the perceived, hyped, or market-based center…
… These days there’s a lot of support for the way we go about things. Many think of UbuWeb as an institution. Artists both well established and lesser known try to contact us asking to be on the site. But it wasn’t always this way; for a long time many people despised UbuWeb, fearing that it was contributing to the erosion of long-standing hierarchies in the avant-garde world, fearing that it was leading to the decimation of certain art forms, fearing that it would tank entire art-based economies. Of course, none of that happened. We just happened to be there at the beginning of the web and had to ride the choppy currents of change as each successive wave washed over. Whereas we once used to receive daily cease-and-desist letters, today we rarely get any. It’s not that we’re doing anything different; it’s just that people’s attitudes toward copyright and distribution have evolved as the web has evolved.
By the time you read this, UbuWeb may be gone. Never meant to be a permanent archive, Ubu could vanish for any number of reasons: our internet service provider (ISP) pulls the plug, we get sued, or we simply grow tired of it. Beggars can’t be choosers, and we gladly take whatever is offered to us. We don’t run on the most stable of servers or on the swiftest of machines; crashes eat into the archive on a periodic basis; sometimes the site as a whole goes down for days; more often than not, the already small group of volunteers dwindles to a team of one. But that’s the beauty of it: UbuWeb is vociferously anti-institutional, eminently fluid, refusing to bow to demands other than what we happen to be moved by at a specific moment, allowing us flexibility and the ability to continually surprise even ourselves…
And indeed, in January of last year, UbuWeb announced it was no longer active, posting: “As of 2024, UbuWeb is no longer active. The archive is preserved for perpetuity, in its entirety.”
But last month, the site reappeared…
A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.
(Image above: source)
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As we celebrate collective memory, we might (make ourselves) remember that it was on this date in 1933 that Nazi Germany opened its first and longest-operaating concentration camp, Dachau. Initially intended to intern (then still Chancellor) Hitler’s political opponents (communists, social democrats, and other dissidents), it seeded what became a network of more than a thousand concentration camps, including subcamps, on Germany’s own territory and in parts of German-occupied Europe. About 1.65 million people were registered prisoners in the camps, of whom about a million died during their imprisonment.
“Whatever happens to musicians happens to everybody”*…
Further, In a fashion, to yesterday’s post (and for that matter, to “Nature doesn’t feel compelled to stick to a mathematically precise algorithm; in fact, nature probably can’t stick to an algorithm.”), a provocative proposal from Justin Patrick Moore…
We don’t have enough Dada in this world of too much data. Something is needed to break-through the over-curated simulacrum that is the online world in order to let in a bit of non-artificial light. One way to make a break is through the deliberate cultivation of the glitch.
The exact etymology of the word glitch is not known, though it may derive from the Yiddish “glitsh” which means a “slippery place.” In the mid-twentieth century the word first started showing up in technical texts and related to sudden surges of voltage within an electrical circuit causing it to overload. Today a glitch is any kind of malfunction in hardware or error in software.
In the 1990’s glitch music became a kind of sub-genre of electronic music found at the meeting points of the avant-garde, noise, and more popular forms. This type of music, and the methods surrounding it, including circuit-bending, can provide a window, cracked as it is, for looking out at adjacent electronic worlds, including the internet…
[Moore explains circuit-bending and it’s history…]
… Digital natives need chance like a body needs water. Algorithms have taken the fun out of what was once unplanned and unstructured; internet surfing has been made accident proof, as if it were run by insurance agents and safety specialists. Spots of possible slippage are mopped up in favor of putting forth pre-chewed opinions and junk food clickbait. A similar environment prevails for electronic musicians. The hardware and software being made more often than not makes it difficult to fail. Sound libraries, instrument and effect presets, samplers pre-loaded with perfect pulsing patterns, make it hard to even play in the wrong pitch. These fully loaded tools make it a possible to become a producer of music in a matter of minutes.
Preconfigured musical gear may make it easier to get grooving right off the bat, but the gift of instant gratification steals the sense of accomplishment and intimacy that comes from knowing every inch and crevice of an instrument. And while on first meeting, a run in with a run of the mill modular set up might cause sparks to fly, the slow burn of excitable electrons grows even further from long association. The nuance and subtlety available to those who explore in depth comes across in the very sounds. Circuit-bending is one way to go into those depths, down to the wire.
Prefab music is low risk music. Something might be made from it that could be used as a backdrop to a car commercial or fit into a DJ set at a dance club, as filler, but without investigating the underlying assumptions of a piece of gear, or software, the things that come out of it will tend to not have the rewards associated with riskier behavior. Disfigured musical gear gives the gift of decomposition and recomposition to electronic composers. With their materials mangled and mutilated, the gear becomes a mutt, with all the natural advantages over thoroughbred, store bought, off-the-shelf kit. The system may be less predictable, but that is the point…
[Moore unpacks examples, and explains how, as the solution was itself absorbed into the problem…]
Kim Cascone pointed this out in his inspired essay The Aesthetics of Failure [here] that glitch is just the latest way of investigating the creative misuse of technology. Yet as the internet grew, the process by which those techniques spread happened much faster than in previous decades. In sharing technique of glitch, some of the imaginative grain within the music was lost as it became just another commodity. With the widespread availability of digital music software, “the medium is no longer the message in glitch music: the tool has become the message.”
Failure had reached a point of failure.
If our own thinking can be glitched then perhaps it is still possible to create systems that embrace the slippage. If we don’t want the “tool to become the message” than a third element beyond the digital must be added into the mix.
The technopoly runs on data. Is there a way to make it more Dada? The artists of the Dada movement rejected many things, but logic and reason were chief among them. Where was the logic in the atrocities of World War I? The founders of the movement had lived through the war and in reaction against it, sought to elevate nonsense and the irrational above cruel, cold logic.
In our own time reason and logic have failed to deliver the utopia of technology as promised and promoted by Big Techs advertisers and PR specialists. It can seem that humanities dystopian nightmares are what are actually manifesting. Perhaps part of technologies failure is due to the fact that the digital world is built on binaries.
Logic circuits or gates are the brick and mortar of digital systems. They are electronic circuits that have one or more than one input, but only one output. Logic gates are the switches that turn ON or OFF depending on what the user does. A logic gates turn ON when a certain condition is true, and OFF when the condition is false. A logic gate is able to check whether or not the information they get follows a certain rule, and the output is thus determined.
There are several types of logic gates, but the three most common are the NOT gate, the AND gate, and the OR gate. The NOT gate is the simplest. It’s sole function is to take an input that is either ON or OFF and give it back as the opposite, what the original signal is NOT. The AND circuit requires two inputs. It can only turn on when both inputs are ON. If only one input is on it turns OFF, and when both inputs are off, it turns OFF.
The OR circuit also requires two inputs. It needs one input to be on for it be ON, and is also still ON when both inputs are ON, and it is only OFF when both inputs are OFF.
While variations from these basic circuits have been used to build complex systems, they still have at their core, the binary which undergirds the entire techonosphere. It is rather difficult for the unknown to break through when only two outcomes are possible. A third position between ON and OFF is never arrived at. This would require ternary logic, and as far as I know, a ternary computer has yet to be built.
In lieu of a ternary computer, a third element needs to be added to digital systems: that is the human component. This is also where I think modes of artistic creation in the spirit of Dada can help. By moving away from pure logic and reason, by letting a bit of nonsense or irrationality slip through, the human tendency to also think in binaries can be glitched.
So much of the creative process is automated when working with digital tools, but it has little in common with the methods of automatism that came out of the Surrealist milieu. The various methods of automatism developed by the Surrealists put a person in touch with the unknown, whether it be the unconscious or from beyond the fragile borders of this world. Bringing these techniques back into play could give back a sense of humanity to the sounds of dead electric emitted from programmed machines.
Automatism came in part from the method of automatic writing or spirit writing, when mediums and others of their psychic ilk were said to be in touch with disembodied spirits. The writing came through them from the other side. For the Surrealists tapping into these forces became a source of creativity. The results were often startling as they bypassed logic and reason.
To the point of this essay, in artistic creation, logic is rarely the principle that needs to be abided. Automation needs to be bypassed in favor of automatism. In electronic music strategies and interventions need to be used to work around and supplant the built-in binary biases of the tools, otherwise the music being made on them ends up just sounding like a commercial for the tool…
[Moore offers examples from Ben Chasney and Max Ernst…]
Whatever the source may be, if we are to glitch the circuit, we need to open ourselves up to the slippage that comes in from the unknown. Otherwise people might as well just let AIs design the music for them. And while generative music systems can be built that produce startling beauty, such as Wotja and Brian Eno’s Bloom, they leave too little for unintended influences from outside the confines of the system. For that a human really does have to put themselves into line with the flow of the circuit path.
To create something new, we need to become conduits, connect and plug into to an outside source…
Putting the Dada into data: “Glitching the Circuit,” from @igloomag.bsky.social.
* Bruce Sterling (@bruces.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy)
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As we explore, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977 that Iggy Pop, former frontman of The Stooges, released his debut solo album, The Idiot. It was produced by Pop’s friend David Bowie, who also wrote much of the album’s music (to which Pop added most of the lyrics). Described by Pop as “a cross between James Brown and Kraftwerk”, The Idiot marked a departure from the proto-punk of the Stooges to a more subdued, mechanical sound with electronic overtones.
“That’s why we have the Museum… to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old”*…
Maya Claire has created a virtual museum– and nearly infinite museum– generated from Wikipedia…
You can find exhibits on millions of topics, from the Architecture of Liverpool to Zoroastrianism. Search for the topic you want to learn about, or just wander from topic to topic as your curiosity dictates!
If you have an OpenXR-compatible headset, you can also visit the MoAT in VR! (Currently, the Oculus Quest is not supported)
The breadth of the museum is made possible by downloading text and images from Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. Every exhibit in the museum corresponds to a Wikipedia article. The walls of the exhibit are covered in images and text from the article, and hallways lead out to other exhibits based on the article’s links.
The museum is greatly inspired by educational videos that I watched as a kid, and the liminal spaces produced by early CGI. I want to recapture the promise that the internet can be a place of endless learning and exploration. I hope you enjoy your time exploring the Museum of All Things!…
Download instructions (and more) at “MoAT: The Museum of All Things,” by @may.as (with help from @wikipedia.org).
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As we browse, we might recall that it was on this date in 1974 that Emerson, Lake, and Palmer’s concert film Pictures at an Exhibition had its US premiere in Los Angeles. Their rock adaptation of the piano suite by Modest Mussorgsky was filmed live in 1970 at the Lyceum Theatre in London.
“Animation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn”*…
From Open Culture, an appreciation of an animator who, though never a commercial success in his own time, became an inspriation…
At a time when much of animation was consumed with little anthropomorphized animals sporting white gloves, Oskar Fischinger went in a completely different direction. His work is all about dancing geometric shapes and abstract forms spinning around a flat featureless background. Think of a Mondrian or Malevich painting that moves, often in time to the music. Fischinger’s movies have a mesmerizing elegance to them. Check out his 1938 short An Optical Poem above. Circles pop, sway and dart across the screen, all in time to Franz Liszt’s 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody.
This is, of course, well before the days of digital. While it might be relatively simple to manipulate a shape in a computer, Fischinger’s technique was decidedly more low tech. Using bits of paper and fishing line, he individually photographed each frame, somehow doing it all in sync with Liszt’s composition. Think of the hours of mind-numbing work that must have entailed.
Born in 1900 near Frankfurt, Fischinger trained as a musician and an architect before discovering film. In the 1930s, he moved to Berlin and started producing more and more abstract animations that ran before feature films. They proved to be popular too, at least until the National Socialists came to power. The Nazis were some of the most fanatical art critics of the 20th Century, and they hated anything non-representational. The likes of Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka and Wassily Kandinsky among others were written off as “degenerate.” (By stark contrast, the CIA reportedly loved Abstract Expressionism, but that’s a different story.) Fischinger fled Germany in 1936 for the sun and glamour of Hollywood.
The problem was that Hollywood was really not ready for Fischinger. Producers saw the obvious talent in his work, and they feared that it was too ahead of its time for broad audiences. “[Fischinger] was going in a completely different direction than any other animator at the time,” said famed graphic designer Chip Kidd in an interview with NPR. “He was really exploring abstract patterns, but with a purpose to them — pioneering what technically is the music video.”
Fischinger’s most widely seen American work was the section in Walt Disney’s Fantasia set to Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor [see it here]. Disney turned his geometric forms into mountain peaks and violin bows. Fischinger was apoplectic. “The film is not really my work,” Fischinger later reflected. “Rather, it is the most inartistic product of a factory. …One thing I definitely found out: that no true work of art can be made with that procedure used in the Disney studio.” Fischinger didn’t work with Disney again and instead retreated into the art world.
There he found admirers who were receptive to his vision. John Cage, for one, considered the German animator’s experiments to be a major influence on his own work. Cage recalled his first meeting with Fischinger in an interview with Daniel Charles in 1968.
One day I was introduced to Oscar Fischinger who made abstract films quite precisely articulated on pieces of traditional music. When I was introduced to him, he began to talk with me about the spirit, which is inside each of the objects of this world. So, he told me, all we need to do to liberate that spirit is to brush past the object, and to draw forth its sound. That’s the idea which led me to percussion…
Bonus: an excerpt from Fischinger’s cigarette ad from 1934:
An animator ahead of his time: “Optical Poems by Oskar Fischinger: Discover the Avant-Garde Animator Despised by Hitler & Dissed by Disney,” from @openculture.bsky.social.
You can find excerpts of other Fischinger films on Vimeo.
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As we appreciate art, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 (16 days after its single-theater premiere) that Walt Disney’s Pinocchio was released. Although it received critical acclaim and became the first animated feature to win a competitive Academy Award– winning two (for Best Music, Original Score and for Best Music, Original Song for “When You Wish Upon a Star”)– it was initially a commercial failure (mainly due to World War II closing off the European and Asian markets). It eventually made a profit after its 1945 rerelease, and is now considered one of the greatest animated films ever made.
Pinocchio was also a major step forward in animation technique, especially in effects animation, an effort led by Joshua Meador.. (In contrast to the character animators who concentrate on the acting of the characters, effects animators create everything that moves other than the characters—vehicles, machinery, and natural effects such as rain, lightning, snow, smoke, shadows and water.)
… the water effects are the true standout in Pinocchio, representing an artistic achievement that would still be difficult to replicate today. To a certain extent, it was nothing more complicated than good old fashioned hard work: Effects animator Sandy Strother [see here] worked on nothing but water effects for a full year. But in addition to working hard, the animators were working smart: In the open-water scenes, for example, the water toward the back of the frame is less detailed and more impressionistic, allowing the artists to focus on making the foreground as rich in detail as possible.
But as detailed as that water is, it isn’t attempting photorealism; as with the character design, the focus is on how the water should function within the story and the emotional response it should provoke, not replicating the real world exactly. Compare the down-to-the-droplet detail of Pinocchio’s open-water scenes to those of Fleischer Studios’ first entry in the feature-animation game, Gulliver’s Travels. Released only a few months before Pinocchio, Gulliver’s Travels used rotoscoping, which had been developed at Fleischer. While the film’s water looks realistic and imposing, it has a flat, almost geometric look that undermines its visual punch. Whereas the way the water works as Monstro chases Geppetto and Pinocchio’s raft is terrifying and overwhelming, and not especially realistic. This is the power of animation, to mold and morph reality to function as something familiar, yet fantastical…
– source
Fischinger, who was primarily engaged down the hall on his ill-fated contribution to Fantasia (released late that same year), contributed to the effects animation of the Blue Fairy’s wand.
“Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.”*…
Former Comptroller of the Currency Eugene Ludwig argues that, at least insofar as many (maybe most) Americans are concerned, unemployment is higher, wages are lower, and growth is less robust than government statistics suggest…
Before the presidential election, many Democrats were puzzled by the seeming disconnect between “economic reality” as reflected in various government statistics and the public’s perceptions of the economy on the ground. Many in Washington bristled at the public’s failure to register how strong the economy really was. They charged that right-wing echo chambers were conning voters into believing entirely preposterous narratives about America’s decline.
What they rarely considered was whether something else might be responsible for the disconnect — whether, for instance, government statistics were fundamentally flawed. What if the numbers supporting the case for broad-based prosperity were themselves misrepresentations? What if, in fact, darker assessments of the economy were more authentically tethered to reality?
On some level, I relate to the underlying frustrations. Having served as comptroller of the currency during the 1990s, I‘ve spent substantial chunks of my career exploring the gaps between public perception and economic reality, particularly in the realm of finance. Many of the officials I’ve befriended and advised over the last quarter-century — members of the Federal Reserve, those running regulatory agencies, many leaders in Congress — have told me they consider it their responsibility to set public opinion aside and deal with the economy as it exists by the hard numbers. For them, government statistics are thought to be as reliable as solid facts.
In recent years, however, as my focus has broadened beyond finance to the economy as a whole, the disconnect between “hard” government numbers and popular perception has spurred me to question that faith. I’ve had the benefit of living in two realms that seem rarely to intersect — one as a Washington insider, the other as an adviser to lenders and investors across the country. Toggling between the two has led me to be increasingly skeptical that the government’s measurements properly capture the realities defining unemployment, wage growth and the strength of the economy as a whole.
These numbers have time and again suggested to many in Washington that unemployment is low, that wages are growing for middle America and that, to a greater or lesser degree, economic growth is lifting all boats year upon year. But when traveling the country, I’ve encountered something very different…
… Within the nation’s capital, this gap in perception has had profound implications. For decades, a small cohort of federal agencies have reported many of the same economic statistics, using fundamentally the same methodology or relying on the same sources, at the same appointed times. Rarely has anyone ever asked whether the figures they release hew to reality. Given my newfound skepticism, I decided several years ago to gather a team of researchers under the rubric of the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity to delve deeply into some of the most frequently cited headline statistics.
What we uncovered shocked us. The bottom line is that, for 20 years or more, including the months prior to the election, voter perception was more reflective of reality than the incumbent statistics. Our research revealed that the data collected by the various agencies is largely accurate. Moreover, the people staffing those agencies are talented and well-intentioned. But the filters used to compute the headline statistics are flawed. As a result, they paint a much rosier picture of reality than bears out on the ground.
Take, as a particularly egregious example, what is perhaps the most widely reported economic indicator: unemployment. Known to experts as the U-3, the number misleads in several ways. First, it counts as employed the millions of people who are unwillingly under-employed — that is, people who, for example, work only a few hours each week while searching for a full-time job. Second, it does not take into account many Americans who have been so discouraged that they are no longer trying to get a job. Finally, the prevailing statistic does not account for the meagerness of any individual’s income. Thus you could be homeless on the streets, making an intermittent income and functionally incapable of keeping your family fed, and the government would still count you as “employed.”
I don’t believe those who went into this past election taking pride in the unemployment numbers understood that the near-record low unemployment figures — the figure was a mere 4.2 percent in November — counted homeless people doing occasional work as “employed.” But the implications are powerful. If you filter the statistic to include as unemployed people who can’t find anything but part-time work or who make a poverty wage (roughly $25,000), the percentage is actually 23.7 percent. In other words, nearly one of every four workers is functionally unemployed in America today — hardly something to celebrate…
[Ludwig similarly analyzes data on wages, inflation, and GDP, finding them similarlly flawed…]
… Take all of these statistical discrepancies together. What we have here is a collection of economic indicators that all point in the same misleading direction. They all shroud the reality faced by middle- and lower-income households. The problem isn’t that some Americans didn’t come out ahead after four years of Bidenomics. Some did. It’s that, for the most part, those living in more modest circumstances have endured at least 20 years of setbacks, and the last four years did not turn things around enough for the lower 60 percent of American income earners.
To be fair, the prevailing indicators aren’t without merit. It is, for example, useful to know how the wages of full-time employees have evolved. The challenge, quite separate from any quibbling with the talented people working to tell the nation’s economic story, is to provide policymakers with a full picture of the reality faced by the bulk of the population. What we need is to find new ways to provide a more realistic picture of the nation’s underlying economic conditions on a monthly basis. The indicators my colleagues and I have constructed could serve as the basis for or inspiration for government-sponsored alternatives. Regardless, something needs to change.
This should not be a partisan issue — policymakers in both parties would benefit from gleaning a more accurate sense of what’s happening at the ground level of the American economy. In reality, both Democrats and Republicans were vulnerable to being snowed in the 2024 cycle — it just happened that the dissatisfaction during this particular cycle undermined the incumbent party.
In an age where faith in institutions of all sorts is in free fall, Americans are perpetually told, per a classic quote from former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that while we may be entitled to our own opinions, we aren’t entitled to our own facts. That should be right, at least in the realm of economics. But the reality is that, if the prevailing indicators remain misleading, the facts don’t apply. We have it in our grasp to cut through the mirage that led Democrats astray in 2024. The question now is whether we will correct course…
On the need to revise our economic reference statistics: “Voters Were Right About the Economy. The Data Was Wrong.” from @LISEP_org in @POLITICOMag. Eminently worth reading in full.
More on (and more-current readings of) the suggested “revised metrics” at the Ludwig Institute for Shared Economic Prosperity.
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As we muse on measurement and meaning, we might recall that it was on this date in 1979 that The Cars released “Good Times Roll,” the third single from their eponymously-titled debut album.
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