2Second(fuse) - 10

Personal Identity
10/30/05 21:48 - permalink - email - category: Futurism

What makes you who you are? What defines a human being? Thought experiments are big in philosophy, so try this one on:

It's mid-afternoon, and Ania is plotting to have Vlad assassinated. She's heard quite enough talk of fractal sound, science fiction, the coming Singularity and robotic overlords, so she's secretly hired a hit-woman to shoot Vlad tonight at the café. "Ah, peace and quiet at last!"

All the excitement of his impending demise has made her a bit tired and being tired makes her cranky, so she lays down to take a little nap.

Shortly after Ania falls asleep, Vlad brings in his newly perfected duplicator machine, a device which will copy the exact configuration of a person and create another, atom for atom. It looks much like a cardboard box with controls pencilled on the side.

"This will show her," he thinks. "She'll see the usefulness of my crazy ideas after this." He presses the big red button and Presto-Change-O! There are now two Anias sleeping soundly, just a few inches between them in the bed, where before was only one. He wakes the new Ania 2. Grumpy at being awakened and still groggy from sleep, she doesn't notice the original Ania 1 lying in bed next to her. Vlad and Ania 2 proceed to the café.

At Café La Scala in Walnut Creek, Ania 2 orders her au lait and leans way back, savoring the sips as she waits for the hit-woman. She doesn't know she's only recently entered this world. Her memories tell her she's lived a life of world traveling, college education and club-hopping leading up to this moment. She knows who her parents are and she knows she paid the hit-woman twenty dollars to shut Vlad up for good. She remembers doing it, but, unbeknownst to her, those memories come from Ania 1 doing the original legwork and passing the twenty to the assassin in a pack of gum.

Meanwhile, back at the house, Ania 1 has woken from her nap. She's refreshed and feeling nice, all her previous unhappiness evaporated. She just needed to catch up on her sleep! She realizes she loves Vlad, even if his incessant rambling about things which make no sense drives her out of her mind occasionally. She's had a change of heart about offing him. "Oh no! Look at the time! He must have let me sleep, like the sweetheart he his, and gone to the café alone! I must make haste and stop the hit-woman from shooting him!" She scrams out the door with a quickness.

At the café Vlad is working on his laptop, head bobbing to the beat in his headphones, lost in focus on his work. As Ania 1 enters the café, so does the hit-woman. The assassin sees Ania 1 and then, a heartbeat later, sees Ania 2. Both are looking at her expectantly and pointing to the guy she's supposed to shoot. One is saying "Don't shoot him, I've changed my mind!" while the other is saying "Shoot him, he's driving me crazy!"

The hit-woman is very glad she brought two sets of handcuffs tonight, because her evening has just gone weird. She doesn't like it when perps get jiggy and start appearing in two places at once. Yes, she's an undercover agent in homicide and she likes to send people to the slammer.

As she slaps the cuffs on them both, Ania 1 says "I thought I wanted to kill him, but I realized I didn't!" Ania 2, pissed off, says "I wanted to kill him, that's why I made arrangements to do so. Who is this bimbo dressed up like me?"

Vlad looks up, finally. Seeing all the commotion, he assumes it's excitement over his duplicator machine and begins explaining the situation to the cop.

Some questions:

Which Ania is responsible for the crime?

Ania 1 physically initiated the entire situation by doing the hiring of the assassin, but changed her mind about murdering Vlad in the end and told the hit-woman not to shoot. Should she be charged with attempted murder? Remember, she tried to stop the hit-woman at the end.

Ania 2 didn't physically do the hiring, but thinks she did and remembers doing it, and was ready to conclude the deal and see Vlad capped. Should Ania 2 be charged with attempted murder, accessory to attempted murder or nothing at all because she wasn't "the one" who did the hiring? She didn't even physically exist when arrangements were made to off Vlad, but she was pointing the finger and telling the hit-woman to shoot. You could attempt to define her state as something akin to brainwashing, but if you remove the memories and motivations arising from them, what are we left with for Ania 2? She was an atom for atom duplicate of Ania 1, so there is nothing else.

What makes a person? Is it the configuration of their atoms? Is it their actions? Is it something outside of their material construction?

We know if a person's brain is damaged, their personality and memories are damaged. They seem to change from the person they were before the injury. What is a memory? If I remember doing something, is this the same as having done it? Can I be held accountable for my memories? What if they are just duplicated brain configurations which make me think I performed the remembered act, as in the case of Ania 2 above?

If you have two people configured exactly alike down to the atom and the instant, are they the same person? Are Ania 1 and Ania 2 simply two instantiations of Ania? At this moment, if you let them jointly out of your sight you won't know which is the original and which is the duplicate upon their return. Sharing a common memory of life up to the moment Ania 2 was awakened and went to the café with Vlad while Ania 1 stayed home asleep, how far will their paths have to diverge before they can be seen as obviously different people?

The above thought experiment, while sounding far-fetched, has implications for a wide range of issues we currently face as a world society:

cloning
gene-splicing
abortion
privacy rights
intellectual property
nationalism
religious beliefs and other superstitions on identity

What makes a person? The sooner we answer this question, the sooner I'll make the schematic for my fabulous duplicator machine publicly available.

Plays Well With Others
10/27/05 11:28 - permalink - email - category: Incantation

I caught a recent Bauhaus show at the Warfield in downtown San Francisco. It's early in their tour and quirks are still being worked together. These creative misfits are legendary, not only for the combined musical power unleashed by their interaction, but for the trouble created by ego and disagreement within their ranks. Watching the show, it was obvious these tensions are still present. At times the gel was difficult, and the edges of each member were apparent as four separate individuals on stage simply playing instruments simultaneously. Then, suddenly, they would snap together for a song and it was like watching a single entity roar to life and come straight off the stage for you.

In any creative endeavor, you're in this sort of clinch. The path of your life is this exact situation.

In modern Western culture we embrace the myth of the isolate artist, the lone person creating something never seen/heard/touched/felt before. I do feel there are new realms of emotion to be found through art, new worlds to see and hear and live in, but the idea it will be the single work of one mad creator working in the dead of night is not specifically correct. The lone flame of creative chaos has no meaning without its context, cannot create newness at all without embedding in and interacting with the culture surrounding it. You can search out context, place yourself within framework, but you cannot exist as a defined concept without it.

What is lost in the narrow focusing on individual action is the fact both sides of the coin are exactly the same. When you create in reactive feedback with another person or set of genre/cultural rules, you are creating a joint work bouncing off the concepts put forth by the other. When you push against another person or set of concepts, stepping off to "do your own thing," you are still working with them. They're providing the negative space, the area you will not enter, the definition for your work in a specified realm for a specified end.

I've been cogitating over the life pursuits and creative endeavors of myself and a few friends of late, and return often to a springboard of thoughts expressed in an eloquent post by mAE hYMN, gifted noisician and imagician: This is my faith, this is the faith I have in all of us. One line in particular grabs and shakes:

"As an individual, I threaten only that which you stand to lose, should you be strong enough to let it go."

The wish for what we see as beneficial change is a choice of focus. Whether we consciously act on life as co-creators or not, we are still co-creating everything, every moment. You storm off screaming, I place my emotions into song in response. She unknowingly says the right word at the right time, his writing block crumbles and the words spill fast, at last. He wanders in without saying a word or even making eye contact, but his choice of scarf today provides the kernel of an idea for your next painting.

Once you realize the true extent of co-creation, terms like egotist, critic, encourager, territorial, obstacle, boundary-maker, threat take on new meanings. They're not simple descriptors applying to an individual. They're collaborative actions.

The beauty of this situation: it takes only one aware person to flip the picture, inverting negative space into positive. Realization of reaction permits choice of reaction.

Where your brush falls, which note comes next, where you place a next footstep, which word best describes this feeling of connectedness: choice is the center of all creation.

Boards Of Canada - The Campfire Headphase
10/23/05 01:01 - permalink - email - category: Listen

Boards Of Canada roadtrip to The Campfire Headphase.

Were it not for continuing knowledge of present surroundings, headphone listening to Boards Of Canada's The Campfire Headphase might feel like temporal dislocation. Close your eyes, inhale deeply, and suddenly you're where you were however many years ago you consider your "misspent youth" to have taken place.

Here's the warm summer evening, here's the feel of wind through your car's window, here's the friend's porch where you got high listening to the first music you were truly one with.

Here's the face of your first love and the way you felt when the world was open wide like your eyes. Here's the brightness of uncountable stars from the seat of a bicycle at 3am. Here's the best time of your life in texture and touch and tone.

Here's the excitement of being alive, where everything is new, the unknown is every second of every minute of every hour of every day and what's ahead is a pact between the future and you.

The miracle: it's not dislocating at all. Instead of taking you back, Boards Of Canada brings it here.

In Music Has The Right To Children and Geogaddi, Boards reached across the sonic gap gap to pull you in, grabbed with rhythm then lead to headspace. With their latest release, they don't need to. From opening track to close, this work is all theirs, and yours... no bread crumbs required.

I can't listen to The Campfire Headphase without realizing the best time of my life has been going on since the day I was born. The good, the bad and everything between is all with me, and all of me, all the time.

Will
10/20/05 15:15 - permalink - email - category: Incantation

The grass, neatly cut away 'round each stone, whispered to us in the wind-sped air.

"What's your choice? Which head of the hydra seems likely to make the best use of your scrawny bones?"

Choice is built from hidden questions: what's inside, what's outside, what do I really want, what do I really need, what do I really mean... what should I do?

I stood with five alive and a seventh deceased beneath, amidst a sea of graveyard markers. On the surface of a dead city of dead Jews, I listened to the lives surrounding us, arcs of motion struck from the sky, choices once made in tears and joy and flicks of wrist now cut and dry.

"Time re-defines all discrete things."

Born into this whip-bit whorl of energy, we draw force for growth. We spin and set in motion, as we were spun and set in motion ourselves. Every action continues the threads of choice. We reach into the connectedness, spin and weave, until finally we've touched more than taken, wrought more than destroyed, and exit the way we came.

If you love something, place it in the center of your chest.

If you've a vision to create, a sonic realm to make, a world to build, a word to fulfill, let it brightly burn.

If you aren't but know you can, begin today and do not rest.

If your feet follow one path and your heart another, the wilderness is waiting for your return.

The dead speak through wind, grass, rain. They act now in sequences of ideas set in motion by their hands and the hands of those from whom they came. We're created from their thoughts, their actions, their material shape. If you listen and look, you will learn: humanity is not a race, but perpetual conversation, each voice assuming ever-shifting place.

Let's cut to the chase and cut to the choice. This is your life to make, and soon chance will end. You'll join the city beneath while others act in your stead.

"Why do you wait?"

Choose and do, today.

Once When Now
10/15/05 23:52 - permalink - email - category: Unfälle

I lived here once, in this City of Angels, all heat and grit and gnashing teeth. I fled to the faerie land of San Francisco and haven't looked back, not once.

Driving by an apartment I once did time in, history looped upon present. I found the same conversation still running between myself and Los Angeles. In the past, I did all the talking, and this city, ignoring me, did whatever it wanted to do.

A sudden urge to write overcame me whilst listening to synthetic feminine directions from the Magellan NLIII by my knee. Slipping gingerly out of double-speed traffic into this magically vacant parking space on La Brea, I find everything I might need is ready and waiting.

Two doors down: an all night service station with, it's unbelievable... organic green tea.

Two doors back: a trendy restaurant with gorgeous creatures in sheer outfits and impeccably messed coiffures... no honest work going on, but walking past the car they provide physical motion, a blanket of conversational atmosphere and an occasional distraction.

Right next to me: a fine tree, pushing up sidewalk slabs, covered in year-round holiday lights. At their power source is an open socket, and I always carry a 4.5 meter extension cable.

In the very air: not one but a trio of wide open wireless networks, all nicely warm in strength and competing for a chance to provide me bandwidth.

Perhaps Los Angeles has rethought itself in the time since I've dwelt here.

Perhaps it's softened and grown more giving.

Perhaps it remembers and feels a twinge of sorrow still over losing me to its elvish sister up north.

Perhaps I've simply learned how to ask for what I want using a language Los Angeles understands.

Just For One Day
10/13/05 22:50 - permalink - email - category: SoundDesign

Working earlier with comped vocals, I applied a favored technique for atmosphere and the touch of strange.

Where I originally learned the trick on David Bowie's "Heroes" vox is lost to memory, but I've used variations many times. It's tremendous fun while recording live and the vocalist can play with their volume, but with automated manipulation of levels (I use volume envelopes in Ableton Live) may be used in controlled and programmatic fashion on any source. I'm not sure if the progenitor is Visconti or Eno, but my thanks go to either or both for a shining example of emotional soundscaping through studio magic.

The basic trick is accomplished with an original close mic vocal take and two (or more) aux sends:

The main track gets a very light touch of reverb.
The sends have progressively heavier gating on each, letting through only louder levels of vox. The gate on the final send must be set to only open when vocal volume is at maximum loudness.
After the gates place a reverb on each send to suit your application, each progressively wetter than your main take.

Often I find perfection at this point, but a final light compression and touch of verb to gel the signals can sometimes serve as sonic icing.

If you want faithful reproduction, keep in mind Bowie was recorded in a large room with three mics placed progressively farther away from him. As above, vary the wet/dry ratios progressively to emulate the close/far situation, but use the same or identical reverb space on each.

Remember: don't stick with tradition or you'll miss all the thrills. I've used this effect on everything from vox to guitars, keyboards to drums, with mismatched reverb spaces and heavy compression and subtractive EQ for sculpting each signal.

This technique lasts far longer than "just for one day." Heroes experiment.

Audio_z - [x]
10/11/05 08:53 - permalink - email - category: Listen

Audio_z girl in maximum machine darkness.

On the now-in-stasis Surface netlabel, [x] by Audio_z delivers ambient soundscapes of clicking rhythms and whirling tones of light in reverb drenched spaces. While mechanized, these pieces have an emergent organic quality, as if robots, taking over their own evolution, found the concept of a soul interesting and adapted it to their own uses.

All the tracks in this release are simply numbered: x_1 through x_7.

x_1 finds you in a nano-growth chamber during hatch time, mechanical podlings breaking through nutrient containment membranes, moving on to their next stage of assembly.

x_2 wraps echoing signals in the soft children's voices of something other than human, but not quite angelic.

x_3 showcases a ride on an observation platform, waiting for what's emerging from the dimensional rift below.

x_4 tags along with a network consciousness in VoIP traffic flowing through undersea, trans-Atlantic cabling.

x_5 documents an assembly line spirit in the dead of night, preparing a surprise for tomorrow's unwelcome workers.

x_6 exists in the signals recorded at the intersection of human neurons and the electrodes implanted by medical bots seeking to discover what makes organic life tick.

x_7 is a field recording of a rainy afternoon in a post-human future.

You can download [x] from the Surface archive, along with many other exceptional and unsettling ambient releases.

RoboNexus 2005
10/9/05 23:13 - permalink - email - category: Technology

The San Jose Convention Center was weekend home to all manner of automata, battlebots, humanoids, people-detecting contraptions, a blinking mechanical giraffe, an Eight Foot Astronaut and more Roombas than I could keep track of. David Fine and Jake Appelbaum accompanied me on the trek from San Francisco to the South Bay for RoboNexus 2005.

Robot Labs was there, with multiple, 30cm incarnations of Pirkus mingling about the hall. Pirkus is, perhaps, the most charismatic metal chassis mini-humanoid bot I've seen.

David befriending a purple Pirkus:

David Fine's fingers and a purple Pirkus, 100805.

Parallax unleashed their full catalog of Boe-Bots to crawl, roll and blink at the crowd. David and Jake picked up Boe-Bot Robot kits. These are an excellent beginner's package, containing a BASIC Stamp 2 and the Board of Education with its full coterie of IO, servo connects, power and breadboarding options.

Among the many makers of robots were also many makers of hardware for robotics. Virtus Advanced Sensors showed me an incredible 3-axis spatial movement tracker, a small disc less than 2cm across extruding a tiny 0.5cm antenna. Any movement of the sensor in X, Y or Z will be detected and reported, wirelessly. I'd love to strap some of these at various joint locations and dance, sending all the data into Max/MSP/Jitter. Imagine: realtime synthesis based on body movement, plus video control of anything you like, including direct avatars. Wear one as a third eye and head-bobbing becomes backbeat. Virtual instruments could be constructed based on nothing but the incoming stream of performance data from a sensor-laden, mechanically functional but electronically inert physical device. You could play a Rube Goldbergian machine whose brain is actually in your laptop. Virtus is currently looking for a fabrication deal on the chips... someone bring these to market in volume!

Also on display was the Phidgets stable, with a 360 degree booth of cool interface and detector technology. I'm interested in trying some of these devices with Max/MSP to turn my studio into a truly interactive zone, a living beast merging with and extending the humans within. For direct instrument interfacing the bend/torque controller was hot. I was also impressed by their multi-level pressure pads.

David had a good time tweaking the Phidgets PSI sensor:

David Fine's fingers and Phidgets everywhere, 100805.

After seeing all these robots and tools for making more robots, I'm convinced homo sapiens' time here is limited. In fact, you will probably be working for a robot in the near future. By this time next week, the mechs will run everything.

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords.

Noise Subtractive Synthesis
10/7/05 21:03 - permalink - email - category: SoundDesign

My cousin, the famous UU & UCC rogue preacher Beringia Zen, asked me to turn a few cassettes of her sermons into compact discs. The source recordings were noisy, so I attempted some minor reduction with Audacity's built-in Noise Removal tool.

Noise Removal in Audacity works... all too well. In a recording with an ambient reverb backdrop it removes everything even remotely matching the imprint of the noise. Voices take on the qualities of DMT machine elves shifting through your neurological wiring in the high frequencies... it's a comb filter, of sorts.

A main creative methodology in my lab is abuse/misuse of tools. Perhaps, I thought, I should give this a go on drum loops. I did, after applying massive amounts of pristine software reverb. Here's an example:

pusherloop reverberated

pusherloop un-noised

pusherloop deeply un-noised

Better still, here's the effect on harmonically rich sources like bass lines, with some post-effect compression to bring up the tortured sonic remnants:

jamjambass reverberated

jamjambass un-noised

Strange sounds make me feel so good inside.

The Difficulty Of Looking Far Ahead
10/5/05 23:51 - permalink - email - category: Futurism

Private sector spaceships, hobbyist gene-splicing, silicon trees generating electricity, ethics and extraterrestrial life, extra-solar colonization as necessary human expansion, modified humans populating millions of experimental societies on far-flung planets, man's best friend with an engineered intelligence increase, regret mitigation via dissociated personalities living separate lives...

All this and more was discussed after Freeman, George and Esther Dyson took the stage at the Fort Mason Conference Center for an evening in The Long Now Foundation's ongoing series of Seminars about Long-term Thinking. Moderated by Stewart Brand, President of the Long Now Foundation, "The Difficulty of Looking Far Ahead" was a perfectly apt title for this soiree of futurism via science, history and business. Freeman himself offered this caveat at the beginning- "Science is organized on unpredictability... and is not conducive to long range projections."

I found myself in disagreement often, and they often disagreed with one another, but that's what makes science go. This accomplished, intelligent man and his accomplished, intelligent children blew the doors off all opposition to the scientific method as the best tool for the advancement of human society. By simply speaking with each other and the audience of what may or may not come they demonstrated Hegel's thesis/antithesis/synthesis as the basis for everything we already are.

Freeman Dyson on the mic:

Freeman Dyson at The Long now Foundation, 100505.

A few small bites of the free-ranging discussion:

Freeman likens the rise of biotech to the computer industry's growth, and sees domestication and widespread acceptance of biotechnology 50 to 100 years in the future. Early computer developments never showed the advent of small, cheap and ubiquitous computing, and Freeman feels the same course will be followed by biotech. He envisions home genome programming kits engendering "new art forms as lively as cinema, painting or sculpture." While he spoke of dark hazards, he considers our current global situation much less dangerous than the threat of nuclear annihilation posed during the Cold War. Quote of the night- "What can be done with microbes is much more dangerous than orchids and roses, even more dangerous than lizards and snakes. Rules must be rewritten so kids can play with dinosaurs but not viruses."

George envisions cultured structures of living tissue, buildings grown for specific use, modified kelp given vascular systems growing from ocean floor into light gathering dwellings above the sea surface. He sees human climate control as a natural outgrowth of our eventual change-over to more eco-friendly energy sources and is against nuclear power generation. He endorses a complete archiving of every fragment of information possible, allowing future historians to "keep history honest."

Esther, the business (and, by extension, politically) oriented member of the trio feels we can see a repeated and yet unlearned lesson in Iraq and Afghanistan: bringing down the bad guys at the top doesn't fix the problem. As a result of fast flowing info and technology, we fail to comprehend the deep-rooted, systemic problems and apply band-aids rather than fixes. Surprisingly, she spoke against anonymity in favor of systems of trusted reputations- "Everything works best when it's transparent, including people."

In keeping with the aims of the evening, Stewart Brand asked the Dysons how much contemporary science fiction they read.

All three answered "not enough."

Photo by Jacob Appelbaum.

Photo License: Creative Commons - Some Rights Reserved.

ToDay Tinderbox
10/4/05 08:22 - permalink - email - category: Tinderbox

January 2006 is my target month for change, with many arcs of effort reaching the same point of fruition. Music releases, a Max/MSP toolbox, some noisy hardware fun, Daevlmakr re-launch, 2Second(fuse)v2. For projects like these, sequence is important but timing is all set to the same value: as soon as it can be done.

I've implemented a very stripped down GTD variant in Tinderbox to keep my daily tasks focused and rolling, without the overhead of tracking due dates and priorities:

MasterLists contains complete, step-by-step breakdowns of the actions necessary to move from start to finish, along with notes and ideas on alternate plans.

The individual day notes in the ToDay container give me a constant indicator of what I need to do right now from MasterLists. They're also a daily place for non-project ToDo items to stay in front of my eyes. If I don't finish my tasks today, I simply cut and paste the lot into tomorrow.

Option-J creates a triangular delta, which looks enough like an upward arrow to tell me the action is dependent on the one above it, but not distinct enough to warrant placement as an individual action. Option-V creates a nice tick mark (which may have thought it was a square root before I had my way with it) to give an OCD "this one's done" tingle.

There's no automation, no sexy contextual coloring or aggregations... just hands-on involvement with the low-level daily tasks involved in linear accomplishment of larger goals. I wouldn't manage a multi-threaded project with different dates and priorities for deliverables with this, but for immediate purposes it works wonderfully.

Ghost
10/1/05 14:01 - permalink - email - category: Image

Roving photojournalist extraordinaire and international man-about-town Jake Appelbaum has been shooting with color infrared film for several months. He shot this image of me somewhere in San Francisco.

I've compared his shots to many of the Photoshop filter techniques for simulating IR and have reached the conclusion nothing beats the real thing. My favorite aspect of infrared is the way it captures the eyes as the entrance to a dark, entirely separate dimension.

Three rolls of excellent IR shots to be found in Jake's flickr gallery.