Sound Seeker

Human-Mind-Machine is retro in two senses. First: it’s totemic. Second: it uses loops to generate beats that syncopate.

It reconciles animist and mechanist philosophy by visually combining cardiac palpitations with repetitive pneumatics.

I keep my kitchen at 5 degrees above zero. Steam hovers in it like clouds. I am trying to freeze the downstairs neighbor out. His smoke rising into my closet. his fried onions mingling with my toothpaste. We know each other well. breathing and farting in the same tight pool. Sharing the vectors of savage necessity. Trading the secret chemicals that intertwine blood. nothing is too much. except language. we do not speak. can never speak. there is nothing between us except smells. and those as mechanical as wind. …

Poetry is any rare thing that goes deep as a randomized apparatus for exultation.

Free(dumb) does not do that, but it has aspirations: to develop a species of text with texture, weight, depth, mobility, and emotive mutations.

It’s a micro-manifesto on routine determinism.

Mounds of pixel clay massaged into formations and made to hover and mutate. Words as malleable tactile contortionist critters.

It’s a testament to the strength of contemporary software that this 3 min. 30 sec. opus was all made today. I even took the afternoon off to do some babysitting. Creation cannot get more relaxed and pleasurably inane than this. I exist in an exultant oasis of excess CPUs. (UPDATE: sigh, i ended up polishing the damn thing for an evening but the original rough version –which to my mind is more charming — is here).

This one goes out to all the taggers, bombers and graffiti dogs.

Clik on image to see it.

The synthesis of virtual and physical realities is pretty normal these days. But I’ve always been confused about the fundamentals of existence. Why does anything exist? What makes it? How?

Well of course I don’t have answers. Just a mild 56.42 second contribution to the confusion.

An enigmatic engine: an engima.

Clik on the image to see the Engima demo.

Events seep toward an unseen horizon. Things get muddy. Other things get clear. Sound moves thru everything.

Tonite I was mucking about in Mudbox. I just received a 14 month license courtesy of NT2 labs. (Big shoutout of thanks to Daniel!). Mudbox is just as much fun as a bucket and a shovel at the beach for a 6 year old.

Click on image to see the demo.

A semi-sardonic pessimistic remake of the fine-print of end user license agreements.

This constitutes another example of what could be called ‘incestuous interactivity’ or ‘cybernetic synaesthesia’. These terms arise from a cursory reading of Rudolf Arnheim’s Film as Art. Arnheim, writing at the birth of the talkies, contended that sense modalities of sound and vision were incapable of unifying in film. Absurdly, I took that (already-defeated idea) as a challenge.

Basically, the computer interface interacts with itself, it feeds values from sound into the visuals. This technique is often used in screensavers and vjing apps. It’s become normative for digital viewers to experience interactivity that crosses sensory modalities (from sight to sound, sound to touch, touch to sound) a whirlwind action of interpenetrant data occurs. Synchronization emulates organic responses: a loud noise makes an animal cringe, the sea sponge retract, and in this interface, text bounces along changing font and size.

As usual click on image below to view demo:

Simple as simple:
an array of words assembled during a course on posthumanism
triggered by a tiny sine wave slush beat.

New feature: number of words auto-manipulated on its own slider and inversely mapped to the pause time before next batch of words. In other words, more words means more reading time; number of words is randomized within a 1 to 10 limit.

As usual in this inverted era: sound peak triggers blur level, font and word change.
No interactivity and click on image to see demo

: a tiny post for a tiny day

the drudgery and joy of daily events blur together
our life are lists of tasks
sound influences focus
monotony entrances

Interactivity Note: again no interactivity. The passive reader is given the opportunity to immerse.

Click on image to view demo

A typographic trilogy devoted to grouchy paradoxes.

Symmetry between form and content.
Migratory passages of tranquility in the center.
Hard brittle crunchy edges.
Simple satisfying psychological candy.
Code loop variations.

Click on image to see it:

Warning: No interactivity, none. Yes, you are really helpless. Hide all GUIs.

After working a bit with the prototype Sound-Seeker I realized it could potentially pull off a reasonable emulation of those pre-eminent digital poetic pranksters with the inimitable-style: Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (Marc Voge and Young-Hae Chang).

Yes it can. It emularts.

Interactivity Note: As always, its been optimized to run sweetly all by itself so to just watch it run, use the full screen button and then slide mouse off-screen to hide control GUI. But if by any chance, the reading is too slow or too fast, sliders exist for changing the beat threshold (its sensitivity to the beat) and [NEW] the pause between words (the minimum time of visibility). The font list comes from your computer.

Click on image to test-out the demo:

Key thoughts re-emerge, recycled inside the brain. For me, for many years, I’ve been concerned with how life organizes itself. I suspect it is done through language. At the skin between beings, where the activity of proto-perception occurs, things meet things, explore them with whatever sensory capacities they have and generate some way of communicating their perceptions thru energy to their interiors. Language is the word we humans have for that communicating between or within things.

Enuff said: I adapted one of my essays into a set of parable-style aphorisms on the subject and set it over video of water spiders and a gliding shot toward a dead tree whose flesh is caressed by light reflected off lake water.

In this example, the sound does not cut the video. The sound fires the words in a sentence sprawl beneath the video. Gives a pause for reading, then beat by beat brings word by word the next sentence to life.

Interactivity Note: I fully advocate just sitting back and watching it play. It’s setup and tuned for auto-animation at a somewhat feasible rate. But, fyi ….Added, info on what line is being displayed, and viewer can go to previous line with right-arrow or left arrow to next phrase. Holding the down-arrow key flicks thru phrases. As before, the user/viewer can control reading rate using the cut threshold slider. In this case, its possible to turn off the beat-synch by sliding the slider to the right all the way and then read at your leisure (if there is any leisure in a browser-based pre-apocalyptic info-saturated universe) using the down arrow to retrieve the next words. Holding the down-arrow button down just zips thru the lines and is very efficient at zooming around thru the text if your proclivities run in the entropic direction.

Screenshot of 'Glider'. Click on image to see demo.

Occasionally, the gap between personality and thought becomes an abyss. Integrity gets a little thick and crusty. Mask-makers and make-up marketers are well aware of this fact. Halloween is the holiday where the libidinal discharge of this gap takes form.

I am an official boycotter of halloween, but enjoy a little Hell-o-ween. The following example uses a glitch-track (composed in Ableton) to fire jump-cuts thru a video (of my girlfriend drawing on her face with kid’s makeup - it was her idea!) and an array of words (a tiny poem on the subject of masks and integrity). At each jump, a small subset of the poem is chosen, words are set one to a line and a new font is randomly chosen from the archives, drop-shadow is added for that ubiquitous blend-in feel-good feel. As the piece loops the poem reoccurs but very very rarely with exactly the same fonts or line lengths or same video frame.

My friend Janusz accurately referred to this as “pretty fucking strange, captivating and disturbing.”

Interactivity Note: Viewers can control the cut threshold or volume which controls the speed of reading using a slider in upper right hand screen-corner. Roll off screen to have controls disappear.