Basically, being an artist is like being an athlete. One is not merely an athlete. If one is a professional athlete, then one is practising some discipline or another. I might be a speed-skater or a javelin-thrower, or else a professional football player or whatnot. I am veritably an athlete, but more particularly, I am a practitioner of a given discipline within the various athletic disciplines or sports.
The same goes with being an artist. I am an artist practising this discipline. In my case, I specialize in the visual arts, in painting, as well as in musical composition and sound design, as well as in writing. I write fiction and non-fiction, I am an experienced poet, these are my disciplines. It is in this sense that one is never merely an artist. One is an artist, surely, but one practises this or that discipline.
One must specialize, and one can almost never be an expert in all disciplines. Those individuals are few and far between who can specialize in more than 3 or 4 artistic disciplines, just as it is in sports amongst professional athletes. Take the Olympics for example. Those individuals are few and far between who specialize in more than 3 or 4 separate disciplines.
It is the same with the arts. One tends to specialize in at most 1 or 2 separate disciplines. I happen to specialize in Images, in Sounds, and in Words, in Text. That technically makes me an interdisciplinary artist, and that in and of itself comes with a great deal of baggage. It is not easy, and of such interdisciplinary artists, very few are great at what they do. It just comes with the territory and terrain of being an interdisciplinary artist. It is really hard and difficult to be great at more than one discipline, more than one field of expertise.
I do not, cannot pretend that I have ever achieved Greatness in my separate disciplines. All I can really attest to is that I have been constant, have persevered in my various disciplines. If I ever achieve Greatness, it will never be for me to judge, to decide. If I have ever achieved Greatness in what I do, I shall let the audience decide. They shall be my judge and jury and executioner. All I can do is wake up every morning and continue working on my stuff.
I swear, though, I am not an Artiste. I am an ordinary, everyday, workaday individual working on his stuff. I happen to make paintings and musical compositions, sound designs, but that doesn't make me special. I don't see my job as any different than the work a plumber does. I wake up every morning and do my thing, work on my stuff. My career involves practising this and that discipline, these specific professions. I do not think I am special. I do not consider myself to be an Artiste. I am just an everyday, average guy, doing his daily work, earning his daily bread.
This is my position with regard to the Arts, specifically the Liberal Arts, and for the time being, I will never change my position. I will however have much more to say about this, so as always, please stay tuned. :)
https://chumly.com/n/21a830a
mardi 31 décembre 2013
What is an Artist?
Believe it or not, the notion that we have of the Artist is a relatively recent invention. We may speak of Michelangelo as a great artist, but back in the day, he wasn't an Artist. He was a painter, a sculptor, he was many things, but not what we today would call an Artist.
Monet, the Impressionist painter, was a Painter and not an Artist, at least not the way we think of artists today. More and more, individuals today are becoming Artists as though being an artist was a career path, a profession. But it isn't.
For example, I am a professional painter as well as a sound designer. There is no such thing as a profession known as being an artist. One can create art but then one is a painter or a sculptor or a musical composer and so forth. I will be writing more about this over the coming months. Stay tuned. The point is that one cannot become an Artist because there is no such thing. One cannot be an Artist. There is no such thing. One is a) an individual and b) one practises some profession, but there is no such profession as creating art. It would be like saying a human being is a breather of air, or an eater of food-stuffs. Art is an abstract concept, not a profession. More to come.
https://chumly.com/n/21a509a
Monet, the Impressionist painter, was a Painter and not an Artist, at least not the way we think of artists today. More and more, individuals today are becoming Artists as though being an artist was a career path, a profession. But it isn't.
For example, I am a professional painter as well as a sound designer. There is no such thing as a profession known as being an artist. One can create art but then one is a painter or a sculptor or a musical composer and so forth. I will be writing more about this over the coming months. Stay tuned. The point is that one cannot become an Artist because there is no such thing. One cannot be an Artist. There is no such thing. One is a) an individual and b) one practises some profession, but there is no such profession as creating art. It would be like saying a human being is a breather of air, or an eater of food-stuffs. Art is an abstract concept, not a profession. More to come.
https://chumly.com/n/21a509a
lundi 30 décembre 2013
Themes for the Coming Year
As I said earlier, I will be logging things continually on this blog. Here are some themes I will be touching upon.
Jean-Paul Sartre: There is something in J.-P. Sartre's philosophy that I have understood deeply and that I want to share with the world. I call it his concept of bad faith to keep it simple. It's something I have a great deal to say about, and will be making statements on this accordingly.
Albert Camus: Camus is another thinker, author, that I have a great deal to say about. Expect me to get into some details about his life and his work, particularly the war in Algeria and what that might mean to a 21st century audience.
Literature: Of course, I will be going through various works of literature in both the French and English traditions. I have a lot to say about modernist literature, and will say it. I myself am an author and wish to position myself in terms of authors that have come before me. Call it a Testament or a Manifesto, as an artist.
Art: As always, I will be speaking of art and art markets. I have a great deal to say about Modernism as a movement and as an art market. Stay tuned for amazing revelations from the artist known as The A.G..
Politics & Religion: The two things that they tell us NOT to talk about in polite conversation. I will be making some bold statements about the two. I have studied it, researched it, I will be making statements with no excuses. I have apparently been given these freedoms, to believe what I believe and to be able to speak what I want to speak. Nothing will get in my way, and anyone trying to stop me will be dubbed a Freedom-Hater.
More to come. Always more to come, but this is a beginning. I will lay out the themes for the coming year and then begin writing. Please stay tuned. There will be much to discuss.
https://chumly.com/n/219d19f
Jean-Paul Sartre: There is something in J.-P. Sartre's philosophy that I have understood deeply and that I want to share with the world. I call it his concept of bad faith to keep it simple. It's something I have a great deal to say about, and will be making statements on this accordingly.
Albert Camus: Camus is another thinker, author, that I have a great deal to say about. Expect me to get into some details about his life and his work, particularly the war in Algeria and what that might mean to a 21st century audience.
Literature: Of course, I will be going through various works of literature in both the French and English traditions. I have a lot to say about modernist literature, and will say it. I myself am an author and wish to position myself in terms of authors that have come before me. Call it a Testament or a Manifesto, as an artist.
Art: As always, I will be speaking of art and art markets. I have a great deal to say about Modernism as a movement and as an art market. Stay tuned for amazing revelations from the artist known as The A.G..
Politics & Religion: The two things that they tell us NOT to talk about in polite conversation. I will be making some bold statements about the two. I have studied it, researched it, I will be making statements with no excuses. I have apparently been given these freedoms, to believe what I believe and to be able to speak what I want to speak. Nothing will get in my way, and anyone trying to stop me will be dubbed a Freedom-Hater.
More to come. Always more to come, but this is a beginning. I will lay out the themes for the coming year and then begin writing. Please stay tuned. There will be much to discuss.
https://chumly.com/n/219d19f
vendredi 27 décembre 2013
mardi 24 décembre 2013
lundi 23 décembre 2013
You are the risk to privacy
Quicknote: The greatest risk to privacy - and security, accordingly - that I have witnessed in my lifetime, has been created, perpetuated, instituted, by the actions - unknowingly, I would presume - of normal, everyday individuals. They were simple actions, but they all broke the foundational binds of trust in our society.
People are right to be concerned about things like privacy, information security, and so forth. There are real and serious reasons to be genuinely concerned. However, it has been my lifelong experience that the greatest of all infringements to privacy have been done by the hands of normal everyday people, what one might call common folk. That means me, you, and everybody else in this room.
It's not that we are evil, not at all. It's just that we have very bad habits and that - I am beginning to believe - we are fundamentally flawed in this area. I don't think that humans come prepackaged with a good enough sense of what the boundaries are between the private and public realms, possibly because these are cultural constructs and not actual physical borders or frontiers between things in the material universe.
With that being said, the borders that bind together the two separate, non-communicating realms of The Private and The Public, are no less real, and important. That is, it is important to keep them separate, but as I have just said, human beings don't seem to be well-equipped to respect such things as privacy, and security, accordingly.
Yes, for not respecting someone's privacy could be putting them in danger. You might not know that, it is in fact not your privacy, but theirs. It's why you should respect it, because it does not belong to you, but to the individual whose privacy it is.
Since this has become almost the bane of my very existence, I will be logging events on this blog whereby individuals have broken the binds of trust, binds - or bounds if you will - that are foundational to living in a just and democratic society. I will not name names, but since my privacy was infringed upon, if you are vigilant enough, you might be able to trace it back to the case in point (the infringement). In doing so, the private information never meant to be private will be revealed to you. It was already revealed, but you probably never noticed. Since it was revealed by someone else, and pertained to my private realm the best I can do is to attempt to reclaim it. I find that I can best accomplish this by pointing out the infringement - of my own private information, revealed publicly - and making an example of it.
I cannot go back in time and change things, I also have no power over others. I also cannot live in isolation. I too must live amongst people, in this society, and if others are not respecting such things as the binds of trust, i.e. by infringing upon people's privacy, knowingly or unknowingly, there is nothing I can do to stop them. But, as I said, I can set an example.
I have very high standards when it comes to these things and for very good reason. I was born with the exceptional ability to see true risks in everything. I also see false risks, erroneous risks, and can do the math to adjust for the discrepancy, the errors of judgement. I end up with a more or less neutral value that is not too optimistic or too pessimistic but just right. And over the course of my 36 years, these judgements have never failed me. I am a natural-born assessor of potential risks. I am telling you that it isn't evil corporations or banks or governments that are putting the very foundational binds of trust at risk in our civil societies. It is normal, everyday people. It is part of what I am calling The Little Evil(s). Small, perhaps even entirely anodyne, behaviors by individuals that infringe upon things such as privacy and so forth, and that taken in the aggregate actually create Evil with a capital E, The Greater Evil.
Evil is not some force of Nature. Evil is in us. I am evil, you are evil, we all have a little evil in us. It is part and parcel of this thing we call being human. It comes alongside our very birthright. It is our birthmark, the reason we are flawed and not perfect beings. The sooner we realize what our little evils are, and take measures to correct them, the better life will be for all living things on this planet.
Remember, I too am a purveyor of little evils. This thing I called a Quicknote is a little evil. It is meant to slight those that would do me harm, do harm to my privacy, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. This slight is a little evil, but smaller than the little evil of infringing upon my privacy, which, if it ever came to that, could put my life in jeopardy, or cause an existential risk or threat to my life, in the very worst case. All because someone did not respect the foundational binds of trust of our democratic societies. A little evil, but that can do great harm to individuals.
You shall not be named. Nothing will be revealed that was private except my own personally identifying information that you disclosed without the right to disclose it. All I am doing is logging it on my blog. It's my privacy, and I am told that I an inalienable right to it. Yet no court of law will take such petty, trifling matters into consideration. They are not important enough, and I wouldn't want a court to have to decide. This is my privacy, after all, and I can do something to preserve it. I have that power, not a very great power, but a power nonetheless.
More and more, people are concerned about Surveillance. Yet who is it that you see spying at you from behind the Venetian blinds when you go freely walking down the street? It isn't the State. It is your neighbor(s). There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye on things, safety is an important public good in our communities. Vigilance is a very important thing to be cultivating. But one must parse things correctly and accept that we are all peddlers in little evils, tiny evils, anodyne evils, petty, trifling evils of this world.
It does no harm, does it, if I tell someone I am with - indoors - that I just saw Mrs. Smith leave her house, walking her dog? Of course it doesn't. Except that it might. It depends who I just told, and if they relay that message and to whom and so on and so forth. It doesn't take long for the message to make it into the wrong hands, of someone who might capitalize on the fact that Mrs. Smith has left her house, and at what time, and with whom - her dog in this case.
Here is the basic rule. There are cases when it is the correct, proper thing to do, to tell someone such things. In fact, it is our duty and responsibility to do so, again, because we live and want to continue living in decent, civil societies, in our wonderful democratic nations. What messages one must relay are ones where there is something seemingly wrong with the picture. There is nothing wrong with Mrs. Smith walking her dog. She probably does it once a day, maybe twice or more. It is a redundant piece of information, entirely regular in the Grand Scheme of Things. But even when one sees someone unfamiliar, this does not mean it is an evil-doer. We are all little evil-doers, as I just said. It is not for us to judge. For all you know, it might just be Bob Dylan. This actually happened recently, he was stopped by police for taking a walk in some neighborhood where apparently he was either unwelcome or unfamiliar. But it was Bob Dylan. So please leave Mrs. Smith alone. Let her mind her own business, and mind yours instead. One has to learn to parse these things properly. If you think you see a risk of violence, or aggression, or else coercion of some form or another, please take immediate action. But then again, you are not to take the law into your own hands. There are trained persons for such always complex and difficult matters. Recent history ought to have taught us all a very good lesson about such vigilantism - or anything resembling vigilantism, even if remotely.
Otherwise, relay nothing. Do as doctors do with our medical dossiers and as priests and lawyers do. The Commandment on bearing false witness has an important, often overlooked corollary: Bear truth only. A private truth is not a truth you have borne witness to, if it is not your privacy. Carry on, pretend as though you never saw anything. It happens at times, we unknowingly stumble upon something we weren't meant to spy upon. If it isn't something dangerous, then carry on. Mind your business.
It doesn't have to be a trade secret or even a state secret for us to mind ourselves if I can put it in a less dramatic tone. These little evils, however, if we are not careful in treating them with care and compassion in our hearts and intelligent discernment, concern and vigilance in our spirits, will grow to become a canker sore, and may risk the very sovereignty of our great nations. It is a general rule that such small, simple things as individual behaviors, when taken in the aggregate, can grow to processes of great complexity, of massive complexity. Things can emerge that are quite ugly. Yet no one wanted to do anyone any harm. Right. I've heard that one before. When we were kids we told our mothers, "It wasn't me." Of course it wasn't. It wasn't any one of us. Then who was it? It must have been this strange ghost, this character living in our house, named It Wasn't Me.
Let us not live in a world with 6 billion persons named It Wasn't Me. That's all I am trying to say. Godspeed and may you carry on.
https://chumly.com/n/2172852
People are right to be concerned about things like privacy, information security, and so forth. There are real and serious reasons to be genuinely concerned. However, it has been my lifelong experience that the greatest of all infringements to privacy have been done by the hands of normal everyday people, what one might call common folk. That means me, you, and everybody else in this room.
It's not that we are evil, not at all. It's just that we have very bad habits and that - I am beginning to believe - we are fundamentally flawed in this area. I don't think that humans come prepackaged with a good enough sense of what the boundaries are between the private and public realms, possibly because these are cultural constructs and not actual physical borders or frontiers between things in the material universe.
With that being said, the borders that bind together the two separate, non-communicating realms of The Private and The Public, are no less real, and important. That is, it is important to keep them separate, but as I have just said, human beings don't seem to be well-equipped to respect such things as privacy, and security, accordingly.
Yes, for not respecting someone's privacy could be putting them in danger. You might not know that, it is in fact not your privacy, but theirs. It's why you should respect it, because it does not belong to you, but to the individual whose privacy it is.
Since this has become almost the bane of my very existence, I will be logging events on this blog whereby individuals have broken the binds of trust, binds - or bounds if you will - that are foundational to living in a just and democratic society. I will not name names, but since my privacy was infringed upon, if you are vigilant enough, you might be able to trace it back to the case in point (the infringement). In doing so, the private information never meant to be private will be revealed to you. It was already revealed, but you probably never noticed. Since it was revealed by someone else, and pertained to my private realm the best I can do is to attempt to reclaim it. I find that I can best accomplish this by pointing out the infringement - of my own private information, revealed publicly - and making an example of it.
I cannot go back in time and change things, I also have no power over others. I also cannot live in isolation. I too must live amongst people, in this society, and if others are not respecting such things as the binds of trust, i.e. by infringing upon people's privacy, knowingly or unknowingly, there is nothing I can do to stop them. But, as I said, I can set an example.
I have very high standards when it comes to these things and for very good reason. I was born with the exceptional ability to see true risks in everything. I also see false risks, erroneous risks, and can do the math to adjust for the discrepancy, the errors of judgement. I end up with a more or less neutral value that is not too optimistic or too pessimistic but just right. And over the course of my 36 years, these judgements have never failed me. I am a natural-born assessor of potential risks. I am telling you that it isn't evil corporations or banks or governments that are putting the very foundational binds of trust at risk in our civil societies. It is normal, everyday people. It is part of what I am calling The Little Evil(s). Small, perhaps even entirely anodyne, behaviors by individuals that infringe upon things such as privacy and so forth, and that taken in the aggregate actually create Evil with a capital E, The Greater Evil.
Evil is not some force of Nature. Evil is in us. I am evil, you are evil, we all have a little evil in us. It is part and parcel of this thing we call being human. It comes alongside our very birthright. It is our birthmark, the reason we are flawed and not perfect beings. The sooner we realize what our little evils are, and take measures to correct them, the better life will be for all living things on this planet.
Remember, I too am a purveyor of little evils. This thing I called a Quicknote is a little evil. It is meant to slight those that would do me harm, do harm to my privacy, willingly or unwillingly, knowingly or unknowingly. This slight is a little evil, but smaller than the little evil of infringing upon my privacy, which, if it ever came to that, could put my life in jeopardy, or cause an existential risk or threat to my life, in the very worst case. All because someone did not respect the foundational binds of trust of our democratic societies. A little evil, but that can do great harm to individuals.
You shall not be named. Nothing will be revealed that was private except my own personally identifying information that you disclosed without the right to disclose it. All I am doing is logging it on my blog. It's my privacy, and I am told that I an inalienable right to it. Yet no court of law will take such petty, trifling matters into consideration. They are not important enough, and I wouldn't want a court to have to decide. This is my privacy, after all, and I can do something to preserve it. I have that power, not a very great power, but a power nonetheless.
More and more, people are concerned about Surveillance. Yet who is it that you see spying at you from behind the Venetian blinds when you go freely walking down the street? It isn't the State. It is your neighbor(s). There's nothing wrong with keeping an eye on things, safety is an important public good in our communities. Vigilance is a very important thing to be cultivating. But one must parse things correctly and accept that we are all peddlers in little evils, tiny evils, anodyne evils, petty, trifling evils of this world.
It does no harm, does it, if I tell someone I am with - indoors - that I just saw Mrs. Smith leave her house, walking her dog? Of course it doesn't. Except that it might. It depends who I just told, and if they relay that message and to whom and so on and so forth. It doesn't take long for the message to make it into the wrong hands, of someone who might capitalize on the fact that Mrs. Smith has left her house, and at what time, and with whom - her dog in this case.
Here is the basic rule. There are cases when it is the correct, proper thing to do, to tell someone such things. In fact, it is our duty and responsibility to do so, again, because we live and want to continue living in decent, civil societies, in our wonderful democratic nations. What messages one must relay are ones where there is something seemingly wrong with the picture. There is nothing wrong with Mrs. Smith walking her dog. She probably does it once a day, maybe twice or more. It is a redundant piece of information, entirely regular in the Grand Scheme of Things. But even when one sees someone unfamiliar, this does not mean it is an evil-doer. We are all little evil-doers, as I just said. It is not for us to judge. For all you know, it might just be Bob Dylan. This actually happened recently, he was stopped by police for taking a walk in some neighborhood where apparently he was either unwelcome or unfamiliar. But it was Bob Dylan. So please leave Mrs. Smith alone. Let her mind her own business, and mind yours instead. One has to learn to parse these things properly. If you think you see a risk of violence, or aggression, or else coercion of some form or another, please take immediate action. But then again, you are not to take the law into your own hands. There are trained persons for such always complex and difficult matters. Recent history ought to have taught us all a very good lesson about such vigilantism - or anything resembling vigilantism, even if remotely.
Otherwise, relay nothing. Do as doctors do with our medical dossiers and as priests and lawyers do. The Commandment on bearing false witness has an important, often overlooked corollary: Bear truth only. A private truth is not a truth you have borne witness to, if it is not your privacy. Carry on, pretend as though you never saw anything. It happens at times, we unknowingly stumble upon something we weren't meant to spy upon. If it isn't something dangerous, then carry on. Mind your business.
It doesn't have to be a trade secret or even a state secret for us to mind ourselves if I can put it in a less dramatic tone. These little evils, however, if we are not careful in treating them with care and compassion in our hearts and intelligent discernment, concern and vigilance in our spirits, will grow to become a canker sore, and may risk the very sovereignty of our great nations. It is a general rule that such small, simple things as individual behaviors, when taken in the aggregate, can grow to processes of great complexity, of massive complexity. Things can emerge that are quite ugly. Yet no one wanted to do anyone any harm. Right. I've heard that one before. When we were kids we told our mothers, "It wasn't me." Of course it wasn't. It wasn't any one of us. Then who was it? It must have been this strange ghost, this character living in our house, named It Wasn't Me.
Let us not live in a world with 6 billion persons named It Wasn't Me. That's all I am trying to say. Godspeed and may you carry on.
https://chumly.com/n/2172852
dimanche 22 décembre 2013
(c) 1961 by Columbia Record Club, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Guided Tours of the World. The Congo. Young Republic: A New Africa Emerges.
https://chumly.com/n/216785c
https://chumly.com/n/216785c
samedi 21 décembre 2013
vendredi 20 décembre 2013
Applications and Genre Theory
I will be writing about applications now and then. I want to take a Genre Theory approach from literary analysis and apply it to applications. I could just call them Categories of applications, like Email, Blogging Platform, etc., but I chose to speak of Genres instead for specific reasons. The main reason is that I want to speak of design patterns for different genres of applications, across numerous categories.
I will be writing mostly about the kinds of applications that I have used the most over the last 20+ years using computers. Check back in every once in a while, I should start writing about this soon. One of the first app genres I want to tackle is the newsreading app. I will be going through the genre in a systematic, methodical way, taking them apart and going through every element, good, bad, and neutral.
Like in any genre, in literature for instance there are bad historical novels and there are good ones. It's the same with applications. Apps are just text, really, they are works of fiction, one could say. Useful fictions. Like in literature, there are great writers and there are a bunch of amateurs who don't even come close. I may not be an application-builder or application-maker, but I am a prolific painter, sound designer, author, and researcher. More than anything, I know exactly what I like and don't like.
I just want to spend some time and get it all out of my system. There really are some bad apps out there. No wonder startups are dropping like flies after burning through their cash handouts. You know, in the long haul, there will be few true entrepreneurs left. By that, I mean true visionaries. They are few and far between. And this little app I happen to be using right now is one of those great works of art in a genre all on its own. But that is another story for another day. Hope you are well. Take care and keep rocking. :)
https://chumly.com/n/215f27f
I will be writing mostly about the kinds of applications that I have used the most over the last 20+ years using computers. Check back in every once in a while, I should start writing about this soon. One of the first app genres I want to tackle is the newsreading app. I will be going through the genre in a systematic, methodical way, taking them apart and going through every element, good, bad, and neutral.
Like in any genre, in literature for instance there are bad historical novels and there are good ones. It's the same with applications. Apps are just text, really, they are works of fiction, one could say. Useful fictions. Like in literature, there are great writers and there are a bunch of amateurs who don't even come close. I may not be an application-builder or application-maker, but I am a prolific painter, sound designer, author, and researcher. More than anything, I know exactly what I like and don't like.
I just want to spend some time and get it all out of my system. There really are some bad apps out there. No wonder startups are dropping like flies after burning through their cash handouts. You know, in the long haul, there will be few true entrepreneurs left. By that, I mean true visionaries. They are few and far between. And this little app I happen to be using right now is one of those great works of art in a genre all on its own. But that is another story for another day. Hope you are well. Take care and keep rocking. :)
https://chumly.com/n/215f27f
mercredi 18 décembre 2013
The Awakened Ear
I have been composing, performing, and recording music most of my life at this point. I have studied and practised sound design now for a decade and a half, give or take. I was both lucky and unlucky to have been born with extraordinary ears. My ears are billion-dollar ears and I don't feel bad admitting that to the world.
There's just so much that one doesn't hear in life. Either one never took the time to hear it, to listen to it, to observe and study it, or else one was even unluckier than I and was born without hearing, or has suffered ear damage. I have protected my ears and continue to do so on a moment-to-moment basis, and I have pushed my brain to the extremes of perception, to the point of making myself veritably seasick.
One should never experiment with hearing in this way. I am a professional, I studied computer-assisted sound design and the recording arts at a fine institution. I had teachers and guides, administrators, personnel, who had worked in the music industry for 30 years or more. I have been composing, performing, and recording music now for over 20 years.
This is no laughing matter, your ears are not a toy to be played with. Neither is your brain a toy. But I have studied the human ear and hearing, as well as language, harmony, the psychophysics of sound phenomena, music and noise, and I have always taken good care of my ears. The general rule is simple: If your ears receive more than 1 hour per week of sound at 80 dB or more, then you will suffer permanent damage to your hearing. I am proud to say that after 36 years on this earth, my hearing is almost entirely intact. I basically have the same capacities, the same faculties, that I was born with.
Granted, sounds near to 20,000 Hz are very faint, more than faint, I hardly hear them at all, but I perceive them nonetheless. They are still perceptible, it is just a little more difficult than it was, say, 35 years ago. However, I have developed many more abilities. Frequency is not the only feature of mechanical waves and possibly one of the least interesting when it comes down to it, to me at least.
Surely you have held a seashell to one of your ears and observed the sound it made. It has maybe even been explained to you how that works, how you apparently hear the ocean. They have told you that the rushing sound is the ambient noise resonating in the cavity of the shell and so forth. They maybe even told you that this can be done with any resonant cavity such as your cupped hands or whatnot.
I'm sure they told you how it was that the sound resembled the sound of the ocean. The thing is, it really isn't doing much, the seashell. It is more or less acting as a filter, filtering other sounds, modulating them if you will. What I am sure they haven't told you is that you don't need a seashell to hear such things. If you listen carefully, you will hear the sound of blood flowing through your body, and other such sounds, coming from the inside.
One can hear one's own muscles, for instance. We ourselves are essentially one big resonating chamber. If you listen carefully, you can not only hear your heart beating from the inside, but you can hear the blood flow, you can hear the pressure itself, exactly the way a cardiologist or doctor might hear it with the use of some technical medium or medical equipment.
If you listen carefully, when you are walking, you can hear your footsteps from the outside and then feel the vibrations from the inside. Your feet are communicating with your brain in this way through seismic communication. The heart actually mixes with and modulates the mechanical vibrations from your feet hitting the ground.
Try putting your fingers in your ears sometime, or to be safe, use proper equipment, such as earplugs. For this experiment, I have found soft earplugs to be best because they block the canal, that is they close off the opening of the canal. However, it's always better never to put anything in your ears. You can just block them by pressing down softly on the Tragus of each ear. This will close off the opening and allow you to test your hearing with the canal closed off.
What do you hear? If you're lucky, you'll hear the blood flowing, your lungs, your heart, your muscles perhaps. Try speaking. In any case, I cannot recommend that people begin experimenting with their ears and auditory systems in this way, I can only say that I have done it and have learned a great deal about the human ear and hearing in general. It taught me about sound too, in general, and mechanical energy also in general.
In any case, I will be sharing some of these experiences over the next year or so. Please stay tuned, as they say. :)
https://chumly.com/n/21536b8
There's just so much that one doesn't hear in life. Either one never took the time to hear it, to listen to it, to observe and study it, or else one was even unluckier than I and was born without hearing, or has suffered ear damage. I have protected my ears and continue to do so on a moment-to-moment basis, and I have pushed my brain to the extremes of perception, to the point of making myself veritably seasick.
One should never experiment with hearing in this way. I am a professional, I studied computer-assisted sound design and the recording arts at a fine institution. I had teachers and guides, administrators, personnel, who had worked in the music industry for 30 years or more. I have been composing, performing, and recording music now for over 20 years.
This is no laughing matter, your ears are not a toy to be played with. Neither is your brain a toy. But I have studied the human ear and hearing, as well as language, harmony, the psychophysics of sound phenomena, music and noise, and I have always taken good care of my ears. The general rule is simple: If your ears receive more than 1 hour per week of sound at 80 dB or more, then you will suffer permanent damage to your hearing. I am proud to say that after 36 years on this earth, my hearing is almost entirely intact. I basically have the same capacities, the same faculties, that I was born with.
Granted, sounds near to 20,000 Hz are very faint, more than faint, I hardly hear them at all, but I perceive them nonetheless. They are still perceptible, it is just a little more difficult than it was, say, 35 years ago. However, I have developed many more abilities. Frequency is not the only feature of mechanical waves and possibly one of the least interesting when it comes down to it, to me at least.
Surely you have held a seashell to one of your ears and observed the sound it made. It has maybe even been explained to you how that works, how you apparently hear the ocean. They have told you that the rushing sound is the ambient noise resonating in the cavity of the shell and so forth. They maybe even told you that this can be done with any resonant cavity such as your cupped hands or whatnot.
I'm sure they told you how it was that the sound resembled the sound of the ocean. The thing is, it really isn't doing much, the seashell. It is more or less acting as a filter, filtering other sounds, modulating them if you will. What I am sure they haven't told you is that you don't need a seashell to hear such things. If you listen carefully, you will hear the sound of blood flowing through your body, and other such sounds, coming from the inside.
One can hear one's own muscles, for instance. We ourselves are essentially one big resonating chamber. If you listen carefully, you can not only hear your heart beating from the inside, but you can hear the blood flow, you can hear the pressure itself, exactly the way a cardiologist or doctor might hear it with the use of some technical medium or medical equipment.
If you listen carefully, when you are walking, you can hear your footsteps from the outside and then feel the vibrations from the inside. Your feet are communicating with your brain in this way through seismic communication. The heart actually mixes with and modulates the mechanical vibrations from your feet hitting the ground.
Try putting your fingers in your ears sometime, or to be safe, use proper equipment, such as earplugs. For this experiment, I have found soft earplugs to be best because they block the canal, that is they close off the opening of the canal. However, it's always better never to put anything in your ears. You can just block them by pressing down softly on the Tragus of each ear. This will close off the opening and allow you to test your hearing with the canal closed off.
What do you hear? If you're lucky, you'll hear the blood flowing, your lungs, your heart, your muscles perhaps. Try speaking. In any case, I cannot recommend that people begin experimenting with their ears and auditory systems in this way, I can only say that I have done it and have learned a great deal about the human ear and hearing in general. It taught me about sound too, in general, and mechanical energy also in general.
In any case, I will be sharing some of these experiences over the next year or so. Please stay tuned, as they say. :)
https://chumly.com/n/21536b8
mardi 17 décembre 2013
dimanche 15 décembre 2013
Roadmap 2014 - Logs
2014 is going to be a big year for me. I wanted to take the time and make a few simple things crystal clear for everybody. I don't want to have to repeat myself any more than is necessary.
This is where I will be logging everything from now on. Everything that I need to say to the world will be logged right here. I will no longer be engaging much in social discussions on other platforms.
The reasons are simple. I have been blogging every day since 2001 and have received very little feedback or engagement from others. At the moment, more and more people are showing interest in what I have to say and so this is the optimal way for me to keep everyone on the same page.
Again, I will be interacting very little on other platforms. In order to simplify things for myself, I will be posting everything anyone needs to know right here, in these ongoing Logs. These Logs are all Public-Facing. I reserve the right to communicate with others across more private channels. However, I have found that too many people do not know how to respect my privacy properly when I interact with them privately, and so I am forced in this way to do everything out in the open.
To conclude, another reason I am not going to be interacting much with others on social media sites is that people also don't seem to know how to respect me there either. It is in this that way I have set up a kind of buffer zone, if you will, between myself and the world. I face the world, the world faces me, the Interface between these two is my personal website.
This is not meant to offend anyone. If ever you feel that you haven't received the memo it's probably because I never sent one to anybody. Come back here and check the Logs. This is not meant to Provoke but rather to Denounce, though no individual shall be named or otherwise made identifiable in any way. This is not about YOU, it's about ME.
You see, here is the thing, plain and simple. If I continue interacting and engaging with others on social sites and in private channels, I lose this ability to freely speak my mind publicly like this. This is the only way going forward that I can freely speak my mind publicly and have a clean conscience about it. Anyone who is offended by this will have to check their own conscience, or check this website for updates on what I'm thinking and doing. (It's not like I will be doing anything out of the ordinary. These are just Logs, more or less like an expanded Calendar and To-Do List combined).
Life is too short. You've got to learn to relax. I find that too many people have become information gluttons, are suffering from a new kind of gluttony that is pervasive and something that I find is bad for my heart, my spirit, and my soul. Too many people are afraid, but I am not afraid. Be not afraid. 2014 is going to be a big year for me. If you think that I have disappeared, I haven't. I am right here, using this platform as my Interface with the World.
A.G. (c) 2013
https://chumly.com/n/2138c97
This is where I will be logging everything from now on. Everything that I need to say to the world will be logged right here. I will no longer be engaging much in social discussions on other platforms.
The reasons are simple. I have been blogging every day since 2001 and have received very little feedback or engagement from others. At the moment, more and more people are showing interest in what I have to say and so this is the optimal way for me to keep everyone on the same page.
Again, I will be interacting very little on other platforms. In order to simplify things for myself, I will be posting everything anyone needs to know right here, in these ongoing Logs. These Logs are all Public-Facing. I reserve the right to communicate with others across more private channels. However, I have found that too many people do not know how to respect my privacy properly when I interact with them privately, and so I am forced in this way to do everything out in the open.
To conclude, another reason I am not going to be interacting much with others on social media sites is that people also don't seem to know how to respect me there either. It is in this that way I have set up a kind of buffer zone, if you will, between myself and the world. I face the world, the world faces me, the Interface between these two is my personal website.
This is not meant to offend anyone. If ever you feel that you haven't received the memo it's probably because I never sent one to anybody. Come back here and check the Logs. This is not meant to Provoke but rather to Denounce, though no individual shall be named or otherwise made identifiable in any way. This is not about YOU, it's about ME.
You see, here is the thing, plain and simple. If I continue interacting and engaging with others on social sites and in private channels, I lose this ability to freely speak my mind publicly like this. This is the only way going forward that I can freely speak my mind publicly and have a clean conscience about it. Anyone who is offended by this will have to check their own conscience, or check this website for updates on what I'm thinking and doing. (It's not like I will be doing anything out of the ordinary. These are just Logs, more or less like an expanded Calendar and To-Do List combined).
Life is too short. You've got to learn to relax. I find that too many people have become information gluttons, are suffering from a new kind of gluttony that is pervasive and something that I find is bad for my heart, my spirit, and my soul. Too many people are afraid, but I am not afraid. Be not afraid. 2014 is going to be a big year for me. If you think that I have disappeared, I haven't. I am right here, using this platform as my Interface with the World.
A.G. (c) 2013
https://chumly.com/n/2138c97
vendredi 13 décembre 2013
The Living Museum of Modern Antiquity
I have always been an amateur collector of fine things, a collector of rare finds. Amongst my most prized possessions are my many typewriters. They are all analog typewriters, and in fact most of what I collect is either analog or long past its due-date, if you will. I have had old telephones in the collection, everything from staplers to an abacus to old apparel from the Age of the Library Card Catalogue.
In essence, I am surrounded by old forgotten things, objects lost in time. I surround myself with objects from another time, another era. Primarily, old books line the bookshelves one finds against every wall. I collect old filing cabinets, other historically relevant Office Supplies, from old file folders to old agendas, calendars, and notebooks.
I am in The Living Museum of Modern Antiquity where everything is so ephemeral, it is already useless once it comes off the shelf. But what these objects, these things, lose in utility, they gain in sublime beauty, of being physical memories from another era. This is the archaeological context in which I live: The context of Modern Antiquity where the Modern itself is ancient history.
At the same time, the typewriters still function properly. The abacus is still quite useful. Nothing changed, nothing happened that made these things obsolete. The times never changed, they could not change, only people changed, habits changed. The Perennial Typewriter Keyboard is the same keyboard found today on most mobile computing devices. The same old ideas are simply recycled, given a fresh Veneer of Newness, sold at ridiculous prices for something you already had 100+ years ago.
You are foolish not to love History, when History is all around you. The Daguerreotype process still produces the most profoundly beautiful photographs. For a time, the Daguerreotype might have fallen out of use, was temporarily replaced by bolder, newer methods, but now, after all this time, it suddenly begins to shine with such intrinsic worth. The Daguerreotype is Sublime, as ancient ruins are sublime. You latest gadgets are out-numbered, it is them who are out of place in History, for they have not yet found their place in the historical record.
https://chumly.com/n/212ad34
In essence, I am surrounded by old forgotten things, objects lost in time. I surround myself with objects from another time, another era. Primarily, old books line the bookshelves one finds against every wall. I collect old filing cabinets, other historically relevant Office Supplies, from old file folders to old agendas, calendars, and notebooks.
I am in The Living Museum of Modern Antiquity where everything is so ephemeral, it is already useless once it comes off the shelf. But what these objects, these things, lose in utility, they gain in sublime beauty, of being physical memories from another era. This is the archaeological context in which I live: The context of Modern Antiquity where the Modern itself is ancient history.
At the same time, the typewriters still function properly. The abacus is still quite useful. Nothing changed, nothing happened that made these things obsolete. The times never changed, they could not change, only people changed, habits changed. The Perennial Typewriter Keyboard is the same keyboard found today on most mobile computing devices. The same old ideas are simply recycled, given a fresh Veneer of Newness, sold at ridiculous prices for something you already had 100+ years ago.
You are foolish not to love History, when History is all around you. The Daguerreotype process still produces the most profoundly beautiful photographs. For a time, the Daguerreotype might have fallen out of use, was temporarily replaced by bolder, newer methods, but now, after all this time, it suddenly begins to shine with such intrinsic worth. The Daguerreotype is Sublime, as ancient ruins are sublime. You latest gadgets are out-numbered, it is them who are out of place in History, for they have not yet found their place in the historical record.
https://chumly.com/n/212ad34
vendredi 6 décembre 2013
Timeless, Like Glass
It would appear that there really is some method to the madness sometimes. I'm an artist and love reading what art historians and art theorists have to say about art as much as the next person, but with regard to the higher-order aspects of art practise, if you will, I like to get my wisdom closer to the source, from the practitioners themselves.
What better place to start looking, then, than at my own art practise! I have already done it and this is what I see. Let me refer to the art of Painting first. I am a professional painter, amongst other things, but to simplify things a little, let me focus for the time being on The Art of Painting.
Personally, I find that a large segment of the population tends to misconceive the work that artists's do. Increasingly, in fact, it would appear that many artists are misconstruing the work they themselves set out to do. It is not a free-for-all. In a sense, I am merely reporting the cultural news, if you will. I am reporting what Human Culture with a capital C is saying and doing at the moment. I did not choose what Culture is, nor what She is saying and doing, in fact I never even chose to become a reporter of such things, at least not in any real sense. Therefore, I disagree categorically with the argument that artists have all the liberties in the world when doing their work as artists, when engaging in their art practise. I also think that it is a dangerous misconception.
More and more, one hears individuals speaking at length on concepts such as Relevance, what is relevant and what is not relevant. First of all, the term they are using was borrowed from information science, namely from information retrieval and search in particular. One speaks of the results of a query input into a search engine and the relevance of the results returned (a.k.a. the output). The term went on to be used in more general ways with regard to things like RSS feeds and then Twitter feeds or just plain news-reading practises in general. In this case, suddenly what is relevant becomes Signal and what is irrelevant or not relevant becomes Noise and all of a sudden individuals were now speaking of their Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds in terms of Noise control and the proverbial signal-to-noise ratio.
Understood. What does this have to do with the art practise? Weren't we going to be talking about the practise of Painting? Why are we speaking of Relevance? One of the reasons I am linking the term Relevance, how it is commonly used in recent times, etc., to Painting is that often this kind of noise reduction involves value judgements but also aesthetic judgements or judgements of taste. I argue that what is often labelled as noise in a social media channel is not noise, it's just not a beautiful signal. In other words, Twitter and writing tweets is a beauty contest and only the beautiful tweets are Signal while the less beautiful ones, the ones that lose the beauty pageant, are the ones that are Noisy tweets.
The problem is that tweets are written by individuals, and so slowly but surely, it is individuals who are being judged on the beauty of their tweets. This begins to be problematic for me for individuals risk being cast out merely based on the so-called relevance of their tweets, entirely based on arbitrary sets of criteria, i.e. what somebody else decides is relevant or not. The Relevance of the information that you put out into the world, Relevance with a capital R, is now the sole metric by which you are being judged, as an individual, in fact your entire existence as an entity in the world is being decided on whether or not YOU are relevant. It is no longer about your tweets, it is about whether or not YOU are relevant as a person.
This is where I believe the art and her art practise comes in because we often hear people say the same thing about works of art, whether or not the works, or the artists themselves, are Relevant. Notice how we are no longer speaking about Twitter and newsfeeds, and we surely are no longer speaking of queries and search engines and information retrieval or information science. We are far removed from where the term relevance first came into our vocabulary, and that in itself is very problematic for me because this is how people can start to get hurt. This is why I spoke of misconceptions and so forth as being dangerous. In this case, a term has entered a vocabulary, has crossed domains, and I see it leading to dangerous, hurtful consequences in the concrete, practical, day-to-day life of individual human beings.
To relate this back to the (art) practise of Painting, let me start by making a few bold statements: In an art practise, it is not the artist who decides what is relevant. That is, the artist merely adheres to what is topical, let's call it, but does not choose what is or is not Topical. The artist does not choose what is most appropriate to portray. The subject in art is always chosen on an ad hoc basis, by the artistry itself, not the artist. The artist is not free to choose in this sense. The artist in her art practise can choose what tools and techniques she wants to use, she can decide what treatment at the technical level is most appropriate or apropos. She does not choose what Subjects or Topics or whatnot are part of the set of All Relevant Topics. This is already chosen in advance by the Moment, the Time, by the moral climate or moral temperature, if you will, the Milieu or Environment in which the artist lives. Some subjects or topics, concepts and so forth, might be relevant across more domains or fields. They might be universally topical in a more global sense, or they might be topical at a more or less local level. But there is always something that is appropriate, and everything else that is not. The artist does not choose what the menu is in this sense, only what meal they want to eat at this or that time, chosen from the menu of available dishes. To think otherwise is to misconstrue what an artist is and what the work is that artists do, and it is a dangerous misconception.
Put another way, the subject that I choose can only ever be an instance of the classes of All Possible Subjects AND Subjects Currently Relevant. Note: The latter two can be separated into Subjects Which Are Relevant AND For This Moment/Time. That is how I have come to the tentative equation for art: A=r(t), art is that which is relevant for all times. And that is the technical definition of Timelessness in art. I will try to explain further at a later time. Stay tuned.
Note: Another way to put it. A reporter doesn't invent the news, she merely reports it. She reports what is happening, doesn't invent what is happening. It is in this way that I said I, as an artist, was merely reporting the cultural news. I report on Culture. It's a simplistic way of seeing it, but it can help get a better idea of what I am trying to articulate here.
http://chumly.com/n/20fc93a
What better place to start looking, then, than at my own art practise! I have already done it and this is what I see. Let me refer to the art of Painting first. I am a professional painter, amongst other things, but to simplify things a little, let me focus for the time being on The Art of Painting.
Personally, I find that a large segment of the population tends to misconceive the work that artists's do. Increasingly, in fact, it would appear that many artists are misconstruing the work they themselves set out to do. It is not a free-for-all. In a sense, I am merely reporting the cultural news, if you will. I am reporting what Human Culture with a capital C is saying and doing at the moment. I did not choose what Culture is, nor what She is saying and doing, in fact I never even chose to become a reporter of such things, at least not in any real sense. Therefore, I disagree categorically with the argument that artists have all the liberties in the world when doing their work as artists, when engaging in their art practise. I also think that it is a dangerous misconception.
More and more, one hears individuals speaking at length on concepts such as Relevance, what is relevant and what is not relevant. First of all, the term they are using was borrowed from information science, namely from information retrieval and search in particular. One speaks of the results of a query input into a search engine and the relevance of the results returned (a.k.a. the output). The term went on to be used in more general ways with regard to things like RSS feeds and then Twitter feeds or just plain news-reading practises in general. In this case, suddenly what is relevant becomes Signal and what is irrelevant or not relevant becomes Noise and all of a sudden individuals were now speaking of their Twitter and Facebook newsfeeds in terms of Noise control and the proverbial signal-to-noise ratio.
Understood. What does this have to do with the art practise? Weren't we going to be talking about the practise of Painting? Why are we speaking of Relevance? One of the reasons I am linking the term Relevance, how it is commonly used in recent times, etc., to Painting is that often this kind of noise reduction involves value judgements but also aesthetic judgements or judgements of taste. I argue that what is often labelled as noise in a social media channel is not noise, it's just not a beautiful signal. In other words, Twitter and writing tweets is a beauty contest and only the beautiful tweets are Signal while the less beautiful ones, the ones that lose the beauty pageant, are the ones that are Noisy tweets.
The problem is that tweets are written by individuals, and so slowly but surely, it is individuals who are being judged on the beauty of their tweets. This begins to be problematic for me for individuals risk being cast out merely based on the so-called relevance of their tweets, entirely based on arbitrary sets of criteria, i.e. what somebody else decides is relevant or not. The Relevance of the information that you put out into the world, Relevance with a capital R, is now the sole metric by which you are being judged, as an individual, in fact your entire existence as an entity in the world is being decided on whether or not YOU are relevant. It is no longer about your tweets, it is about whether or not YOU are relevant as a person.
This is where I believe the art and her art practise comes in because we often hear people say the same thing about works of art, whether or not the works, or the artists themselves, are Relevant. Notice how we are no longer speaking about Twitter and newsfeeds, and we surely are no longer speaking of queries and search engines and information retrieval or information science. We are far removed from where the term relevance first came into our vocabulary, and that in itself is very problematic for me because this is how people can start to get hurt. This is why I spoke of misconceptions and so forth as being dangerous. In this case, a term has entered a vocabulary, has crossed domains, and I see it leading to dangerous, hurtful consequences in the concrete, practical, day-to-day life of individual human beings.
To relate this back to the (art) practise of Painting, let me start by making a few bold statements: In an art practise, it is not the artist who decides what is relevant. That is, the artist merely adheres to what is topical, let's call it, but does not choose what is or is not Topical. The artist does not choose what is most appropriate to portray. The subject in art is always chosen on an ad hoc basis, by the artistry itself, not the artist. The artist is not free to choose in this sense. The artist in her art practise can choose what tools and techniques she wants to use, she can decide what treatment at the technical level is most appropriate or apropos. She does not choose what Subjects or Topics or whatnot are part of the set of All Relevant Topics. This is already chosen in advance by the Moment, the Time, by the moral climate or moral temperature, if you will, the Milieu or Environment in which the artist lives. Some subjects or topics, concepts and so forth, might be relevant across more domains or fields. They might be universally topical in a more global sense, or they might be topical at a more or less local level. But there is always something that is appropriate, and everything else that is not. The artist does not choose what the menu is in this sense, only what meal they want to eat at this or that time, chosen from the menu of available dishes. To think otherwise is to misconstrue what an artist is and what the work is that artists do, and it is a dangerous misconception.
Put another way, the subject that I choose can only ever be an instance of the classes of All Possible Subjects AND Subjects Currently Relevant. Note: The latter two can be separated into Subjects Which Are Relevant AND For This Moment/Time. That is how I have come to the tentative equation for art: A=r(t), art is that which is relevant for all times. And that is the technical definition of Timelessness in art. I will try to explain further at a later time. Stay tuned.
Note: Another way to put it. A reporter doesn't invent the news, she merely reports it. She reports what is happening, doesn't invent what is happening. It is in this way that I said I, as an artist, was merely reporting the cultural news. I report on Culture. It's a simplistic way of seeing it, but it can help get a better idea of what I am trying to articulate here.
http://chumly.com/n/20fc93a
mardi 3 décembre 2013
The Great Patternless Void
I find the daily practise of being fascinated by finding new patterns in something rather lukewarm and boring. I often hear people talk about patterns as though they were trying to uncover all the patterns in the universe so they could put them in a box somewhere. They speak of pattern languages, yet they are not designers. They constantly speak of things such as mindfulness and meditation, yet they seem to be doing the exact opposite of what they are describing.
That's fine by me. That's their prerogative, I guess, to do that and be that way. But when they come and tell me that I'm doing it wrong or whatnot, and criticize Me harshly, I fear that I find it all rather lukewarm and boring. Tepid, really. Room temperature IQ.
I'm not the one all excited about discovering patterns. These same people will look at my artistic production and start looking for patterns, the same patterns that they see everywhere. I must be telepathic, I guess, if I was able to put the patterns they see everywhere into my paintings, without ever having seen the patterns, or went looking for them. Yet they persist to deny what I say about my own artistic production, I, the author of my works.
I'm not all that bitter about it. What I am is sad, though, for I feel that I must be the only one on earth that was born imperfect and with flaws. Everyone else just seems so darn perfect. They are masterful pattern-watchers, and me, I only see one thing, The Great Patternless Void. And I embrace it. I ask it for guidance, to lead me down the right path, whatever path makes It happiest.
I don't get all excited about that either. I never said I was in it for the excitement, or for lukewarm workaday epiphanies. I am not here to worry about such pleasantries. I apologize if that makes me seem hyper-solemn. People say I am too intense, that I am too profound, in any case, they end up telling me I am apparently all the things that they are seeking in life. Because that's what they do, they seek most actions based on this same set of criteria, they want intense experiences, they want the powerful, potent stuff. Yet when they see it in the flesh, or see someone experiencing such things in the flesh, they spit on him.
Humility is not some heroic individual action. I am not asking to be celebrated. Life is a celebration for me, but I don't need anything to feel the drunkenness that others need to drink and attend cocktail parties to feel, or to go to the movies.
Again, that's all fine and dandy. The one thing I can say about the kinds of individuals I have been talking about is that they seem to be having a genuine, jolly good time. So in that regard, I am genuinely happy for them. You are happy saying one thing and doing another. Unfortunately, and also that which makes me most sorrowful, is that I am unable to do that. I have done it before, and could not bear the pain of ever doing it again. But please do whatever makes you happiest, there can never be any real harm in that, if it is genuine joy you are experiencing.
But, alas, I am unable to chase after such joys. And for that stubbornness, I guess, and other like things, I apologize, but not to you. Not to myself either. I apologize, though it is not an apology. I merely try to keep that pockmark that I was born with always in the back of my mind somewhere. And when others ask about me, how I am doing and so forth, I try never to pretend that that pockmark is not right there staring me in the face like the inside of my own eyelids. But it isn't feeling sorry either. It is a state of asking for a kind of cosmic forgiveness, because everything else, myself and everything in the world forced me to surrender in absolute terms. It was the only way forward for me. I don't like it any more than anyone else would, but it does help heal a broken heart, I will tell you that much. And I was born heartbroken, that is the mark on my flesh, the spot, reminding me never to forget that One Thing.. What thing? You know, the Thing, there? My will, my only desire.. to belong to Someone..
Again, does that make me heroic? Unfortunately for you, no. I say for you because it's they that seem to be looking for heroism. I said at the beginning that I do not care for such things. There is nothing as heroic as the Universal Abstract Distributed Pattern Generator, or whatever you like to call her. Your pockmarked patterns are little in comparison, but great reminders. Like Post-It notes for the soul, to you, from The Great Patternless Void.
http://chumly.com/n/20ea035
That's fine by me. That's their prerogative, I guess, to do that and be that way. But when they come and tell me that I'm doing it wrong or whatnot, and criticize Me harshly, I fear that I find it all rather lukewarm and boring. Tepid, really. Room temperature IQ.
I'm not the one all excited about discovering patterns. These same people will look at my artistic production and start looking for patterns, the same patterns that they see everywhere. I must be telepathic, I guess, if I was able to put the patterns they see everywhere into my paintings, without ever having seen the patterns, or went looking for them. Yet they persist to deny what I say about my own artistic production, I, the author of my works.
I'm not all that bitter about it. What I am is sad, though, for I feel that I must be the only one on earth that was born imperfect and with flaws. Everyone else just seems so darn perfect. They are masterful pattern-watchers, and me, I only see one thing, The Great Patternless Void. And I embrace it. I ask it for guidance, to lead me down the right path, whatever path makes It happiest.
I don't get all excited about that either. I never said I was in it for the excitement, or for lukewarm workaday epiphanies. I am not here to worry about such pleasantries. I apologize if that makes me seem hyper-solemn. People say I am too intense, that I am too profound, in any case, they end up telling me I am apparently all the things that they are seeking in life. Because that's what they do, they seek most actions based on this same set of criteria, they want intense experiences, they want the powerful, potent stuff. Yet when they see it in the flesh, or see someone experiencing such things in the flesh, they spit on him.
Humility is not some heroic individual action. I am not asking to be celebrated. Life is a celebration for me, but I don't need anything to feel the drunkenness that others need to drink and attend cocktail parties to feel, or to go to the movies.
Again, that's all fine and dandy. The one thing I can say about the kinds of individuals I have been talking about is that they seem to be having a genuine, jolly good time. So in that regard, I am genuinely happy for them. You are happy saying one thing and doing another. Unfortunately, and also that which makes me most sorrowful, is that I am unable to do that. I have done it before, and could not bear the pain of ever doing it again. But please do whatever makes you happiest, there can never be any real harm in that, if it is genuine joy you are experiencing.
But, alas, I am unable to chase after such joys. And for that stubbornness, I guess, and other like things, I apologize, but not to you. Not to myself either. I apologize, though it is not an apology. I merely try to keep that pockmark that I was born with always in the back of my mind somewhere. And when others ask about me, how I am doing and so forth, I try never to pretend that that pockmark is not right there staring me in the face like the inside of my own eyelids. But it isn't feeling sorry either. It is a state of asking for a kind of cosmic forgiveness, because everything else, myself and everything in the world forced me to surrender in absolute terms. It was the only way forward for me. I don't like it any more than anyone else would, but it does help heal a broken heart, I will tell you that much. And I was born heartbroken, that is the mark on my flesh, the spot, reminding me never to forget that One Thing.. What thing? You know, the Thing, there? My will, my only desire.. to belong to Someone..
Again, does that make me heroic? Unfortunately for you, no. I say for you because it's they that seem to be looking for heroism. I said at the beginning that I do not care for such things. There is nothing as heroic as the Universal Abstract Distributed Pattern Generator, or whatever you like to call her. Your pockmarked patterns are little in comparison, but great reminders. Like Post-It notes for the soul, to you, from The Great Patternless Void.
http://chumly.com/n/20ea035
lundi 2 décembre 2013
Crunch Time
In field recording, I discovered the impact and influence I had in the recordings. I had to become invisible. To do that, and monitor the recording process properly, I also couldn't be listening. So I had to find a way to become like a first-person universal "sound technician" without actually being there.
I had to become powerless to influence the recording. It required much experimentation, much training. I couldn't move the microphone. A big truck would go by and the ground would shake beneath me. Sometimes I had to move to avoid being hit by a bus. Sometimes someone stopped me and asked me what I was doing.
I couldn't say anything or I would suddenly be part of the recording. Sometimes people are so insistent that I have to stop recording to tell them I was recording and they just interrupted the process. I am always recording. I had to invent ways to keep recording when I couldn't use the sound recorder. So I took field notes too, to make up for lost time.
Remember, I was doing this before you could easily obtain proper equipment to do this. It was easier to get a hold of the proper equipment to do field recordings in the 1960s and 1970s, funny enough. But I was a teenage boy with very few resources. But I wanted to do field recordings of everything, the natural world, urban centers, and so forth. And I did it, and kept doing it for 20 years now, give or take.
The difference now is that I use a GPS, I have 4 digital audio recorders (portable media devices), have access to 8 or so digital cameras should I need them. I use index cards, notebooks of every shape and size. But I can't use computers or tablets or mobile phones in the field, really. There's no app for what I do. At least not yet.
That's who I have been and what I have become. I am the mobile recording studio, always in the field. I have become a field artist. And now it's Crunch Time.
http://chumly.com/n/20e03a7
I had to become powerless to influence the recording. It required much experimentation, much training. I couldn't move the microphone. A big truck would go by and the ground would shake beneath me. Sometimes I had to move to avoid being hit by a bus. Sometimes someone stopped me and asked me what I was doing.
I couldn't say anything or I would suddenly be part of the recording. Sometimes people are so insistent that I have to stop recording to tell them I was recording and they just interrupted the process. I am always recording. I had to invent ways to keep recording when I couldn't use the sound recorder. So I took field notes too, to make up for lost time.
Remember, I was doing this before you could easily obtain proper equipment to do this. It was easier to get a hold of the proper equipment to do field recordings in the 1960s and 1970s, funny enough. But I was a teenage boy with very few resources. But I wanted to do field recordings of everything, the natural world, urban centers, and so forth. And I did it, and kept doing it for 20 years now, give or take.
The difference now is that I use a GPS, I have 4 digital audio recorders (portable media devices), have access to 8 or so digital cameras should I need them. I use index cards, notebooks of every shape and size. But I can't use computers or tablets or mobile phones in the field, really. There's no app for what I do. At least not yet.
That's who I have been and what I have become. I am the mobile recording studio, always in the field. I have become a field artist. And now it's Crunch Time.
http://chumly.com/n/20e03a7
dimanche 1 décembre 2013
No, But Seriously - Part II
The previous post relates to a few things. The trick is not remembering in and of itself. Think of actual Archives in general, whether they are for academic, business (for profit), government, non-profit, and other purposes. In an academic institution, or say a research laboratory, or even a Science Museum, there's no use in preserving the things in and of themselves, i.e. there is no intrinsic value, if you will, to just storing something, whether it is experimental data or a scientific instrument used in a research process. There has to be some other value, at least to me that's what makes it all worthwhile. What I am finding increasingly important is the idea of a) all the material that is being lost forever, but also b) how rich a treasure archives are specifically of scientific research, laboratory work, experimental data, findings, and so on.
Example. It's not enough that someone made some amazing discovery. It's not enough to have a record of how they went about discovering it. If they took samples, you ideally want to still have access to the samples and so forth (I am simplifying things for brevity). This is true of inventions too, which is why we have a patent system. The true impetus, rationale for such a system is for the enrichment of all, right? The patent records give us the ability to a) know what abstract knowledge came before so we can properly add to it or invent new abstract knowledge and b) it's also great for a host of other things, like maintaining the quality or integrity of something, or its authenticity, if you will, as in, "Is that how those chairs were made? What made IKEA designs so x, y, and z? Are these real IKEA chairs, how can I verify that?"
It's much more complicated than that obviously, but the point is that there are treasures in there waiting to be found which might not be where you might think to look. A lot of the technology that came just before the official standards in information technology, communication technology and so forth, the digital computer, a.k.a. The Information Age, i.e. before the transistor and the use of silicon and so forth, that technology was abandoned for obvious reasons. What is forgotten though is that often the shortcomings that say vacuum tubes had may no longer exist. Whatever constraints existed that made people switch to transistors, that made the abandoned solution suboptimal, maybe due to some future innovation, that constraint is no longer true. That opens up the possibility of using vacuum tubes again, perhaps for a whole host of yet undiscovered purposes. Just a simple example.
Just as many minds are better than one, i.e. the old wisdom of the crowd idea where a group of people guessing how many jelly-beans there are in a jar of jelly-beans can collectively come to a much better approximation than any single person will tend to come to - because processing can often scale that way, I guess - better preserved archives and more people looking through them is also optimizing, especially looking at the record of old inventions and otherwise many of the traces or paths, trails that led us to the Present Moment, etc. One should perhaps also take a closer look at abandoned or discarded inventions, ideas, etc., and the reasons for their ending up in the historical trash-pile. In other words, you never know what you might find in a pile of garbage. I call that something that was Kierke-disregarded, a.k.a. fell prey to Kierkegaardian disregard, true crypto-kierkegaardian pseudonymity where Lost was just another name for Found.
Discoveries seem to work that way. I see discovery as the discovery of Artifacts in the most general sense of the term. Artifacts are always unique. The artifact isn't just the thing sitting in the archive, at least not when treating of these kinds of archives, with experimental data, scientific research, etc. The artifact isn't just the thing being observed or studied either. The artifacts are also the things that went wrong with the equipment, the things that interfered with the research programme itself, all the above and more. There were artifacts that interfered with the scientist's work, artifacts in their own minds, in their own perception of the world, and by implication, with their own perceptions of themselves observing themselves using scientific instruments to study various phenomena.
We're at the point now where the resolution is incredibly good, amongst other things, and we should be going back to check every single piece of knowledge that humans ever put to clay or paper or to archives and catalogues and databases and so forth. Think of it in terms of the Bitcoin protocol and its blockchain. The integrity of the blockchain, as public ledger or register, is all-important in Bitcoin if we want it to work properly. Same thing goes for the integrity of information or data assets, structures, types, the integrity of the data models themselves.
I often say that the age of narratives is over. This is not a story, Experience is not a story, Existence is not a story. There can be no systematic theory of this type of thing. It is distributed, it has countless concurrent processes, it is adaptive, non-linear and dynamic, what more do you want me to say? This is Not the Narrative You Are Looking For. In the meantime, you missed out on the most beautiful thing of all, the thing you weren't paying attention to when you were paying attention to the thing you were paying attention to, i.e. you were paying attention to the trajectory, the voyage, the exploration, a.k.a. Story, and not the individual tiles that make up the micro-mosaic of episodes. You were looking at the pattern(s) and the process(es) and trying to see how they fit together to form a Big Picture, you were not paying attention to the actual artifacts. For me personally, the real artifact, the most important artifact of all, in fact the ONLY Artifact that there truly is, is => **The Interference Fringe Pattern**! That will always be where all the action is for me, and that's what is being documented and kept in my personal archives: The catalogue, the database of such high-order side effects, one by one, plucked from Experience, documented, abstract containers of the very quintessence of everything that is or could possibly be.
The problem with this is that it may take a while. Also it's important to realize that you simply can't compose a protocol that will make it work. You can't control it. You can't reduce uncertainty. There will always be interference and noise, data loss, corruption, etc. You can't shape it to make it more resilient. Do you see where I am going with this? You basically can't alter the physical laws of the universe. Don't even bother trying.
Now jump back to me reading Henry Petroski's book about failure and then breaking my leg, spending 3 months in the hospital, having to learn to walk again in a place where I just lost half my most valuable personal possession of all, my personal Archive going back 30+ years. If you got a group of people and tried to think of what the perfect torture mechanism would be for me at that precise moment in time, you could never have come up with something as profoundly torturing as that. I couldn't even think of it myself. I actually accidentally slipped on black ice and broke my leg. Note to Self: St-Paul didn't throw himself off the horse and experience metanoic conversion, he fell off the horse.
So, the only thing you can do is build on what fails most beautifully: Data loss, noise, corruption, corrosion, fractures, cracks, fragmentation, and so on and so forth. But if you focus on what I call the beautiful signals, like how beautiful the Rhythms of the Brain book is by Gyorgy Buzsaki, you're missing the whole point. You're missing what's right there in front of you that can never be attributed to the book itself, since your Experience hadn't even happened yet when the book was already bound up and stocked on the shelves in the Amazon super-warehouse. So the signal: "I recommend this Book," is the wrong signal, because whoever recommended I read Petroski almost cost me my life. Except the only way I would ever have found that book was if for the last 20+ years I had been implementing and optimizing the perfect search strategy for finding rare finds in old book-stores and through piles of books libraries throw away that you can purchase for 1$ a pound, or garage sales, etc. I am a collector of rare books, but not books with monetary value. The best book is the one that doesn't exist, the singular book that is out of print and that almost no one even has any record that it exists. The best book is the book that hasn't been written yet and that perhaps will never be written, or that will be written but lost forever to History. Those are always the best things in life, that which was most necessary, and also necessarily must have come to pass. This has always been my interpretation of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is the Vanity of Vanities. Better to stare disinterestedly at the moving pictures of the fringe effects as they get stuffed into the catalogue. Call it: A Season in The Life of a Manual, Characters in Search of The Lost Anti-Logbook. Remember, Interference, too, Can Be Beautiful. :)
http://chumly.com/n/20d9919
Example. It's not enough that someone made some amazing discovery. It's not enough to have a record of how they went about discovering it. If they took samples, you ideally want to still have access to the samples and so forth (I am simplifying things for brevity). This is true of inventions too, which is why we have a patent system. The true impetus, rationale for such a system is for the enrichment of all, right? The patent records give us the ability to a) know what abstract knowledge came before so we can properly add to it or invent new abstract knowledge and b) it's also great for a host of other things, like maintaining the quality or integrity of something, or its authenticity, if you will, as in, "Is that how those chairs were made? What made IKEA designs so x, y, and z? Are these real IKEA chairs, how can I verify that?"
It's much more complicated than that obviously, but the point is that there are treasures in there waiting to be found which might not be where you might think to look. A lot of the technology that came just before the official standards in information technology, communication technology and so forth, the digital computer, a.k.a. The Information Age, i.e. before the transistor and the use of silicon and so forth, that technology was abandoned for obvious reasons. What is forgotten though is that often the shortcomings that say vacuum tubes had may no longer exist. Whatever constraints existed that made people switch to transistors, that made the abandoned solution suboptimal, maybe due to some future innovation, that constraint is no longer true. That opens up the possibility of using vacuum tubes again, perhaps for a whole host of yet undiscovered purposes. Just a simple example.
Just as many minds are better than one, i.e. the old wisdom of the crowd idea where a group of people guessing how many jelly-beans there are in a jar of jelly-beans can collectively come to a much better approximation than any single person will tend to come to - because processing can often scale that way, I guess - better preserved archives and more people looking through them is also optimizing, especially looking at the record of old inventions and otherwise many of the traces or paths, trails that led us to the Present Moment, etc. One should perhaps also take a closer look at abandoned or discarded inventions, ideas, etc., and the reasons for their ending up in the historical trash-pile. In other words, you never know what you might find in a pile of garbage. I call that something that was Kierke-disregarded, a.k.a. fell prey to Kierkegaardian disregard, true crypto-kierkegaardian pseudonymity where Lost was just another name for Found.
Discoveries seem to work that way. I see discovery as the discovery of Artifacts in the most general sense of the term. Artifacts are always unique. The artifact isn't just the thing sitting in the archive, at least not when treating of these kinds of archives, with experimental data, scientific research, etc. The artifact isn't just the thing being observed or studied either. The artifacts are also the things that went wrong with the equipment, the things that interfered with the research programme itself, all the above and more. There were artifacts that interfered with the scientist's work, artifacts in their own minds, in their own perception of the world, and by implication, with their own perceptions of themselves observing themselves using scientific instruments to study various phenomena.
We're at the point now where the resolution is incredibly good, amongst other things, and we should be going back to check every single piece of knowledge that humans ever put to clay or paper or to archives and catalogues and databases and so forth. Think of it in terms of the Bitcoin protocol and its blockchain. The integrity of the blockchain, as public ledger or register, is all-important in Bitcoin if we want it to work properly. Same thing goes for the integrity of information or data assets, structures, types, the integrity of the data models themselves.
I often say that the age of narratives is over. This is not a story, Experience is not a story, Existence is not a story. There can be no systematic theory of this type of thing. It is distributed, it has countless concurrent processes, it is adaptive, non-linear and dynamic, what more do you want me to say? This is Not the Narrative You Are Looking For. In the meantime, you missed out on the most beautiful thing of all, the thing you weren't paying attention to when you were paying attention to the thing you were paying attention to, i.e. you were paying attention to the trajectory, the voyage, the exploration, a.k.a. Story, and not the individual tiles that make up the micro-mosaic of episodes. You were looking at the pattern(s) and the process(es) and trying to see how they fit together to form a Big Picture, you were not paying attention to the actual artifacts. For me personally, the real artifact, the most important artifact of all, in fact the ONLY Artifact that there truly is, is => **The Interference Fringe Pattern**! That will always be where all the action is for me, and that's what is being documented and kept in my personal archives: The catalogue, the database of such high-order side effects, one by one, plucked from Experience, documented, abstract containers of the very quintessence of everything that is or could possibly be.
The problem with this is that it may take a while. Also it's important to realize that you simply can't compose a protocol that will make it work. You can't control it. You can't reduce uncertainty. There will always be interference and noise, data loss, corruption, etc. You can't shape it to make it more resilient. Do you see where I am going with this? You basically can't alter the physical laws of the universe. Don't even bother trying.
Now jump back to me reading Henry Petroski's book about failure and then breaking my leg, spending 3 months in the hospital, having to learn to walk again in a place where I just lost half my most valuable personal possession of all, my personal Archive going back 30+ years. If you got a group of people and tried to think of what the perfect torture mechanism would be for me at that precise moment in time, you could never have come up with something as profoundly torturing as that. I couldn't even think of it myself. I actually accidentally slipped on black ice and broke my leg. Note to Self: St-Paul didn't throw himself off the horse and experience metanoic conversion, he fell off the horse.
So, the only thing you can do is build on what fails most beautifully: Data loss, noise, corruption, corrosion, fractures, cracks, fragmentation, and so on and so forth. But if you focus on what I call the beautiful signals, like how beautiful the Rhythms of the Brain book is by Gyorgy Buzsaki, you're missing the whole point. You're missing what's right there in front of you that can never be attributed to the book itself, since your Experience hadn't even happened yet when the book was already bound up and stocked on the shelves in the Amazon super-warehouse. So the signal: "I recommend this Book," is the wrong signal, because whoever recommended I read Petroski almost cost me my life. Except the only way I would ever have found that book was if for the last 20+ years I had been implementing and optimizing the perfect search strategy for finding rare finds in old book-stores and through piles of books libraries throw away that you can purchase for 1$ a pound, or garage sales, etc. I am a collector of rare books, but not books with monetary value. The best book is the one that doesn't exist, the singular book that is out of print and that almost no one even has any record that it exists. The best book is the book that hasn't been written yet and that perhaps will never be written, or that will be written but lost forever to History. Those are always the best things in life, that which was most necessary, and also necessarily must have come to pass. This has always been my interpretation of Ecclesiastes in the Bible. It is the Vanity of Vanities. Better to stare disinterestedly at the moving pictures of the fringe effects as they get stuffed into the catalogue. Call it: A Season in The Life of a Manual, Characters in Search of The Lost Anti-Logbook. Remember, Interference, too, Can Be Beautiful. :)
http://chumly.com/n/20d9919
No, But Seriously - Part I
In March, 2011, when I broke my leg (severely!), I had just finished reading Henry Petroski's book To Engineer is Human: The Role of Failure in Successful Design (1985). It was a fabulous read, one of those books that is so good you want to keep it all to yourself and not tell anyone about its existence. Having to suffer trauma and then re-learn how to walk again could not have been preceded by better reading material.
On a similar note, while I was in the hospital, I orchestrated a physical move (of physical address). What do you suspect awaited me the day I got out of the hospital and arrived at my new abode? Flooding in the basement had destroyed half of my personal archives, half of everything, half my books, etc., and Petroski's books happened to be one of the priceless books in my collection that was so damaged I had to physically throw it into the garbage can.
That's okay. It allowed me to go full circle with Petroski analysis of failure. What was lost in what I call the Archives was unbelievably tragic, hundreds of pages of manuscripts typed by hand on old type-writers, 30-40 notebooks tracking the exact pattern of my thoughts over the course of 20+ years. I literally had to start back from the very beginning, but to me it has not only become normal, it has become second-nature, and even amusing at times.
That's because prior to the accident, I was already 2 years into doing the same thing, engaged in the arduous and systematic process of putting things back together after tragic loss, terrible traumatic accidents, and so forth. What's amusing in is that before the accident I was already engaged in a similar reconstruction process, and before that also, and so on and so forth.
That pattern goes back to shortly after I was born, when I was mauled in the face by a small dog. Having to continuously recreate myself and my experience after something or something hits the RESET button is the only thing I have ever known. Something happened when the dog bit me in the head - which happened twice, separated by several months, give or take. Yes, two traumatic dog-mauling experiences in as many months at around the time that a child really starts forming long-term memories, and at least one concussion-like experience before that, of falling down a flight of stairs and landing on my face on a concrete basement floor. But, to do justice to the experience and to what actually happened, it turns out that I was miraculously not all that injured in each of the cases mentioned, just as losing all that material in my personal archives and breaking my leg was not actually all that tragic. What is truly tragic in life, that's another story for another time.
The thing is, I believe that all of this has given my memory super-powers, forced to constantly be engaged in a massive effort of reconstruction. I remember my entire existence up to the very first memory I ever formed in my mind. The loss of my ability to move, the loss of chunks of my Archives and so forth, the notebooks especially, forced me to realize that **this is the Real Archive**! If there is an archive, or if there is to be an Archive I might ever want to preserve, then this is it, the record of my Experience, and not the physical materials I've accumulated. I remember everything. But as I will point out in the next article, remembering is only half the battle. In and of itself, remembering or storing something technically has no intrinsic value, at least not in and of itself as we say, a.k.a. the value is not to be found in remembering per se. The value, if there is on, is in the Experience and the Experiencing, which is always fleeting and can never be fully reconstructed in the first place. I call it Vanitas; Or, Memento Mori, the reminder of death. Again, another story for another time.
http://chumly.com/n/20d91e2
On a similar note, while I was in the hospital, I orchestrated a physical move (of physical address). What do you suspect awaited me the day I got out of the hospital and arrived at my new abode? Flooding in the basement had destroyed half of my personal archives, half of everything, half my books, etc., and Petroski's books happened to be one of the priceless books in my collection that was so damaged I had to physically throw it into the garbage can.
That's okay. It allowed me to go full circle with Petroski analysis of failure. What was lost in what I call the Archives was unbelievably tragic, hundreds of pages of manuscripts typed by hand on old type-writers, 30-40 notebooks tracking the exact pattern of my thoughts over the course of 20+ years. I literally had to start back from the very beginning, but to me it has not only become normal, it has become second-nature, and even amusing at times.
That's because prior to the accident, I was already 2 years into doing the same thing, engaged in the arduous and systematic process of putting things back together after tragic loss, terrible traumatic accidents, and so forth. What's amusing in is that before the accident I was already engaged in a similar reconstruction process, and before that also, and so on and so forth.
That pattern goes back to shortly after I was born, when I was mauled in the face by a small dog. Having to continuously recreate myself and my experience after something or something hits the RESET button is the only thing I have ever known. Something happened when the dog bit me in the head - which happened twice, separated by several months, give or take. Yes, two traumatic dog-mauling experiences in as many months at around the time that a child really starts forming long-term memories, and at least one concussion-like experience before that, of falling down a flight of stairs and landing on my face on a concrete basement floor. But, to do justice to the experience and to what actually happened, it turns out that I was miraculously not all that injured in each of the cases mentioned, just as losing all that material in my personal archives and breaking my leg was not actually all that tragic. What is truly tragic in life, that's another story for another time.
The thing is, I believe that all of this has given my memory super-powers, forced to constantly be engaged in a massive effort of reconstruction. I remember my entire existence up to the very first memory I ever formed in my mind. The loss of my ability to move, the loss of chunks of my Archives and so forth, the notebooks especially, forced me to realize that **this is the Real Archive**! If there is an archive, or if there is to be an Archive I might ever want to preserve, then this is it, the record of my Experience, and not the physical materials I've accumulated. I remember everything. But as I will point out in the next article, remembering is only half the battle. In and of itself, remembering or storing something technically has no intrinsic value, at least not in and of itself as we say, a.k.a. the value is not to be found in remembering per se. The value, if there is on, is in the Experience and the Experiencing, which is always fleeting and can never be fully reconstructed in the first place. I call it Vanitas; Or, Memento Mori, the reminder of death. Again, another story for another time.
http://chumly.com/n/20d91e2
An Encounter with Antisynthesis - First Draft
Everywhere I go, I see is a huge lack of Inhibition. The lack of inhibition is the cause of many problems, too many to count. It causes grave indignities. Another name for one type of Inhibition or inhibitory pattern that I came up with - A.G. All Rights Reserved (c) 2013 - is the Antisignal. It isn't noise reduction or active noise control. That would be the application of antinoise to reduce noise. It isn't antiphase either. It is antisignal, what you might call active signal control. Beautiful Signals was a term designed to be outrageously pejorative: The focus on beautiful signals is an example of the problem in question, the lack of inhibition, an almost complete lack of fundamental understanding of all things inhibitory. What you get is too much signal. No noise, just signal.
How do you manage **too much signal**? You either add noise, but not antinoise, in this case it would be a noise signal, such as white Gaussian noise. Understandably, there are many disciplines and practises which involve Antisignals and antisignal patterns which form part of what I have come to call Signal Science, though I am beginning to expand on this basis and currently calling it a form of Antisynthesis. Yet, though people use my truly original ideas without care or concern, without inhibition or attribution, and even profit from them, all too often I'm still treated as a bumbling idiot, no one showing all that much interest in my artistic production, and I am more often than not laughed at as an independent researcher and scholar. A lifetime of hard work and insane discipline has become just another angle in someone else's Picture.
Well, folks, these are hard times I think for everyone. So let's up the ante. I can prove that I am the authentic and independent author of these truly original ideas for a simple reason: I spent years verifying to make sure every last speck of dust in my Ideas Bank did not already exist, was not already invented by someone else before me. What I did use that was created by others has all been meticulously documented. That's the simple thing that allows me to see my own signature when it is being passed around in the world and did not originate from me, its sole author, the only one authorized to use his Signature: No one has that documentation. You do not even know how the documentation process works, how the Archives are being built, and what the long-term Succession Strategy is. You can't recreate a single of these uniquely, independently-arrived-at, truly original ideas. Only one author exists who is capable of producing such things. I could write you a 1000-page paper on how I came up with the Antisignal and you still wouldn't get it.
A lot of that is accidental, incidental. You are most likely using an old out-dated technological vision. That's one reason. Or, maybe you are an amateur, or not an inventor of original ideas, perhaps you are even a free-rider. I assure you that the protocol, if we can call it that, was designed to be fail-proof. Nassim Nicholas Taleb might say that it was founded on a principle of Antifragility. It is a thing that gains from disorder, as he famously says in the title of his book. The more the indignities go on with respect to my work, the more it succeeds. It was founded on the mechanics of fracture, failure, crack propagation and so forth. It was based on a vision of the way History looks on paper. It was learned through arduous training of continuously losing everything, of having my work defaced, stolen, lost, destroyed, on purpose and from natural disaster.
Note: I am not the author of the word itself, Anti-signal, but of the new original concept I have assigned to it for the purposes of my work as an artist and independent researcher. The actual authors of the term itself were those working in Inflammatory myopathy and targeting signal recognition particles (SRP), in particular the Anti-signal recognition particle antibodies or anti-SRP. I'm just the first ambient experimental sound designer to use it in the unique way that I am using it which no one could ever reproduce. I have no attachment to the term itself. Once people start using Antisignal or Beautiful Signal or any of these other terms in the way that I have used them, I will be introducing new terms. Antisignal only became necessary because Antiface, which I had been previously using, was re-appropriated by individuals engaged in the Selfie movement, to denote a Selfie where there is no Face present in the picture, which was never what Antiface was even remotely about.
I was forced to invent a new term, Antiselfie, though if I am not mistaken, it had already been used. But I now own the Twitter accounts for both @antisignal and @antiselfie, so there you have it. I'm still in business. **Antisynthesis* is a tough one because it already exists in some measure, just not in the way that I currently am using it. In my case, it stems from 20 years of practising computer-assisted sound design, particularly from a method of sound synthesis called additive synthesis, which has always been my shtick. Again, I'm the only person on earth who can do antisynthesis in this way, so don't even try it.
The question I keep asking myself, though, is why do people work so hard just to copy others? They even justify this practise of copying without inhibition by saying that that is in fact what Art itself is and has always been. I'm telling you that it's not. Now everyone wants to be an Artist and they aren't listening to the warnings and cautionary tales coming from the established professional artists themselves. You gain nothing from copying others. You actually are helping destroy the market, the business, the industry. In fact, it has been argued that the worst thing for an artist to do is to copy themselves. So artists don't even copy themselves, why would you copy the work of other artists? It's not like posting this on-line is going to do anything to secure the copyright on my material, nor will it help pay the lawyer fees I would need to uphold my rights. If it wasn't for the fact, come to think of it, that this is being posted on AlexGagnon.com... I forgot about that! I do own the rights after all! It took 20+ years of arduous, pain-staking research and work, but I'll be darned, I finally found a way to secure my own authenticity and genuineness! Thank you! All I ever wanted was the freedom to be myself and be myself fully and truly, genuinely me. Thank you for your lack of inhibition, you may have just made me famous! I can hear the Nobel people calling in the distance.... ;-)
Alex Gagnon (c) 2013. All Rights Reserved.
http://chumly.com/n/20d84ac
How do you manage **too much signal**? You either add noise, but not antinoise, in this case it would be a noise signal, such as white Gaussian noise. Understandably, there are many disciplines and practises which involve Antisignals and antisignal patterns which form part of what I have come to call Signal Science, though I am beginning to expand on this basis and currently calling it a form of Antisynthesis. Yet, though people use my truly original ideas without care or concern, without inhibition or attribution, and even profit from them, all too often I'm still treated as a bumbling idiot, no one showing all that much interest in my artistic production, and I am more often than not laughed at as an independent researcher and scholar. A lifetime of hard work and insane discipline has become just another angle in someone else's Picture.
Well, folks, these are hard times I think for everyone. So let's up the ante. I can prove that I am the authentic and independent author of these truly original ideas for a simple reason: I spent years verifying to make sure every last speck of dust in my Ideas Bank did not already exist, was not already invented by someone else before me. What I did use that was created by others has all been meticulously documented. That's the simple thing that allows me to see my own signature when it is being passed around in the world and did not originate from me, its sole author, the only one authorized to use his Signature: No one has that documentation. You do not even know how the documentation process works, how the Archives are being built, and what the long-term Succession Strategy is. You can't recreate a single of these uniquely, independently-arrived-at, truly original ideas. Only one author exists who is capable of producing such things. I could write you a 1000-page paper on how I came up with the Antisignal and you still wouldn't get it.
A lot of that is accidental, incidental. You are most likely using an old out-dated technological vision. That's one reason. Or, maybe you are an amateur, or not an inventor of original ideas, perhaps you are even a free-rider. I assure you that the protocol, if we can call it that, was designed to be fail-proof. Nassim Nicholas Taleb might say that it was founded on a principle of Antifragility. It is a thing that gains from disorder, as he famously says in the title of his book. The more the indignities go on with respect to my work, the more it succeeds. It was founded on the mechanics of fracture, failure, crack propagation and so forth. It was based on a vision of the way History looks on paper. It was learned through arduous training of continuously losing everything, of having my work defaced, stolen, lost, destroyed, on purpose and from natural disaster.
Note: I am not the author of the word itself, Anti-signal, but of the new original concept I have assigned to it for the purposes of my work as an artist and independent researcher. The actual authors of the term itself were those working in Inflammatory myopathy and targeting signal recognition particles (SRP), in particular the Anti-signal recognition particle antibodies or anti-SRP. I'm just the first ambient experimental sound designer to use it in the unique way that I am using it which no one could ever reproduce. I have no attachment to the term itself. Once people start using Antisignal or Beautiful Signal or any of these other terms in the way that I have used them, I will be introducing new terms. Antisignal only became necessary because Antiface, which I had been previously using, was re-appropriated by individuals engaged in the Selfie movement, to denote a Selfie where there is no Face present in the picture, which was never what Antiface was even remotely about.
I was forced to invent a new term, Antiselfie, though if I am not mistaken, it had already been used. But I now own the Twitter accounts for both @antisignal and @antiselfie, so there you have it. I'm still in business. **Antisynthesis* is a tough one because it already exists in some measure, just not in the way that I currently am using it. In my case, it stems from 20 years of practising computer-assisted sound design, particularly from a method of sound synthesis called additive synthesis, which has always been my shtick. Again, I'm the only person on earth who can do antisynthesis in this way, so don't even try it.
The question I keep asking myself, though, is why do people work so hard just to copy others? They even justify this practise of copying without inhibition by saying that that is in fact what Art itself is and has always been. I'm telling you that it's not. Now everyone wants to be an Artist and they aren't listening to the warnings and cautionary tales coming from the established professional artists themselves. You gain nothing from copying others. You actually are helping destroy the market, the business, the industry. In fact, it has been argued that the worst thing for an artist to do is to copy themselves. So artists don't even copy themselves, why would you copy the work of other artists? It's not like posting this on-line is going to do anything to secure the copyright on my material, nor will it help pay the lawyer fees I would need to uphold my rights. If it wasn't for the fact, come to think of it, that this is being posted on AlexGagnon.com... I forgot about that! I do own the rights after all! It took 20+ years of arduous, pain-staking research and work, but I'll be darned, I finally found a way to secure my own authenticity and genuineness! Thank you! All I ever wanted was the freedom to be myself and be myself fully and truly, genuinely me. Thank you for your lack of inhibition, you may have just made me famous! I can hear the Nobel people calling in the distance.... ;-)
Alex Gagnon (c) 2013. All Rights Reserved.
http://chumly.com/n/20d84ac
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