September 2007

"Bliplock"

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"Bliplock" [mp3 removed]

This is piece started as some snippets of Dutch electronic music from the '60s--a Netherlands site called Humanworkshop made them into six loops a bar or two in length each and offered them for download. For this piece I timestretched and edited them further (in some cases into unrecognizability using onboard softsampler FX) and then layered them into counterpoint and harmony with each other to make a "classical" piece. The only thing added are some synthesized drum hits because I thought it needed some beats. This is a remix, fair use blah blah.

Cherryh vs Niven & Pournelle

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On the Digital Media Tree blog I quoted BruceB's reconsideration of the Niven & Pournelle science fiction novel The Mote in God's Eye in light of the "9/12 mentality" of Glenn Reynolds and other techno-class warmongers:

What most troubles me now is the glibness of it, the emphasis on the cleverness of the humans who see through the Motie deceptions, since this looms even larger than the courage of some humans who must die for the sake of plot developments. And it’s completely callous about the wisdom and morality of just standing by and watching an entire society collapse into barbarism - since it’s not the full-blown genocide some authorities had thought be necessary, it’s an improvement, and it seems like since it’s not genocide, it’s A-OK. Other people’s stuff is there to be exciting and interesting props, but it and its owners can be shoved around and broken up as need be, and what really matters (as presented in Mote) is the coolness of the humans who’ll do the pushing and breaking.

Just finished Serpent's Reach by C. J. Cherryh (yeah, yeah, prolific paperback author but there are gems in the canon--this one's from 1980) and found it dealt with Mote-like themes in a much less chauvinistic way (mild spoilers):

1. The premise is a quarantined star system where aliens periodically go on destructive rampages, causing the complete collapse of organized society.

2. The difference is the humans aren't just worried observers trying to contain the menace. In Reach, human colonists entered the system pre-quarantine and have been living among the aliens for centuries. They are verboten to the rest of human space, along with the aliens, because they have developed a de facto symbiosis--not in terms of breeding but shared cultural traits. The Majat species is a hive organism split into four families and over the course of the book we learn how insect-like and clanlike the humans have become living in close proximity to them.

3. This human-alien bond that develops between the descendants of the colonists and the Majat is a working partnership, resulting in biotech and other goods that are traded all over human space, outside the quarantine zone.

4. So the hive worlds thrive and the monstrosity of human-alien "cultural miscegenation" continues. Unlike Niven and Pournelle, who approach the Moties as outsiders and a mere problem for the dashing "Americans" to solve, Cherryh's perspective is that the "Americans" are outsiders--she even calls the people from human space that, Outsiders--as she tackles the bigger topic of what happens to former "Americans" who have settled down and become as intermingled with another culture as, say, Christians and Muslims intermingled in pre-war Bosnia or Iraq.

5. The POV of the book is that of a human aristocrat denizen of the quarantined zone who communes with the hives and is long-lived thanks to that biotech. She and her fellow aristocrats have adopted hivelike, eusocial characteristics without ever openly acknowledging it. For one thing, they have taken the ova of of would-be colonists sent to the hive worlds from human space (pre-quarantine but after their own arrival) and bred Betas, who are normal-lived test-tube humans psychologically conditioned to serve the aristocrats. The Betas in turn have bred "azi," who are clones and comprise yet another, lower caste of servitude.

6. Cherryh describes this state of affairs non-judgmentally. She assumes that colonization means change and that both good and bad come from this (this is true of the other books of hers I've read--Downbelow Station and Cyteen). She is more interested in mapping the psycho-geography of this change than writing disguised polemics about "appeasement" or "the rights of the unborn." She devotes much ink to the emotional connections that develop between aristocrats and aliens, or between aristocrats and their serfs and sub-serfs. And from that a morality is mapped out for a set of circumstances completely different from ours. So, file it under "post human studies" or "the Cyborg."

7. One thing should be clear--the aliens are not just so-called second or third world peoples in disguise. They are truly alien. Cherry is exploring the unknown here--how will humans change in the face of circumstances not currently even imaginable. It would be like Lovecraft actually writing about the fish men in The Shadow Over Innsmouth instead of just shrieking in horror at them.

8. Ultimately, for all its strangeness, Cherryh's yarn is richer, more complex, more satisfying, and more real than Niven & Pournelle's boys' adventure story.

MOMA and The Flat World

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Paddy Johnson is reviewing MOMA's "Automatic Update" show, which ended a couple of weeks ago--Part One of her piece appears today. I noticed that curator Barbara London used Thomas Friedman's "flat world" metaphor in describing the show, so I submitted the following as a comment to Paddy's post. It's Matt Taibbi in the NY Press discussing Friedman's book The World Is Flat:

The book's genesis is a conversation Friedman has with Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys. Nilekani casually mutters to Friedman: "Tom, the playing field is being leveled." To you and me, an innocent throwaway phrase—the level playing field being, after all, one of the most oft-repeated stock ideas in the history of human interaction. Not to Friedman. Ten minutes after his talk with Nilekani, he is pitching a tent in his company van on the road back from the Infosys campus in Bangalore:

"As I left the Infosys campus that evening along the road back to Bangalore, I kept chewing on that phrase: 'The playing field is being leveled.'

"What Nandan is saying, I thought, is that the playing field is being flattened... Flattened? Flattened? My God, he's telling me the world is flat!"

This is like three pages into the book, and already the premise is totally fucked. Nilekani said level, not flat. The two concepts are completely different. Level is a qualitative idea that implies equality and competitive balance; flat is a physical, geographic concept that Friedman, remember, is openly contrasting—ironically, as it were—with Columbus's discovery that the world is round.

Except for one thing. The significance of Columbus's discovery was that on a round earth, humanity is more interconnected than on a flat one. On a round earth, the two most distant points are closer together than they are on a flat earth. But Friedman is going to spend the next 470 pages turning the "flat world" into a metaphor for global interconnectedness. Furthermore, he is specifically going to use the word round to describe the old, geographically isolated, unconnected world.

"'Let me... share with you some of the encounters that led me to conclude that the world is no longer round," he says. He will literally travel backward in time, against the current of human knowledge.

MOMA's version of the Flat Earth was an alternative, "steampunk" universe where artists described the coming age of cyber-connectedness using video art and other pre-Internet media. (Apparently the Net is not allowed in museum galleries.)

More on surf clubs, Sleepover

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A late thought to the thread over at Paddy's about surf clubs and the Great Internet Sleepover:

Something I said above I'd like to explain further:

"I should clarify that the context of Marisa’s and my exchange was a question on my blog about collaboration. Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split. And I was questioning whether, in the tech art arena, that made art more bland because both team members had to understand it well enough to explain it to others."

The second sentence should probably read "Someone had asked about artist teams where different parts of a common task were split, say, between an artist and an engineer."

The context was XYZ art. Someone noted that a lot of this bland, by-the-numbers tech art was the fruit of teams, which were "often...a cover for one person getting someone else to do technical stuff." In reply I was conjecturing that in order to work together, the engineer had to dumb down the hardware or software theory to explain it to the artist and the artist had to dumb down the art theory to explain it to the engineer. The product they announced to the world was then doubly dumbed-down, hence XYZ art.

This would never happen with the surf blogs because it's not that type of collaboration. The surfers either (i) act as their own engineers or (ii) proudly have no skilz whatsover except roaming the internet and mashing up its by-products using off-the-shelf software.

(This comment reworded slightly from when I submitted it at Paddy's.)