October 2007

Notes for an intro I may or may not give at Galapagos tonight. (Either way it won't be this long and involved--I only have a minute or so to talk.)

Although this was billed as a performance it is actually a demo.
The "demo scene" emerged in European computer geek culture.
Programmers got together and set up monitors on folding tables and showed each other what they were working on.
Tonight I am demo-ing a CD of music (four songs dj-ed together into a continous mix) and a DVD of 15-20 animations.
The two will run simultaneously--the points of contact between them are fairly random.
Although I'm calling this a demo I'm not a programmer, but an artist using a home computer to make images and music.
The visuals are as "original" as the software allows--I try to use the simplest programs so it is clearer what is "mine."
Some of the images originated on the Internet but all of those have been manipulated or added to.
The music is all "mine"--i.e., it's all live synthesis written and performed by me and tracked down for CD, although the music-creation software programming and hardware wiring is a "default," that is, someone else's work.
All of this content (images and audio) has been published to the web on my blog(s).
Part of the reason I'm demo-ing it is to see how it "scales up" to big screen projection and a club-sized PA system.
I tried to pick work that was fairly transparent and iconic--that would read or sound clearly no matter what the environment.
We'll see if it works.

Just noticed that Carsten Nicolai is showing at Pace Wildenstein (see ArtCal Zine review).
I wrote about him for Very magazine in '00--that review has been online for a while. Looking forward to the show--sure it will be insanely rigorous.

Update: Saw the exhibit. Considerable mileage exists between the work I covered and what's at Pace. The street edge, such as it was, is missing--this was very uptown. The music component made the trip worthwhile; subtle almost to the point of inaudibility, the white noise hissing in the Irwin/Turrell-like "mist room" and the fried pacemaker pulses pinging between the bombastic mirrored concavities in Room 2 brought the slightly subverting influence of the ear to the inevitable eye-dominating museum style installations.

Open Left on why we'll probably be holding our nose and voting in November 2008:

If anyone has illusions about how horrific Clinton will be as a President, disabuse yourself now. Here's Clinton's 'Innovation Agenda'. Notice what's missing? That's right, net neutrality. And here's a tip as to what she's really planning.

Establish a national broadband strategy called Connect America

Clinton is citing a program called Connect Kentucky as a national model for expanding broadband penetration. Connect Kentucky, which is embraced by the telcos as a way of warding off net neutrality and a real internet policy, defines broadband as 256k, which is about 500 times slower than what's in Japan.

It's typical Clinton. Say you'll end the war, but with residual troops. Say you'll implement universal health care, but without talking about how you're going to get everyone to buy into it. Say you'll expand national broadband, but at a speed about five times as fast as dial-up and without net neutrality protections.

UPDATE: I should note that Clinton has been a supporter of net neutrality protections, and she may yet appoint an FCC that ensures net neutrality is enforced. I just don't think she will, because basing your broadband policies on Connect Kentucky is an indication that she isn't serious about dealing with the corruption in the system that actually led to the evisceration of net neutrality in the first place.