November 2007

Open letter to Paul Slocum:
What determines the tempo of individual loops on your sample-remixer? Or put another way, how is tempo detected?
You said the program looks for "interesting loop points"--what is interesting to your random generator? (This sounds skeptical but I'm just trying to grasp the methodology--I like the idea of self-designed art-making tools being almost an art in themselves.)
Also, what is the database that the sampler is using to look for loops?
Do you have a folder of contemporary Christian music that the program is searching?
Also, is it contemporary Christian rock? (I only watched enough of the Casting Crowns vid to see that they look like gentle metal dudes.)
Again, these aren't criticisms, just trying to understand the concept better, and thought it might be fun to have a little cross-blog discussion going. (While we still have this freedom and before the Internet turns into walled garden Facebook ghettos controlled by your local cable provider.)
Best, Tom

...at vertexList. Top photo: the projection on the rear wall is Paul B. Davis/Paper Rad's Video Compression Study II, interpolating Rihanna (I think), the Cranberries, and assorted '80s VHS ephemera. My "Stock Popcorn" GIF, based on a stock footage video of a rotating popcorn kernel found by Guthrie Lonergan, is in the foreground--from an "enlarged GIFs collection" vid I burned to DVD for the show. The bottom image and detail is a rather handsome work by Paul Slocum--the description reads "MINIMUM ATARI 2600 EMULATOR. This software emulates 2% of the functionality of the Atari 2600 game console. Supports 3 out of 151 instructions in the 6510 processor: INX, STX, and JMP. Supports 1 out of 58 TIA audio/video chip registers: COLUBK"

The Atari console is on the floor, connected to the left hand screen; a PC is connected to the screen on the right. I'm guessing the joke is that the console image is set at the same minimal level of information as the emulator--a kind of pre-emptive subtraction to avoid the usual XYZ reading of this kind of transformation.

Slocum adds (via email):

...I thought [the minimum emulator] needed to demonstrate some sort of verifiable output and use the simplest command subset to do so. I chose INX (increase the X register by one), STX (store the X value in a memory location), and JMP (like GOTO in BASIC, need this to keep it running in a loop).

So the program that both the emulator and Atari are running is made up of a long string of alternating INX and STX commands with a JMP at the end to make it loop. I probably spent more time designing the sequence* than I did writing the emulator.

At this level of minimalism in code and machine, I noticed that it reduces to a variation on the concept of [Steve Reich's] "It's Gonna Rain." Its visual complexity is due to mismatched phase. I may explore this further in future work...

*A .pdf showing the "Atari 2600 ROM Disassembler Output" is here.

One candidate stands up to Giuliani in the Republican debates and says the US's destructive policies abroad led to 9/11--it's not because "the terrorists hate us for our freedoms," the official loony story line. Millions appreciated his candor and have given him money as the sole conservative candidate not on defense industry payroll. Yes, we're talking about Ron Paul. Now considerable effort on both the right and the centrist left is going to marginalize Paul as a "nut." Justin Raimondo at antiwar.com examines the anti-Ron Paul movement, particularly posts by center-left blogger David Neiwert, who seems not to understand that the US has bigger problems than Ron Paul's candidacy. I would also add the ultra-verbose Open Left blogger Paul Rosenberg, who I believe tacitly supports a permanent U.S security state and endless military adventurism abroad with his Herculean efforts to prove that the "paleo" conservatives are a greater danger to us than Rudy and probably ultimately Hillary. Rosenberg says the paleos are isolationists who want to return us to a time that never existed, but so what? Being the world's cop clearly isn't working out--that part of the critique rings true. Rosenberg's effort to discredit the already discredited paleos seems like cloud cuckoo cerebration in the face of the rise of Thug No. 1--the neocon 9/11 profiteer who has promised to continue Bush's policies of preemptive, undeclared wars and the resulting curtailment of civil liberties here at home.

Neiwert at one point singled out this 1999 Raimondo column as an example of the paranoia of the paleos. Raimondo was talking about the Y2K madness and how it was prepping us for an Afghanistan attack--incredibly prescient, it seems to me.