Day: January 4, 2009

Music diary: The Mutator filter has wild gain swings and I've been wanting to push it more without clipping (tired of those clicks!). Went to Sam Ash and found a used DBX compressor/limiter for 89 bucks. The peak stop limiter isn't very good (you still get clicks on super blow out volume levels) but at 10:1 compression and output gain slightly below zero it mostly does the job. Have been dialing through Electribe presets with the Mutator removing most of the treble and transients and the DBX keeping the bass blorts under control. I love the dense, heavy underwater sound. Have recorded some of these and compressed them even further with mastering plugins.

open note to Robert Wodzinski:

Sorry it took me a while to get to your your screen capture project. I'm subscribed to the pngmess feed now.
Screen captures as artistic artifacts can be interesting--part found object, part collage, and part documentation.
In some ways they are all we will have of our computers and the Net experience as we know it.
Links go dead (as with some 1st generation net art) and so much flies by in our experience that is never described in words.
The decision of what to capture, it seems to me, is a new form of photography with new, net-centric subject matter (or computercentric subject matter, or even non-net-centric or non-computercentric subject matter) and it merits consideration as an aesthetic. The best captures are not forced or self consciously artistic but are genuinely interested in preserving something that happens onscreen that one notices (whether an arrangement of images, temporary text, or some mix of content and supposedly invisible interface).
These were some ideas I had on seeing your project--keep up the good work.