February 2016

web recorder, heal thyself

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So, Rhizome.org recently announced it had been awarded a $600,000 grant to develop a "web recorder" that essentially does what the Internet Archive "wayback machine" already does. Our old friends at ArtFCity breathlessly and uncritically reported this development, so here is the critical, huffing-and-puffing version:

Just before it won the $600,000, Rhizome did a site redesign that broke much of its own content. Using webrecorder (beta version) I've been submitting reports of Rhizome page URLs that have missing text and/or formatting. One of these was fixed after I submitted a bug report. (I've also sent some emails -- they are aware of these issues but fixing historic content is clearly on the back burner as they forge ahead with new projects.)

Here's another example, Ed Halter's squib on the so-called "Rematerialization of Art," from 2008, which touched off some extensive commenting by yours truly and others. Ironically, this page can be viewed correctly on the Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20080517165715/http://rhizome.org/editorial/fp/blog.php/590 but on Rhizome Halter's text has gone missing. The comments are there but they make little sense without showing what they are reacting to.

The same thing happened four years ago when Rhizome did a top-to-bottom site overhaul. Eventually most of the problems were identified and fixed, just in time for the current site overhaul, where everything was broken again. It's obvious where the $600,000 needs to be spent.

Update: The content of the Halter post has been restored. Next post in need of rescuscitation: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2008/apr/08/brush-off/ (also missing text by Halter).

"No Windows"

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"No Windows" [mp3 removed -- please listen on Bandcamp]

My first track produced on my PC running the Linux Mint OS. Ardour is the software used -- a DAW (digital audio workstation) that handles similarly to Cubase.
The sound sources are

--the Moog Concertmate keyboard, played live and recorded into Ardour
--some found old school synth beats
--Doepfer modular mini-synth, triggered by MIDI from Ardour and recorded simultaneously into the DAW
--Calf's Monosynth, a softsynth plugin for Ardour that can be played using an Ardour MIDI track and exported as audio
--"Reasonable," a default softsynth for Ardour MIDI tracks

For a soundcard I used Native Instruments' Komplete Audio 6 (hat tip Joel for suggesting this). The ALSA driver in the Linux "kernel" recognizes this class-compliant USB device; audio ins, outs and MIDI are ported to/from it using the JACK streaming & connection program. This took a few days of reading forums to set up (although Ardour installs JACK automatically, I had to add the NI hardware in a separate Jack control called QJACKCTL, and instructions on how to do this varied).

Am very happy to be able to make music pretty similar to what I've been doing on Windows and have a final mixdown without (unintentional) clicks or glitches.
MAJOR NEGATIVE: At present the only way I can run Ardour is with an unacceptable amount of latency (about a fifth of a second). When I reduce the sample buffer I get pops and the dreaded "XRUNS" -- dropouts in the audio. The next task is to try to optimize the PC (which has a fast-enough processor and lots of RAM) without interfering with other things I use the computer for. Ardour also has a tendency to crackle when moving windows and clicking graphics inside the interface while audio is playing. This is annoying but doesn't affect the final output.

to phone or not to phone

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Dumper cheseball was pounding hard last night on a certain blogger's decision to double down on Linux PC art-making at a time when millions of sheeple are ditching their PCs for phones.
Apparently cheseball believes that if you are making "networked art" you must use the majority technology in order to respond to present-day culture.
Becoming obsolescent and losing an audience is certainly a concern for any creative type. Yet ultimately the work is still going "on the web" whatever hardware and operating system is used to make it. Whether it will be found on the web is another issue. Do you have to be on social to play or can you rely on search/word of mouth? Paying for a mobile plan doesn't guarantee a shot at a large audience.
Or is it that we're supposed to be making apps now, with the Apple store as the new commons? Arguably that's networked art but it's not the freewheeling, variegated network of interchangeable parts that the WWW was. Better to keep making autonomous objects (on Linux or any other means you can still mostly control), objects/processes that can be displayed, distributed, and remixed, for as long as the WWW model continues to exist. Regardless of what "millions" have decided to do.