March 2019

speak for yoursel(ves)

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Netherlands-based net theorist Geert Lovink has a new book coming out called Sad By Design. The thesis outlined in the lead essay seems to be "smartphones and social media make us sad." Lovink's employment of the first person plural throughout the essay is a turnoff, e.g.,

By browsing through updates, we’re catching up with machine time – at least until we collapse under the weight of participation fatigue.

or

After yet another app session in which we failed to make a date, purchased a ticket and did a quick round of videos, the post-dopamine mood hits us hard.

As noted previously, this use of "us" and "we" irritates. If Lovink said "I" did these things or had these feelings he'd sound like a pitiful stooge.
The present blog is certainly guilty of using "we" or "you" instead of "I" but it's mostly a writerly habit of trying not to sound too pompous.
When I write I don't assume that you never joined Facebook or owned a smartphone. Or stopped tweeting in 2018.
I'm not sad about having a blog with with no like buttons or page view counters and I don't expect you are sad about whatever you do online or in life. Use Facebook and phones if it makes you happy, if it doesn't don't use them.

documentation fatigue

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moody_daws2

Having documentation for songs is helpful if you hear something you did two years before and can't remember how it was produced.
At some point you are tempted to surrender to the ephemerality of the enterprise and just give up.
Like, when you are eight songs into documentation of a 26-song LP.
The Digital Audio Workstations have a feature where you can archive old productions. Mostly it's crap, as folders get moved on hard drives, computers age, operating systems change, and dongled plugins are no longer accessible.
Live for the moment, man.

"Chord Bingo" - notes

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Production notes for "Chord Bingo," from the Terra Organization LP:

chordbingo_650w

Uncropped screenshot of Tracktion Waveform page. [Standard disclaimer: The Waveform DAW is used for editing and mixing on Ubuntu Studio; the tracks also incorporate sounds playing or triggered on other PCs and devices. This isn't a "score" so much as a form of notekeeping (I prefer these colored blocks, monotonous though they may be, to (a) the Soundcloud waveform with "this rocks"-level superimposed commentary or (b) YouTube demos showing dudes' hairy hands turning knobs.]

In the screenshot many of the tracks and clips are named so there's no need for a complete track breakdown. This tune combines live recordings from a Eurorack synth (SIDGuts, SIDGuts Deluxe modules) with a couple of software sythesizers (Plogue Chipsounds, Arturia SEM V2). The softsynths (which don't have Linux versions) are played on a Windows PC and recorded individually into the Tracktion Waveform DAW running on a Linux PC. On the Linux side, the Multisampler track plays percussion and the Collective ROMpler plays the piano at the end.

UNAC thoughts

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Since the mid-'00s have been spending time in UNACs (unanthologized net art communities).
First came Nasty Nets, the ironic "internet surfing club" that Rhizome.org keeps pushing to the end of its "to be documented" priorities list. It's currently scheduled to be anthologized in April but talks about anthologizing the site began in 2013 and far worse projects have been lionized in the meantime.
Then came Dump.fm, a hugely influential idea-incubator that Rhizome never "got" and that suffered when the stock of founder Ryder Ripps dropped on the Rhizome credibility exchange (many say unfairly).
More recently it's been bogchat and chat soup, which are Dump- and IRC-like sites for people who "get it." (Hat tips John Romero and Joel Cook.)
Ripps once tweeted to Rhizome honcho Michael Connor that he, Connor, didn't understand the internet. That's certainly true regarding the net after about 2005, if the contents of the New Museum's Rhizome Net Anthology show are a guide. That show's weighted heavily to a pre-blogging era style of "net art" (Shulgin, MTAA, etc) and has no surf club presence to speak of. Possibly Connor "gets" Facebook and Twitter, which he seems to use and like. But who cares about those?