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.
linux diary
studio diary: music on linux
My five year plan (which is about four years ahead of schedule) is to move all my art and music production to a PC running Linux.
I made some progress this week getting my music studio set up. Linux Mint is a great all-purpose operating system but is not particularly "professional audio friendly."
So I've been getting a USB audio card to work with Ardour (essentially Linux's version of Cubase). There is a tricky interaction of drivers for the hardware, a low-latency streaming/connection protocol called JACK, and Ardour itself. I had to adjust the CPU governor to allow for maximum speed, which took a couple of hours of reading forums and watching out-of-date YouTube tutorials.
I'm hoping by later this week (or next) I'll have a new Moog Concertmate piece done using Linux instead of Windows for sequencing, recording and mixing. If I never mention it again it means I didn't get it working.
Hat tip to Joel Cook for suggestions and letting me vent in emails.
