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Brilliant Noise by Semiconductor: Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt

Avaliable on DVD! with 12 alternate soundtracks semiconductorfilms.com/WorldsInFluxDVD.html

Brilliant Noise takes us into the data vaults of solar astronomy. After sifting through hundreds of thousands of computer files, made accessible via open access archives, Semiconductor have brought together some of the sun’s finest unseen moments. These images have been kept in their most raw form, revealing the energetic particles and solar wind as a rain of white noise. This grainy black and white quality is routinely cleaned up by NASA, hiding the processes and mechanics in action behind the capturing procedure. Most of the imagery has been collected as single snapshots containing additional information, by satellites orbiting the Earth. They are then reorganised into their spectral groups to create time-lapse sequences. The soundtrack highlights the hidden forces at play upon the solar surface, by directly translating areas of intensity within the image brightness into layers of audio manipulation and radio frequencies.
Lots more info here:
semiconductorfilms.com/root/Brilliant_Noise/BNoise.htm
…this version suffers a bit from the internet compression. The original version is much better.

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This video is about exploring the spatial qualities of RFID, visualised through an RFID probe, long exposure photography and animation.

It features Timo Arnall of the Touch project and Jack Schulze of BERG.

More here
nearfield.org/2009/10/immaterials-the-ghost-in-the-field
berglondon.com/blog/2009/10/12/the-ghost-in-the-field/

One of the interesting things about modern tech is that it makes people deal with things they only previously imagined they were dealing with. An RFID field is foreshadowed by such nonsense as auras, invisible materials remind one of ghosts and social media suggests a jury-rigged telepathy. How about when we raise the dead through chat-bot necromancy?

And the standard, mainstream religions that we’ve derived our ethical base from only advise one not to take part in such magic.

Easy for them to say. They didn’t have smart-phones.

Just as tech impacts the present and future, it also changes the past. Now that we’re routinely dealing with the powers, it seems possible that those old occult texts, the bizarre guides to rules governing the esoteric, might be assigned new value as the foundation of a modern ethics.

Though it’s a bit dubious to derive any ethical system  from the drugged-up power delusions of barbarians and conmen, it does seem to be where these things come from.

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Toughness has been rather out of fashion, as a masculine virtue, and Takeshi simultaneously radiates it and suggests its wounded core. There can in fact be no depiction of genuine toughness (not brutality but a sort of excess of substance of soul stuff) without this concomitant indication of that wound, else the piece simply becomes the pornography of fascism.

–William Gibson, “The Baddest Man on Earth” from Distrust That Particular Flavour

Beat Takeshi has been one of my favourite directors and actors for a long time.

When I quit drinking, it was with the simple caveat that, if I even met Beat Takeshi and he proved willing, I would drink with him. We wouldn’t even talk. We’d just sit quietly. Drinking, smoking. Maybe looking at each other. Maybe not. Cause what’s there to look at? What’s there to say? Not so much.

I stumbled into his movies when I had no cable and not much money. I bought bootleg DVDs in Chinatown. 5 for $30. I started with no idea what I liked. I quickly learned I liked Beat.

When I saw his face, I bought the movie. No questions asked. No point asking them. The answers I got from the back of the case were either in Chinese or in a gibberish English that told me nothing except, maybe, how the movie ended. And who wants to know that?

He never disappointed.

I didn’t come to Asian cinema through any sort of fetish for it. I wasn’t even interested. It was just much cheaper than the Western stuff, which is what I actually hoped to find in those little shops. This created a strange, unintentional and must-be-modern alienation from my own culture.

For a period, its stars became my stars. They were more famous to me than the strangers on my city’s billboards. I had no idea who won the Oscars or what the current state of Hollywood was but, when the new-to-me Beat movie dropped –its availability a function of the invisible dictates of the black market– I was there. Cash in hand.

People like Takashi Miike, whose work I find uneven, amazing when its good and awful when its not, and Chan-wook Park, who is every bit as good as Hitchcock, were my celebrities. And Beat was the best.

I didn’t know anyone who watched their films. When I met a fellow traveller, usually a hardened film nerd, out came the pad and pencil. Names and locations were traded. DVDs were burned.

I sensed these films playing just under the surface of Toronto to a large but invisible audience. Shipped in by Mafia, passed around and sold in the open, with awkward subtitles, there must have been an English speaking market. But I had little way to connect with other people who’d plugged in. And little inclination. The people I met who liked or knew these movies were really into film. They were the dedicated collectors of culture. It was a currency, the value dictated by the obscurity.

Being young, the breadth of their knowledge intimidated me. I didn’t want to look stupid nor was I looking to be a completist or an expert. I wasn’t even looking for important films. Just plain old entertainment. Something to watch while hungover or eating a pizza.

Bootleg Asia was just my budget’s Hollywood.

But, maybe because it’d been filtered by geography, it was so much better than Hollywood. It made American film-making visible. And made it incredibly stupid. And ugly.

(To this day, I can’t enjoy many modern American movies. They’re constantly moving backwards, spending most of their time explaining what has just happened to the audience, who apparently don’t have eyes, while telling you what’s about to happen just in case you don’t have a brain. They use a visual laugh track to tell you how to feel about what you just saw. But, if they never told you, you wouldn’t know you were supposed to feel anything.

Having been told, you still don’t feel it. Not really. You just know you’re supposed to. It’s like a Pavlovian call and response.

Doing all this is probably why even the crassest fluff now clocks in at over two boring hours.)

It’s personally odd but perfectly right to read an essay about Beat by Gibson.

Surprising because it makes sense.

I remember walking through Chinatown on a rainy day, wearing a cheap and dirty suit, my bag of illegal information shipped in from Asia so I could jack into a virtual world just below the surface of Toronto’s culture and suddenly feeling like a bit character in a Gibson novel.  (Curiously enough, I think that was around the time he stopped writing about the future and started writing about the present.) Cyberpunk headlocked reality. An actual perceptual shift.

And that’s a special feeling. A rare one. One that sticks with me.

In my own writing, creating that moment for someone is the only thing I aim at.

You can’t create it for everyone. Maybe, not even for someone. It’s very rare. Even if you like an author, they might not deliver that.

I like plenty of books but, offhand, I can only think of one other author that gave me that gut understanding.

It happened in court.

Shuttled from room to room, trying to trade papers I didn’t understand for papers no one would tell me the name of, speaking words I’d never heard or used before, listening to these same words from people who didn’t understand what I was asking for, then appearing before a judge with a formalized back-room deal that my $100, alcoholic lawyer had made only to find out there was no such deal and my lawyer didn’t even exist, although he’d appeared, with me, before this very court a month prior. Then the judge, from up in his high chair, said something I did understand. Something I didn’t like very much. Something that turned out to be the result of a clerical error.

“Wait,” I said. “This makes no sense.”

“Wait,” I should have said. “I just got Kafka.”

And you can tell people that and they can nod. They might even think you’re clever but they probably think that clever is what you’re trying to be. They don’t quite get it. Funny thing is, they’ve probably had a similar experience. There should be a word for it. Something like Deja Vu. Something that means a sudden, involuntary overlapping of art and of the world. Something that suggests a sudden shared consciousness with the art. Something you can say and people can nod and know what you mean.

I don’t get that feeling from Beat movies but I get something like it: A sense of kinship. Though he is very different from me, watching his movies, I feel we’re very much the same. It’s a wrenching familiarity. There’s a common ground. It’s not intellectual. Putting it into words makes it ridiculous.

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As the 90s came to a close, the business of music began to change profoundly. New technology allowed artists to record and produce their own music and music videos, and the internet became a free-for-all distribution platform for musicians to promote themselves to audiences across the world. The result was an influx of artists onto the cultural scene, and audiences were left wondering how to sort through them all. In this episode we discuss these massive changes, and reveal how music blogs and websites have arisen as the new arbiters of quality.

One of the things that bothers me most about all the recent attempts to crack down on the internet is that this platform is where new ideas –both in art, criticism and new ways to make money off both– are being born. It feels like the future is being aborted to preserve the familiar.

But I think this video also shows that the self-publishing mantra of overthrowing the gatekeepers is probably wrong. Equally wrong is the standard publishing industry’s claim that they need to exist to serve as these gatekeepers.  Fact is, although their form may change, the so-called gatekeepers do have a role to perform.

I also wonder how much of the money people say they’ve lost due to piracy has actually been lost just to plain abundance. In most of the arts, supply has outstripped the demand. Competition is fierce.

Continue reading »]]> Although I’m not too big on leaving the house, I attended this talk by Robert J. Sawyer and William Gibson at the Toronto Reference Library.

Aside from trips to the tailor and organizing my cupboards, This is the sort of thing I get excited about. I’ve been wanting to see these two in conversation for years.

Reason being is that I think there’s two forms of science fiction: The first takes the very strange and makes it familiar and the other takes the very familiar and makes it strange. Sawyer belongs to the former camp and Gibson belongs to the latter. Sawyer can take some of the most difficult ideas in science and make them instantly comprehensible and entertaining. Gibson can take the most normal sort of scene and warp it into something strange.

This difference informs many of the differences in their writing. Sawyer is clear, Gibson is evocative. Sawyer’s work is extroverted and engaged in the world around it while Gibson’s is inward looking, alienated and a product of an interior terrain. Relationships form the backbone of Sawyer’s work while Gibson’s characters are alienated. Sawyer is often seen as an optimist while Gibson is seen as a pessimist.

I don’t have a value judgement to make about these different types of writing. I enjoy both.

And I could not think of two people who better represent their camp. Both are amongst the best at what they do.

It was a genuine treat to see.

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This tattoo purports to be the first random tattoo in the world.

Each time you scan the QR code tattoo you will see something different: Videos, pictures, phrases, weather forecast, tweets … every time something new.

A lot of the thinking on this subject is about personal branding — tattoos that lead to your website, thus turning you into a meat hyperlink– but what interests me is the hacking potential. This sort of thing was a background tech in Technicolor Ultra Mall and was often used to undermine digital video surveillance. (Incidentally, in the book, it’d already been co-opted and turned useless by the mainstream.)

Back when I wrote that, this sort of thing seemed a lot further away than it turned out to be. The future is moving a lot faster than publishing.