“… if all knowing, all culture, all art, all useful information can be costlessly given to everyone at the same price that it is given to anyone; if everyone can have everything, anywhere, all the time, why is it ever moral to exclude anyone?” — Eben Moglen
Few days ago I ordered an Echo Indigo DJx audio card from Amazon. It’s an expressCard device with 4 analog outputs – just perfect for a digital DJ. I used to own one few years ago and had a very good experience with it. It’s pretty much flawless – just two lowlatency stereo outputs – all you need to use your laptop for a DJ situation.
Well, guess what? It’s just works. Out of the box. I plugged it in and it was instantly available as an alsa device. The only thing that I had to do to get some sound from it was to install alsa-tools-gui package in run “echomixer” and lift all levels for virtual mixer 0. Now onto “mixxx”.
Lately I’m very attracted to practice of livecoding. I’m especially looking for ..er.. well, “aestheticaly” challenging cases. Here are two of them looked at today.
One is from Andrew Sorensen who is also developing a scheme-based language for av livecoding called Impromptu. Already awhile ago I was fascinated by his “study in keith” (as in Keith Jarret). Here’s another piano piece: http://vimeo.com/8732631
On the other hand, much nearer to me, in hungary, is Gabor Papp, who works with fluxus. I very much liked this live-coded hackpact based on a glitch: http://mndl.hu/hackpact-day-21
here are embeds – take your time:
Dancing Phalanges from Andrew Sorensen on Vimeo.
Hackpact Day 21 – Glitch from gabor papp on Vimeo.
Learning things has always been possible through two main routes (many other are possible though, surely): learning through a reference and learning by example. Personally it’s quite hard for me to learn through reference – it’s like learning grammar and syntax of a foreigh language without speaking the language. There always must be examples of use. Many of them. But who made examples? Others. So, learning from others in an open (free software) world is crucial element of today’s information society IMHO. In the old days I learned HTML from other webpages.
Here are two sites packed with different processing examples to learn from:
SketchPatch: http://www.sketchpatch.net/
OpenProcessing: http://openprocessing.org/
Situated on the “freedom” side of technology, the Free Software movement strives for equal possibilities of all citizen to use, modify, adapt and copy software for their purposes. Even if Free Software is open to everyone’s use and contribution, this is hardly the case in reality. On the opposite, it is seen as a closed movement of people with often a similar description: mostly white, mostly young, mostly Western country citizen, mostly male. Why is free software associated with this white-young-male personality and not with something else? Does software reproduce identities and ideologies, and if so, how can contributors and users of Free Software change the stereotype?
Although the term “boy band” did not exist until the 1990s, Boston group New Edition is credited for starting the boy band trend in the 1980s. Maurice Starr was influenced by New Edition and popularised it with his protégé New Kids on the Block, the first commercially successful modern boy band who formed in 1984 and found international success in 1988. Starr’s idea was to take the traditional template from the R&B genre (in this case his teenage band New Edition) and apply it to a pop genre.
Some managers in Europe soon created their own acts after being inspired by New Kids on the Block. First beginning with Nigel Martin-Smith’s Take That in the UK who formed in 1990 and followed by Tom Watkins who had success with Bros in the late eighties and formed East 17 in 1991 who were marketed and pited against Take That as rivals with a harsher attitude, style and sound. Irish music manager Louis Walsh had seen the impact of these two British boy bands and put out an advert for an ‘Irish Take That’ creating Boyzone in 1993.
Starr, originally from Florida, moved to Boston with his brother Michael in the early 1970s. After moving to Boston he recorded two unsuccessful R&B albums, Flaming Starr and Spacey Lady. Since he was unsuccessful as an artist, he decided to create a band to perform the songs that he wrote. Starr won Songwriter of the Year in 1989.
In 1982, Starr found the band New Edition on his talent show. The group produced a number of U.S. Top 10 R&B hit singles and a Top 5 hit in the Billboard Hot 100. Differences between Starr and New Edition caused the two to go their separate ways. Eventually the band split up. One of the members, Bobby Brown, went on to have a successful career as a solo act. […]
After losing New Edition, Starr needed a new band to record his songs. In 1984, he created New Kids on the Block, a band consisting of five male teenagers. Starr produced New Kids on the Block to be a white version of New Edition as he stated I honestly believe that if they’d been white, (the group) would have been 20 times as big.
New Edition: Cool it down (1984)
Very interesting writing from Blay (pyratbyrian).
[…] if the internet is not to be considered an infrastructure that is put into place it must be considered something that needs to be performed. Latour said that technology is society made durable, but clearly he is neither a hacker nor an industry lobbyist. The construction of the internet is slower, more resistant and more inert than the fleeting performance of a theatre piece. But this is a difference in scale and in terms of the actors involved, not in principle. Viewing the internet as a performance not only has the consequence that it constantly needs to be maintained, but also, like any performance, that it might change from time to time and even run out of steam. A performance is an intervention in a specific context. It implies having to distinguish between which procedures make the internet the internet and which that are its superficial manifestations, rather than accepting the internet and its path of development as it is today as its final form.
Towards the end of the article, he goes:
Oval is better when he plays guitar, punk is more punk in other styles of music and the internet is more explosive in post-digital environments.
via Internauts, Punks and Infrastructure. Thanks to Goto80 for the original tweet and quote.
Umetnost lahko v tem kontekstu napravi tak učinek, da imajo žrtve ali ljudje, ki se jih potiska v vlogo žrtev, pravico, da niso žrtve, ampak da so zmožni ustvarjati fikcijo in se poigravati z dvoumnostjo določene situacije.
via klepet z Jacquesom Rancièrom | Kino! Revija za film in filmsko..
One of the best things to happen if you are a free software developer is to see your code cropping up in other projects. […]
To me this highlights how thinking about free software in terms of being products (in a consumer capitalist sense) is an ill fit. This kind of cross pollination is really “the point” of free software, and would be, by necessity full of barriers if these projects were proprietary.
The problem is that it’s very hard for us to see outside of these ideas when they are so ingrained in our world and our thinking. It’s sometimes valuable to try and outline these assumptions, and become more aware of them.
The popularity in terms of raw market share is an interesting metric for a free software project as it has a kind of irrelevance or is even an obstruction when users are not supporting the project somehow. In the same way, the definition of “user” and “developer” seem a hangover from the same kind of producer/consumer thinking we are interested in finding the edges of.
What we want to know is what kind of people are using the project, are they curious, will they fiddle with things, do they blog about the work they are doing, can they translate the documentation? Most of all, will they increase the energy surrounding the work? People that do that are precious.
via dave’s blog of art and programming | Free software projects are not products.
You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak.
Facebook’s Open Graph technology allows third-party websites to tell Facebook what people are doing. It extends Facebook’s Like button to include any action that the site owners think might be interesting to Facebook. Play a song and your music streaming site tells Facebook what you’ve played. Read a newspaper article and Facebook knows what you’ve read. LOL at a lolcat and your LOL gets logged for all time on your indelible activity record. Facebook calls this “frictionless sharing”, which is their euphemism for silent total surveillance. Once you’ve signed up for this (and it is optional, at least for now) you don’t need to do anything else to “share” your activity with Facebook. It’s completely automatic.
http://adrianshort.co.uk/2011/09/25/its-the-end-of-the-web-as-we-know-it/
Today I worked more on a piece of code that should get up basic functionality of SenseStage/DataNetwork. With some nice help from Marije I’m now this far in SuperCollider:
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/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // DataNetwork host! ////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// ~datanet = SWDataNetwork.new; ~datanet.createHost; ~datanet.makeGui; /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // Nowsclang SETUP CONTROLLER MINIBEE to be able to listen to // the network of minibees- use python - pydon ( " echo "cd /home/random/src/pydonhive.8/pydon/" > /tmp/wonkohive.sh; echo "python swpydonhive.py -c wonko-hive.xml -s /dev/ttyUSB0" >> /tmp/wonkohive.sh; echo "sleep 10" >> /tmp/wonkohive.sh; chmod u+x /tmp/wonkohive.sh; gnome-terminal -t SW-WonkoHive -e /tmp/wonkohive.sh; sleep 2; rm /tmp/wonkohive.sh ".unixCmd; ) /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// // DataNetwork CLIENT! //////////////////////////////////////////////////// /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// y = SWDataNetworkClient( "localhost", "NovaSC"); // create client y.subscribeNode(1); // subscribe to a DN node (a miniBee with accel. sensors) ~node1 = y.nodes[1]; ~node1.createBus(s); ~node1.value; // print what's on the bus ~node1.value.at(1); ~node1.value.at(2); ~node1.value.at(0); // define a synth ( SynthDef(ThreeWF, { |freq1=0.5, freq2=1, freq3=2, amp=0.05| Out.ar([0,1], SinOsc.ar(freq1 * 1000 - 300, 0, [amp,0]) + SinOsc.ar(freq2 * 1000 - 300, 0, [0,amp]) + SinOsc.ar(freq3 * 1000 - 300, 0, [amp,amp]) ); }).send(s) ) // instantiate the synth i = Synth(ThreeWF); // either we map a subBus to another variable ~node1bus1 = ~node1.bus.subBus(0,1); // .subBus (offset, numChannels = 1) // before we map it then to an argument of the synth i.map( freq1, ~node1bus1 ); // or we skip another variable all together i.map(freq2, ~node1.bus.subBus(1,1)); i.map(freq3, ~node1.bus.subBus(2,1)); /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// |
I still have (more and more) questions. It’s funny, as you progress in slowly becoming familiar with language things keep on popping out, questions that are most of the time in the form of “why this doesn’t work? it should work, but it doesn’t!”
For example, if i write “~variable” what exactly does it mean? It seems to be some kind of global variable, according to SC docs?
