Last night’s UPLOAD06 was tight! We ran more than an hour over time due to all the presenters having so much interesting stuff to show and tell. I’ll put up a mini review later on today. But right now it’s back to the grind stone with a little help from Surgeon.

Surgeon - Food For Thought mix:

TRACKLIST:
Shiver - Subsonic Soundscape
Autechre - Clipper
Surgeon - Exhibit
Scorn - Twitcher (Surgeon DNA remake)
Liaisons Dangereuses - Peut Etre … Pas
AFX - Mighty Force
Monolake - Polaroid
Photek - Trans 7
Renegard Soundwave - Phantom
DHS - The House Of God (DHS remix)
Monolake - Cern
Autechre - Second Scepe
Tony Rohr - Lofishizzy
65D Mavericks - Earthbound (Surgeon remix)
Cane - Fall
Curve - Falling Free (Aphex Twin remix)
Dom and Rymetyme - Iceberg
Horace Andy - Money Money
Monolake - Stratosphere
British Murder Boys - Live Ritual No.1
Autechre - Second Bad Vilbel
Phantom Power - Can D
Nitzer Ebb - Smear Body
Meat Beat Manifesto - Mindstream (Aphex Twin remix)
Autechre - Cipater (Surgeon remake)
Denis Rusnak - Working Sister
British Murder Boys - Don’t Give Way To Fear
Ed Rush, Optical and Fierce - Alien Girl
Autechre - Second Peng
Surgeon - Shaper Of The Unknown

The next installment of Upload goes down tonight.

DIGITAL ANIMATION.. 2D animator Bryan Devlin shows a selection of his animations and talks about how he created them by combining mediums such as illustration and digital imagery. He also gives tips and tricks on the basics of animation.

AUDIO/VISUAL INTERACTION.. Ralph Borland, an artist, designer and part-time lecturer, demonstrates the use of microcontrollers and simple electronic devices to control video and sound input from the physical world using Basic and Max/MSP/Jitter.

VJing.. Charles Lee-Thorp, a graphic designer with a penchant for interactive art and design, shows how he uses Resolume and basic hardware for video performances, mixing his custom visuals and a live camera feed.

VJing.. Influenced by the Pickle/Geto 3000 scene, Sightori and VJ Ink, the elusive Mime/Storyboy has VJed at numerous gigs for African Dope, MTV and Smirnoff, and even manned the video feed at the Red Bull Music Academy 2003.

I’ve just started playing with MAX/MSP so Ralph’s demo should be interesting.

Seven Ark gets in the last word over at the The Beat Symposium.

What is the best and worst thing about the city in which your are currently based?

The best is the worst: it’s a small scene and city, so it’s pretty easy to stand out and do interesting sh#t, but because of the size it’s also easy to get lulled into a false sense of worth regarding what you’re actually doing. Your frame of reference can become so skewed that you lose track of what’s really happening elsewhere.

Bruno Morphet, one of Cape Town’s sickest DJ’s, gets one in too…

I got into a pretty heated debate with some friends about my ideas around marketing this week. Intially I came across as being completely anti-marketing which, to a certain degree I am, particularly when marketing starts trying to sell you ‘lifestyle’.

I argued against marketing in favour of alternate currencies and community exchange programs. My problem was that alternate currencies and community exchange programs are not meant to replace marketing and I was at a loss trying to explain the connections between the two.

I’ve read about the ideas but I could not put what I’d read into one cohesive argument. Now if I had a computer and an internet connection I would have been able to pull a couple of sites to help me substanciate my argument but, unplugged from the hivemind, I failed miserably.

And thats just it, the internet is a sort of hivemind, plugging in gives you access to the hive’s cast collective intelligence but you leave all that behind once you’ve disconnected unless you internalize that understanding.

With internet connectivity becoming so massively (well, not so massive here in South Africa yet) widespead, what happens when we dont have to disconnect? What will life be like permanently connected to the hive? AND! What happens when the hive is wired directly to our brains like the good people at Cyberkinetics and Nasa are starting to do?

Well, for one, I don’t think I’ll be loosing are many arguments! :)

So I’ve been thinking about Steven Johnsons encounter with the machines a lot recently. I’ve also been listening to a whole of IDM recent (thanks last.fm!). And then it dawned on me…

Electronic music musicians have been working with and have been inspired by machines for a long time already. Two artists that come to mind are Richard Devine and Autechre.

Lately Devine has been experimenting with composing music using algorithmic-based sequencers. “I was doing quite a bit of this with MAX/MSP, but soon discovered other interesting avenues,” says Devine. “The first was a neat little app called Symbolic Composer.” Symbolic Composer is a complete music language that covers all aspects of music composition.

Sound on Sound illustrates the point well:

Perhaps the most challenging and potentially controversial aspect of Autechre’s music is their use of generative sequences. Confield contains more of these than their other works, though they also feature on their latest release, Draft 7:30. Insofar as these sequences involve drum machine sounds they are sometimes referred to as ‘random beats’. The adjective clearly sits uneasily with Booth, who is at pains to point out that the beats are far from random.

“There’s a lot of maths and generated beats on Confield, but we never considered that album very difficult,” asserts Booth. “It’s like pop music compared to some of the stuff we had considered putting out! And even when the beats sound like they are moving around in time and space, they’re not random. They’re based on sets of rules and we have a good handle on them.

Steven Johnson used an advanced search tool to find make connections to information that he would not have on his own and Richard Devine and Autechre use advanced audio manipulation tools to create music that they would / could not have created on their own.

I suppose the difference here is that Autechre and co. are creating complete finished products. Johnson’s relationship with his tools is more an ongoing symbiotic relationship of sorts. Last.fm possibly comes close to that.

So what happens when we see this idea spreading to other fields? Bots set out to achive this goal years ago but have, for the most part failed. I rate they’ll be making a reapearance soon…

Technology has for a long time been shaping how we live but what about where we live? Our devices are allowing us to become increasingly mobile but that we still roam from fixed place to fixed place. What if our buildings were as mobile as us?

Bruce Sterling writes about an architect working on the idea of adaptive buildings:

And yet Roche’s scheme is not just fun to think about, but eerily plausible. He’s exploiting ideas that make perfect sense in computer-driven fabrication but have never been applied to architecture. Imagine a building where the needs and desires of its inhabitants are hot-wired to the shapes of walls and floors, which can be extended and updated ad hoc, ad infinitum.

That’s Node 1. It’s an idea for a building, yes, but it lacks most of the usual architectural accoutrements: blueprints, material suppliers, subcontractors. Instead, Roche imagines a programmable assembly device dubbed the “viab,” a construction robot capable of improvising as it assembles walls, ducts, cables, and pipes.

Although the kind of structure Roche is proposing is not a moble structure it however could be a home for mobile communities, constantly adapting to the coming and going of it’s residents.

The concept isn’t as alien as it may seem; nature has been doing something similar for eons. Termites build skyscrapers by spitting and smoothing mud, then removing the structure if it gets in the way. A mound is shaped by the activity of the society within it.

Parasitic architecture, on the other hand, is a home for the mobile individual:

>

Parasites have not only become a fashion phenomenon, the term is increasingly being used for small mobile structures of all kinds. Usually, the comparison breaks down because architectural parasites are not pests: they do not draw off energy from their hosts. Among the few exceptions are the paraSITES of the American artists Michael Rakowitz. These tent-like dwellings for the homeless - mobile architecture for people who have no other choice than mobility and are often cursed as “social parasites” - can be connected to the waste-air pipes of buildings to inflate the dwellings and keep them warm. The existing architecture is seen as a body whose lungs and organs of digestion produce enough surplus energy for weaker, dependent organisms.

There’s this Cannibal Ox lyric that goes, ‘I’m not a bum I’m a nomad / Off dome, thoughts have no home / The page is ours to roam’.
This could be home to digital nomad’s of the future. In fact, some of it sounds like the Cheap Motel Case stays in in Neuromancer…

So if you’ve been following you would noticed that things have gone a little silent here. I’ve been really busy at work and on a number of side projects. Lots of interesting stuff’s been brewing, some of which I hope to write about here.

So anyway, its summer here in Cape Town and the weather’s been great so I’ve been taking the train instead of driving to work and sitting in traffic by myself. The train is great, it’s given me time to read the Neal Stephenson’s massive Quicksilver (which is an incredible read btw!) and I’ve run into a quiet a few friends riding the train too.

Traffic here is bad but I stay in the southern suburbs so I miss the worst of it. Watching the other drivers is also entertaining (the singers are the funniest) and that makes it just the little bit more bearable. Angermann’s pointed out someone who has a plan to make driving home a little more fun.

Years ago, I’m driving along in my car spacing out and thinking about how I’m surrounded by people in their cars and yet I’m completely alone, and wouldn’t it be cool if there was some sort of short range radio system so that I could talk to the people in cars around me. About what, I don’t know. “Are those Bugle Boy jeans you’re wearing?”, “Do you have any Grey Poupon?”, “10-4 Good Buddy, there’s a smokey at the Mission Boulevard exit”. Who knows, I always thought it would be a cool experiment to try.

I dig walkie talkies! I’d try this out if someone started this locally. I had a similar idea a while ago.

The idea also needed walkie talkies but the aim to to create an awareness of space. It was essentially a game that poeple would play. We’d leave walkie talkies all around town with instructions to guess where in town the other person was. You could not mention obvious things that would give it away. The person who guessed the right place first would be the winner and the loser would have to buy the winner a drink or something along those lines.

But…

I’ve had dumb ideas before. I’ll have dumb ideas again. This might be one of them. You tell me.

… I think my version is one of them.

Steven Johnson’s facinating encounter with the machines:

Now, strictly speaking, who is responsible for that initial idea? Was it me or the software? It sounds like a facetious question, but I mean it seriously. Obviously, the computer wasn’t conscious of the idea taking shape, and I supplied the conceptual glue that linked the London sewers to cell metabolism. But I’m not at all confident I would have made the initial connection without the help of the software. The idea was a true collaboration, two very different kinds of intelligence playing off each other, one carbon-based, the other silicon.