I am sitting in a backwards room
I am sitting in a backwards room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the backwards room again and again until the backward frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any illegibility of my speech, with perhaps the exception of the rhythm of the backwards room, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural frequencies of the backwards room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but, more as a way to smooth out any asymmetries my speech might have.
Analog granular synthesis
might be possible if a read head from a reel-to-reel or cassette player were used like the wheel of a hurdy-gurdy and the tape its strings.
Everything from Nothing
In general, the smaller the vibrating medium, the higher the frequency at which it vibrates. Therefore, a non-existent singing bowl would vibrate at an infinitely high frequency.
THE calculus, sublime
What would the graph of the average distance from my feet to the ground (ignoring the angles of my feet) over the course of my life look like? I step over a threshold, the graph jumps slightly; I take off in an airplane, the graph jumps dramatically.
What would the two graphs of each foot look like?
What would the two, four-dimensionsal graphs (one graph for each foot; a dimension for time, and three for each of the possible angles relative to the center of the earth) look like? I wag my foot sitting in a chair, three dimensions wiggle; I walk around working in a restaurant, three dimensions flatten.
How about the single graph of their average?
What would the integral of these graphs be (the total area per 3 angles per lifetime of the distance from my feet to the ground)?
What would the average be? A single scalar whose value is the integral of one of the graphs (total distance) divided by their domain (a lifetime); or, per angle of my feet, the total distance my feet were from the ground over the course of my lifetime.
What would the total average graph be: this integral scalar divided by the average of the angles of my two feet? This is the integer of posture and of elevation.
What would all these graphs look like relative to sea level? These are the quantities of posture and of evolution. Time, ever the independent variable, would become dependent, read backwards from the infinite detail of water flow (or again, of the movement of dust, sand, and concrete).
Add a fifth (and sixth, seventh, eighth?) dimension. Direction of blood flow. Blood flow would slow in accordance with time, near the end.
What would the two graphs of each foot look like?
What would the two, four-dimensionsal graphs (one graph for each foot; a dimension for time, and three for each of the possible angles relative to the center of the earth) look like? I wag my foot sitting in a chair, three dimensions wiggle; I walk around working in a restaurant, three dimensions flatten.
How about the single graph of their average?
What would the integral of these graphs be (the total area per 3 angles per lifetime of the distance from my feet to the ground)?
What would the average be? A single scalar whose value is the integral of one of the graphs (total distance) divided by their domain (a lifetime); or, per angle of my feet, the total distance my feet were from the ground over the course of my lifetime.
What would the total average graph be: this integral scalar divided by the average of the angles of my two feet? This is the integer of posture and of elevation.
What would all these graphs look like relative to sea level? These are the quantities of posture and of evolution. Time, ever the independent variable, would become dependent, read backwards from the infinite detail of water flow (or again, of the movement of dust, sand, and concrete).
Add a fifth (and sixth, seventh, eighth?) dimension. Direction of blood flow. Blood flow would slow in accordance with time, near the end.
Piracy's mistaken freedom
The common rebuke from "independent"/"alternative" (dominant) culture against piracy is that the consumption of the product at hand without the (naturalized) transaction of money robs the value from the artist who produces the product. This is both the claim of the RIAA and the artists it "represents" (the RIAA here is perhaps a metonymy for corporate music culture). The only source of value that can be transferred from the consumer to the "producer" is money: a sort of naive capitalist realism.
But piracy's counterargument (if it is univocal) is no less problematic. Circumventing the monetary transaction as a supposedly anti-capitalist gesture nonetheless results in consumption, and does nothing to undermine money as a single value. "If you won't give us our Kings of Leon, we'll just take it." This is precisely the supposed dead end of capitalist realism: consumption is fine, even a goal, but it must be obtained through a nominally anti-capitalist gesture. Indeed, the survival of corporate music depends on its activation of the principles of those who claim to oppose it: music must be decentralized from the exchange structure of Fordist commodities for music as an industry to continue. And it will.
The cease and desist letter that Verso (and other publishers) sent to a.aaaarg.org also makes a fine point: a well-known publisher of seminal left texts threatening a P2P(-ish) site which is hosting exactly some of the same content would seem to be an absurd contradiction. Verso establishes a market for the gesture of buying (and reading) left books, while aaaarg.org hosts the same content, activating its principles on the level of distribution itself. (Defending Verso with "Naturally; there is no other way to make money." is exactly the naturalization I'm arguing against.) What connects the two (terrifyingly) is that the texts "themselves" cannot be disconnected from the very gesture of their acquisition: that aaaarg.org reproduces the form of this gesture on the level of distribution is no solution to Verso's "cynicism." Rather, it pursues the postmodern logic of consumption, a characteristic feature of which is the very disavowal of this logic, over Verso's more obviously contradictory arrangement.
The questions which seem obvious are the wrong ones: "Given all this, does the content survive?" "Can the reader still get what's intended from the texts?" We're lead back to the atomized individual whose contemporary is this very act of reading, this possibility of "personal" politicization.
In the end, pirating music or books reinforces the logic of consumption; the "old" model however, is no solution itself. The fact that making a choice between them can have no political clout is precisely the problem, yet again.
But piracy's counterargument (if it is univocal) is no less problematic. Circumventing the monetary transaction as a supposedly anti-capitalist gesture nonetheless results in consumption, and does nothing to undermine money as a single value. "If you won't give us our Kings of Leon, we'll just take it." This is precisely the supposed dead end of capitalist realism: consumption is fine, even a goal, but it must be obtained through a nominally anti-capitalist gesture. Indeed, the survival of corporate music depends on its activation of the principles of those who claim to oppose it: music must be decentralized from the exchange structure of Fordist commodities for music as an industry to continue. And it will.
The cease and desist letter that Verso (and other publishers) sent to a.aaaarg.org also makes a fine point: a well-known publisher of seminal left texts threatening a P2P(-ish) site which is hosting exactly some of the same content would seem to be an absurd contradiction. Verso establishes a market for the gesture of buying (and reading) left books, while aaaarg.org hosts the same content, activating its principles on the level of distribution itself. (Defending Verso with "Naturally; there is no other way to make money." is exactly the naturalization I'm arguing against.) What connects the two (terrifyingly) is that the texts "themselves" cannot be disconnected from the very gesture of their acquisition: that aaaarg.org reproduces the form of this gesture on the level of distribution is no solution to Verso's "cynicism." Rather, it pursues the postmodern logic of consumption, a characteristic feature of which is the very disavowal of this logic, over Verso's more obviously contradictory arrangement.
The questions which seem obvious are the wrong ones: "Given all this, does the content survive?" "Can the reader still get what's intended from the texts?" We're lead back to the atomized individual whose contemporary is this very act of reading, this possibility of "personal" politicization.
In the end, pirating music or books reinforces the logic of consumption; the "old" model however, is no solution itself. The fact that making a choice between them can have no political clout is precisely the problem, yet again.
Thesis Project
Display the paperwork necessary to have received the degree to which the present thesis project is the culmination.
Jennifer Walsche + Tony Conrad, Issue Project Room, Nov. 10th, 2009
Two autoharps.
Two mixers.
Two violins, one with custom bridge and strings.
Loop pedal.
AutoTune.
A five-year-old girl's liminal slipping in and out of a pleasant, pastoral, and horrific nightmare and wish-fulfillment of fucking her father. The crowd of an anxious voice at the standing out of transiences and robotic vowels, and the loose strands of success woven as failure. After the constituent tone and tuning suffer hand mutes, deliberate gestures and accidental clusters. What would reside in memory as a yodel, a hiccup and a confession.
Two mixers.
Two violins, one with custom bridge and strings.
Loop pedal.
AutoTune.
A five-year-old girl's liminal slipping in and out of a pleasant, pastoral, and horrific nightmare and wish-fulfillment of fucking her father. The crowd of an anxious voice at the standing out of transiences and robotic vowels, and the loose strands of success woven as failure. After the constituent tone and tuning suffer hand mutes, deliberate gestures and accidental clusters. What would reside in memory as a yodel, a hiccup and a confession.
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