posted to dump.fm by plams last year
"Keystroke Mountain"
"Keystroke Mountain" [mp3 moved to Bandcamp]
Grand piano + "urban beats" -- that's all you need to know.
The beats are all tweaked, using FX presets pretty much exactly as intended.
A nice thing about having a PC with a little more speed and memory is I can play sampled piano with all the convolution settings and no overload spasms.
The undulating granular sounds during the drum break were made a couple of years ago using Reaktor Photone and analog filter sweeps.
pollock as cave man
From Art News, after MOMA turned up more, or clearer hand prints of the artist during a recent canvas-cleaning:
Now more than ever, the work evokes the walls of a prehistoric cave, the oldest known mark-making of primitive man.
“He’s declaring his identity free of language in the most elemental way,” Temkin says. “He wanted to bring modern art to that same level of essentialism. He’s harking back to a period when humankind was not far past the ape stage.”
Oogah me painter. (You don't get to call abstract artists stupid -- only art magazines get to do that. Also, this is the latest effort by MOMA to reinvent Pollock as a figurative artist, previously having done it with Pepe Karmel's computer analysis of Hans Namuth photos to show the reassuring human form underlying all that weird chaotic stuff.)
tip of the sabretooth skin hat to bill
sold
GIF by Rene Abythe re-enacts the recent "Paddles down" cyber-auction where my OptiDisc GIF was "bought in" by a consortium of private investors and will now be viewable only on approved institutions' "art computers." A mobile device (above) was used in the bidding, employing a complicated algorithm developed in a recent Rhizome "Seven on Seven" symposium.
This is all nonsense, of course, pertaining to the ongoing obsession of new media types with $$$, and the uneasy marriage of start-up culture with the anti-capitalist avant garde. Have an art idea? Don't starve like Van Gogh -- get backers and monetize it! No backer likes your work? Crowdfund it! The crowd hates your work? Then maybe you aren't really an artist!
"the blogosphere isn’t in such good shape these days"
David Dayen, writing in a Naked Capitalism fundraising post:
As we’ve seen, the blogosphere isn’t in such good shape these days. Google has undercut the online advertising funding model, and writers are struggling to combine financial security with editorial independence. I can say with experience that the freelance market is, to put it mildly, hazardous. Websites are experimenting with new funding models that actually aren’t all that new; it’s mainly a distributed, populist version of the old concept of patronage. By giving a donation, you announce that this project has value, that it’s worth something to you. The alternative is akin to the patronage archetype of the Middle Ages, considering the billionaire purchases of news outlets, mergers and acquisitions, and the hollowing out of what made the new publishing tools of the Internet, for a brief period, something special. By donating, you consent to opening up the range of debate, to keeping the flickering spirit of alternative media alive...
Since I never relied on advertising I can't say anecdotally how Google "undercut" it. Dayen could be more specific about this claim. Google's adwords created the spam incentives that bedevil small websites, as we've been discussing. But Google is still the largest traffic-driver here, and the main reason for a steady stream of unsolicited email requests to advertise on this site.
The mid-'00s blogosphere declined not so much for lack of funding -- blogs are cheap -- but because (i) most individuals don't have that many posts in them, as demonstrated by Cory Arcangel's joke blog of people's apologies for not posting, and (ii) the corporate blog silos offer a place to put up content sporadically and "have a presence" without cost or the headaches of keeping a site alive in the modern spam- and malware-filled web.
This represents, if not a loss of utopia, at least a loss of biodiversity: to some degree tumblr-ers all share the same genes, aren't hardened by the challenges of independence, and thus are the farm-raised salmon of creativity, ha ha. Same for Facebook, etc.