Connected Everything
Here are some things I'm going to be covering in my thesis.
- All possible enumerations: "Wishing Well" by Eijssen and Klopman, "Borges" by Jochem van der Spek, Every Icon, God's Eye, Imagen, Magic Mirror, The End, 8-bit, 4-bit waveforms (also in hardware). The legal-political implications of these projects. Stéphane Mallarmé's "[dream] of a universal work, capable of encompassing all the others". Ablinger's conception of "all notes" as "white noise". Borges' Aleph. pppd and RC/NAND combinations toward the idea of a "functionally complete" synth.
- Possible permutations: allRGB. If you're enumeration everything, how do you arrange it in an interesting way? Anti-gray codes?
- Very long pieces: Pi house music (indefinitely long), Infinite C (indefinitely long), Soundtrack For An Exhibition (96 days), The Shapes Project, As Slow as Possible (639 years), Longplayer (1000 years)
- What is music? Of all the sounds that can be made, which are musical? Is there a connection between meaningful sounds and musical sounds? Considering noise as a human-centered phenomenon, or otherwise.
- McLuhan's symbiotic medium/message relationship: Photoshop Gradient and Smudge Tool Demonstrations. Glitch art as a method for uncovering a medium: Ceibas, MPF, CD-glitching from Oval and Yasunao Tone. The aesthetics of failure. "Looking at what's broken" is a technique regularly used in cognitive neuroscience, outlined by V.S. Ramachandran in "Phantoms in the Brain". Eigenradio. The role of transcription: ethnomusicology as a case study.
- The history of MP3, the language and the logistics behind glitching compressed formats. Remixing 4'33" for a new media (Only Everything Lasts Forever).
- Correspondence theory of truth versus coherence theory of truth, the connection between truth and meaning, meaning and music. MOOKDFJLAL and 241543903. Side channel attacks (especially TEMPEST), persistence hunting, and reality cracking. Buddhist "interdependent arising" as a "coherentist metaphysics". Autoloop as purely sonic coherentism. Jean-Jacques Nattiez' "symbolic web".
- The role of illusion in meaning, finding patterns in noise, and the "edge of chaos": Kanizsa triangle, dalmatian and cow illusions, Christian iconography, The Holy Toaster, the face on Mars, Einstein's Brain, the golden ratio as a guiding principle for beauty in nature and art, prime numbers and the Ulam spiral and Sacks spiral, equidistant letter sequences and The Bible Code, Haiku Finder, SETI@home and the definition of a signal, astronomical patterns and constellations, geographic patterns, the Voynich manuscript as a hoax. Working with Mark Changizi on evolutionary psychology. No Noise.
- Emptiness, and art everywhere: Cage's 4'33", Duchamp's "Fountain", Rauschenberg's "White Paintings" and the monochromatic tradition, including Malevich and Rodchenko. Nietzsche's "will to power" and Sartre's "existence precedes essence" as models of self-created coherentist meaning.
- Noise and copyright: illegal numbers, pi in binary.
7 comments:
I appreciate the summary, a few of those (such as allRGB) I havn't seen before.
Can I get a copy of the thesis when you've attained a degree? :)
Great! Yeah, I figured allRGB would be right up your alley, it's a good problem/solution pair.
Also, if you liked "No Noise" I made my own variant last night.
I'd be glad to share my thesis once it's done :) Maybe even before, and I could get some criticism?
It sounds like a fair trade to me. :)
Man, No Noise feels like KidPix to me. Did you ever use that program? (For some reason, I feel as if the black and white pixels should cluster together when I move the mouse, even though I know it will never be..)
Yes, I did use KidPix! Shortly after using Paint for the first time I think. Then a few years later I saw Kai's Power Goo and it blew my mind.
I'm not sure what you mean by "cluster", but if you run the sketch with wait = 0, you get a kind of smudge-tool effect.
By clustering, I mean that I feel that, on average, white pixels should cling to other white pixels, while black pixels do similarly, so, given infinite time, you'll have the screen divided in half, one side being white, and the other being black.
I know that the algorithm doesn't do this, but for some reason, I expect that behavior. :)
Hi Kyle.
I think many of us would love to read your thesis... even before it's done.
Do let us know (perhaps posting it here) if there is a draft or something to read.
best,
t
Hi Tom, my thesis is available on Google Code along with some excerpts from the composition. I'd be glad to hear your thoughts!
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