wikipedia is a bureaucracy, not a website

People tend to think of Wikipedia as a website, but as Clay Shirky points out, it's better to think of Wikipedia as a bureaucracy for arguing about edits that happens to produce a website as its byproduct.

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"artists shouldn't repeat themselves" is a new rule

nice quote from a new yorker review of twyla tharp's latest work:

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the principle that artists shouldn’t repeat themselves. It’s a new rule. Nobody told Fra Angelico that he should stop painting the Virgin. Only in the early twentieth century, with the advent of modernism, did people start saying that artists should constantly “reinvent” themselves. Implicit in this notion is the belief that with every replay, like every dub of a videotape, there will be a loss of power, of definition. That is true in some cases; Paul Taylor is now working by formula. Conversely, however, when Merce Cunningham sought and found a mechanism that would prevent him from repeating himself—a computer program called Life Forms, which suggested to him movements that he himself could not have imagined—he weakened his work, because those movements were so strange. They looked like something out of a computer.

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artist teaches robots to love punk, but will they pogo?

fiddian warman built some robots controlled by a neural network. neural networks can learn, so he's been playing them classic punk records in an attempt to turn them into robotic versions of his younger self. the robots are 2 metres tall and have the ability to pogo.

it all culminates in a gig at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in london (3-5 july 2008: bring your friends!). the artist has formed a punk band (neurotic and the pvcs) for the occasion: they're going to play to the robots and the audience and see if the robots dance. (support acts include scrotum clamp and the devil's hotpants: should be a hoot!)

if the gig sounds scary and you'd rather just discuss questions such as

In the robots we also see the possibility of a socially value free enjoyment of music – these robots have no heirs and graces, no normative social beliefs that would prohibit the enjoyment of any form of music. They don’t have cultural baggage – is their judgment objective as a result?

.. you can do so at a blog dedicated to the aesthetic and philosophical issues arising from the experiment, here.

(i hope they post videos after the event.)

link
found via networked_music_review

code_swarm - visualising the life of an open source project

check out this beautiful time-lapse visualisation:


code_swarm - Python from Michael Ogawa on Vimeo.

the creator describes it like this:

This visualization, called code_swarm, shows the history of commits in a software project. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to the code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. Both developers and files are represented as moving elements. When a developer commits a file, it lights up and flies towards that developer. Files are colored according to their purpose, such as whether they are source code or a document. If files or developers have not been active for a while, they will fade away. A histogram at the bottom keeps a reminder of what has come before.

..which is a fair description but doesn't hint at the organic beauty of it all. you get to see a software project (development of the python language, in this case) pulsate and throb like a living thing.

found at o'reilly radar

"create more value than you capture"

six words which nicely summarise what i've been thinking recently, thanks to tim o'reilly.

At O'Reilly, we always say "Create more value than you capture." All successful companies do this. Once they start capturing more value than they create, their market position erodes, and someone displaces them.

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phoenix puts mosquito-eating fish in abandoned pools to prevent west nile virus

Authorities in Arizona are stepping up a program to put mosquito-gobbling minnows into the stagnant pools of foreclosed or abandoned homes to prevent an outbreak of West Nile virus.

found via bruce sterling, who says

Man, only in 2008. They're the Ballardian empty-swimming pools of West Nile stupor-breeding death!

link to planet ark article
link to bruce sterling's blog

cory doctorow: blog = outboard brain

(via moneybites)

stabilised video collage

um. i'd like to make a music video like this. correction, i'd like someone to make one like this for me.




link
(via lifehacker)

christopher hitchens on bohemia

In every age in every successful country, it has been important that at least a small part of the cityscape is not dominated by bankers, developers, chain stores, generic restaurants, and railway terminals. This little quarter should instead be the preserve of—in no special order—insomniacs and restaurants and bars that never close; bibliophiles and the little stores and stalls that cater to them; alcoholics and addicts and deviants and the proprietors who understand them; aspirant painters and musicians and the modest studios that can accommodate them; ladies of easy virtue and the men who require them; misfits and poets from foreign shores and exiles from remote and cruel dictatorships. Though it should be no disadvantage to be young in such a quartier, the atmosphere should not by any means discourage the veteran

.


found via kottke.org
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grandmaster flash on his dad's record collection

The book kicks off with you as a kid desperate to get into your dad’s record collection. Can you talk about that time?
Oooweee. How can I explain it? My dad was highly feared, as you read in the book. He happened to be the brother to 1957 flyweight champion of the world Sandy Saddler, so he was really good with his hands. And he had some cardinal rules: Never go into the living room where the stereo is. Never touch the stereo. Never ever go into the closet where his prized possession, his records, were. Now I heard the rule, but I had this uncontrollable urge. So I would drag a chair to the closet because I was so little and the knob was kind of high. I would climb up and open up his closet. It was like gold or something. I would take out a record and put it on and just dance around the living room, and then I would try to put the record back in the same place where the record was originally living in the closet. But my father was very meticulous and he always knew it was me. So I got beat, beat, beat, and after he would beat me, next morning I’d get up, he’d get up, I’d hear him leave for work, and I’d do the same thing all over again. And it got the point that where he would beat me to almost where I was unconscious, but the next day it would be the same process. So what he would do then was take my hands and put them on a hot radiator to burn them, but of course they would heal and I would get over it and I would wait for that clink and the door slam and I would sort of go back to it again. I just had this uncontrollable urge.

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i don't know what's going on here

but i know that i like it. (the artist is yoshihiko satoh.)

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yeah, what he said

it's embarrassing to see all these writers and musicians and artists bemoaning the fact that art just got this wicked new feature: the ability to be shared without losing access to it in the first place.
- cory doctorow

link

mexican jumping bean dance party

Peter Coffin
Untitled (Symbiotic Relationship / Dance Party)
2007
Drum, Mexican jumping beans, stool, headphones, contact microphones, amplifier, effects pedal, heating pas, string lights

i'd love to know how this thing sounded! (and what a 'heating pas' is.)

link

blogging, like rock music, is usually voluntary work

here's a model. tell me where it doesn't apply, or where i haven't followed through on it far enough. tell me also if i've replicated something someone else has said without realising or remembering that that's what i'm doing.


I - VOLUNTARY WORK
1. blogging, like playing in a rock band, is voluntary work most of the time for most people.

2. like other voluntary work, it may lead to
a) Better-Paid Things Later On, or
b) burn-out.

3. like other voluntary work, it's especially likely to lead to burn-out if one's only motivation for starting is Better-Paid Things Later On.

4. as with other voluntary work many of the rewards are non-financial. instead they're things like
a) getting practice doing something: writing, or design, or analysis (for example).
b) meeting people with similar interests.
c) getting better-known in a certain field.
d) making a contribution to the rest of the world.

this last point - that blogging is some kind of contribution to the rest of the world - is least-recognised, largely because we don't think of blogging as voluntary work very often. it's not really a big part of how bloggers think about themselves at the moment.

what kind of contribution? well, that depends on what kind of work blogging is. i'd argue it's voluntary intellectual work, of at least the following (non-exclusive) varieties and maybe more:

entertainment: making people shudder enjoyably, either with amusement (lol!) or indignation (wtf!) or amazement (zomg!) or in some other way.

reporting and publicity: telling people about stuff that happened, whether one's own activities or someone or something else's.

secondhand dealing: filtering through the seething mass of stuff we call the internet for attractive and interesting items amidst the junk.

analysis: making sense of the seething mass of stuff we call current events, or the internet, or technological progress, or anything else.

archiving: keeping a bunch of similar things in one place.

rabble-rousing: motivating readers to do something or other - organise their sock drawers, for example, or form vigilante-style gangs.


II - PAID WORK
1. like playing in a rock band, blogging can be paid work some of the time for some people.

2. as with rock music, most of the practitioners who get paid produce a sea of insipidity. (why? see III - ADVERTISING, below.)

3. as with rock music, there are a few exceptions. instead of a sea of insipidity they produce a sea of wonderful things. they wear capes and we worship them as gods.

4. as with rock music, no-one agrees which practitioners produce the sea of insipidity and which produce the sea of wonderful things. there are clusters of preference which sometimes covary reliably, but that's about it.


III - ADVERTISING
1. to the degree that any blogger starts to chase advertising dollars, the quality and content of their output will more and more closely approximate that of network television.* why? because

2. advertising dollars are to network television what eucalyptus leaves are to koalas, i.e., the only available source of food. the supply of and competition for advertising dollars is the strongest evolutionary pressure on network television, and it has adapted to fit. network television is what screen-based content turns into once it's chased advertising dollars for long enough.

3. the last metaphor could be better, probably if koalas were replaced with some kind of flower.



* except, for some reason, there will be a lot more lists.

today's word is 'sonification'

today's word is sonification, a word i didn't know existed before today. according to wikipedia it's "the use of non-speech audio to convey information or perceptualize data".

the best-known examples of sonification are the geiger counter, which ticks more frequently as radioactivity increases, and medical equipment that goes ping when things are ok. or in some cases, when everything goes very very wrong.

hmm, interesting. partly because i've seen a bunch of pretty data visualisation recently, much of it via boingboing. and in some ways we can read science as the endeavour to make more and more things visible which weren't.

it's also interesting to me because as someone who uses computers to make and record sound, i spend an awful lot of time working with visual representations of sound. sometimes you can get so used to working with these visualisations of sound that you stop listening, start lining things up and drawing volume curves according to how they look.

anyway, thomas hermann's page has an overview of the field, and sonenvir are working on making a generalised software environment for data sonification. oh, and here's the international community for auditory display. (why did they have to use the word 'display', though? wasn't there a less visual word they could have used?)

wall of sound. well, of 130 radios, anyway..

Maia Urstad's ‘Sound Barrier’ is a wall of sound, or at least a wall of sound-making-devices: 130 CD- and cassette-radios.


link

(found via today and tomorrow)

'you can only feel so bad for a robot': sasha frere-jones on autotune

sasha frere-jones writes about music for the new yorker. he can be annoying: the always-interesting nico muhly, talking about one of his articles, describes the effect thus:

Articles such as SFJ’s posit music as vehicles for His Personal Excitement – the listener as the despot, sitting in the throne, waiting to be amused. This article made me, in the middle of a busy music festival, never want to listen to music again, with its cynical attitude (”such-and-such is the only such-and-such kind of such-and-such that I play” – as if Musics gain credibility by finding their way onto SFJ’s turntable or CD player or whatever.

and one day i will write something dissecting why the article NM complains about shits me so much, but for today enough of my carping! he can be interesting and entertaining too, like today's article on autotune. here's an excerpt:

..there is nothing natural about recorded music. Whether the engineer merely tweaks a few bum notes or makes a singer tootle like Robby the Robot, recorded music is still a composite of sounds that may or may not have happened in real time. An effect is always achieved, and not necessarily the one intended. Aren’t some of the most entertaining and fruitful sounds in pop—distortion, whammy bars, scratching—the result of glorious abuse of the tools?

link

it's a very abstract museum in which they show.. sound paintings

i love the way radio documentaries play with a mix of sound design and narration. radio national and bbc4 routinely play great things; i've heard good things too about radiolab and this american life but i haven't yet spent much time investigating american public radio: any pointers welcomed.

the link below is for an episode of radio national's great show the night air, guest curated by sound artist robert iolini, about museums. it's worth listening to for the ken nordine bit alone.


link


(found via the lovely speech-radio-obsessed blog speechification)

how to write an amazon review for your own book

DOES ANYONE ELSE get the feeling that a bunch of the especially-glowing reviews on amazon are written by the authors themselves? of course you do, because a bunch of them probably are.

there's a certain kind of reverent tone to some of these reviews, and it rarely fails to creep me out. why? well, i'm reminded of two different approaches to selling oneself in the dating game. approach a (for 'american') is to list one's good qualities, especially one's sense of humour, humourlessly. approach b (for 'british') is to tell everyone you are a poltroon, thus displaying a sense of humour. i'm drawing a kind of use/mention distinction here.

anyways: i'm from australia. we embody some uneasy mix of american and british ways of doing things, and i've got enough of the british sensibility to be creeped out by attempts to sell oneself too strong. i can't defend it philosophically, mind you: it's no more rational than my fondness for vegemite. but it's how i am, and it's part of why i wish the following review (for this book) had been written by the author, even though it probably wasn't:

The characters are unlikable and they behave in ways that make no sense at all. But the author is such a good writer and the story is so well told that I couldn't put it down.

now that, gentle reader, is an effective review. and if it'd been written by the author, i wouldn't mind.