modulus

First Published in Examiner.com December 20, 2012 1:28 PM MST 

By David Cox

Sensor driven devices serve expanding to all areas of everyday life. Toys are no exception. Quite ordinary toys down come complete with elaborate systems of census that enables them to not only undergo series of motion through all three dimensions in space but to have these motions recorded and replayed over time much like two-dimensional images on the screen.

The air hogs have a replay toy from SpinMasters is one such device. A rather complex system of onboard sensors enables the toy helicopter to not only fly around the room like most remote control helicopters, but also to have its flight path recorded in extremely fine detail. This means that once you perfected a flight maneuver you can have it be repeated over and over again. It’s kind of like training the helicopter to dance. The effect of doing this is quite uncanny. When I first started using the device I found myself marveling at the toy’s ability to occupy a very confined region of the living room and then to visit and then revisit areas around the room as if it “knew” or “remembered” those areas. It’s a bit unsettling.

So we live in very interesting times. These toys are interesting on another level too; they can be controlled from the touchscreens of portable smart phone and smart tablet devices like the iPhone and Atrak and other android type devices. So they are truly the marriage of smart personal wireless communications technology and sensor driven home entertainment in toy form. Sensors here, sensors there, sensors everywhere.

I wonder what it would be like to install small painting brushes or spray paint systems on these helicopters and to have them perform paintings while flying around in front of a canvas or series of pictures for pieces of paper? Or perhaps have them interrupts laser light beams and in doing so play notes on a MIDI instrument? What about have them simply perform together like a ballet, or a hiphop dance routine?

There are many creative potential uses for the small helicopters that can remember. They could in theory stay aloft forever if supplied with power, carrying cameras, carrying small payloads like money, candy, jewels, keys. And in theory at least, in time Helis could be used to assist the elderly, assist the disabled, assist everyone.

Maybe one day in the near future tiny helicopters that can remember their moves and become piloted by manual control if necessary will one day fill the skies much like sparrows do today and act as our robot companions in every aspect of life.

Here is the link to the Spinmasters Air Hog Heli-Replay website.

Official blurb:

Heli Replay

Fly, record and play back your flight path with the all-new Heli Replay! With 3 ways to fly, you control the aerial action. Choose between a remote control or download the free Flight Control App and start flying straight from your Smartphone. Use onscreen controls to fly the Replay, or activate the accelerometer and tilt your phone in the direction you want to fly! The onboard electronic control system automatically prevents unstable movement, resulting in an exceptionally smooth and precise flight experience. Master the art of flight and replay it time and time again with the Air Hogs Heli Replay!

Compatible Smart Devices

Apple (iOS) Devices

iPhone 3GS

iPhone 4/4S

iPod touch (4th Gen)

iPad 1, 2, 3

Android Devices

HTC: Evo 3D, Sensation XL, Desire, Hero

Samsung: Galaxy S2X, Note

Motorola: Razr XT910, Atrix

April 10, 2012 12:03 PM MST

Das Netz review

by David Cox

http://www.t-h-e-n-e-t.com/ www.expolar.de/kybernetik/

Lutz Dammbeck’s film Das Netz (The Net) provocatively and methodically connects the dots which link the CIA, their covert mind-control LSD research, the anti-war LSD fuelled counterculture, the personal computer, and the Internet with Ted Kaszynski, the man many know as the “UNABOMBER.”

The filmmaker’s own fascination with this character is itself a curious thing – we see the filmmaker, detective-style, tracking down his leads until some kind of broad stroke picture can emerge of who this man is and what might have motivated his bomb campaign during the 1990s. The use of first person narrative – a hand drawing with a pen on paper a bunch of named circles and lines connecting them of who was who and who was connected to what – is interspersed with interviews with key people. This is a gripping and disturbing story and something of the Euro-sceptic flipside to the official California school of WIRED magazine’s breathless technological deterministic view of “tech” always being good, always making things better, and always representing the best that the USA has to offer.

Europeans, particularly the very highly educated ones, have long viewed the USA and its fascination with its own technology, mythology, and machinery with nothing if not an ambivalent scepticism, for no other reason that even Western Europe saw itself on the receiving end (like it or not) every day since 1945 of white goods, cars, machines, TV, radio, music, and culture in general.

Das Netz revisits very, very familiar ground for those historians and media archaeologists like myself who have a vested interest in keeping the story “clean,” in which the good guys (artists, philosophers like Leary, Brand, Weiner, Fuller) are on one side and the bad guys (the evil CIA, the US Military, project MK Ultra et al) are on the other.

This must have been particularly keenly felt in the Eastern Bloc countries, where not only was the evidence for the USA’s own relentless push to influence the West in most stark evidence by its absence in the East, but the view reinforced daily via Pravda and other official channels that the USA was corrupting Europe with its relentless technological advances in any way it could. Growing up in England I remember vividly the ambivalence which surrounded the very fact of US domination. We loved it and we hated it. We loved it because we hated it. And we hated it because we loved it. Like a stern mom, the USA was always there, always “on” and always would be.

And here within the USA’s own borders is the auto-sceptic, a man with a Polish name, Kaszynski, the loner, the isolated woodsman holed up in his distant rural cabin dispatching random and deadly pipe bombs in the form of booby-trapped parcels to unsuspecting scientists. Why did he do it? Because he was sick of seeing the world go to hell in a hand-basket at the hands of self-styled captains of techno-industry, science and technology, advocating their responsibility as scientists to prevent the world from losing its direction. Or something like that. Read the manifesto.

Kaszynski as an idea, more than the man himself appear to be a source of deep fascination for Dammbeck, almost an obsession. Men will travel all their lives to film themselves looking for other men with whom they see something to closely identify with. The obsessed goes in search of the obsessed. This double fascination (which becomes fascinating to outsiders like the viewers, which is to say, us) is met in equal measure by understandable revulsion and bitter resentment by his victims and those who know them when Dammbeck finally meets them and interviews them on miniDV. The laptop and the miniDV have allowed this type of essay-verite to happen at all and this fact alone is worth a mention.

It is almost embarrassing to see Dammbeck interview those who clearly are totally and utterly mystified and angered as to why anyone would reserve anything but total contempt for Kaszynski and his ‘tactics’. How can Dammbeck maintain anything like a level head as his interviewees squirm uncomfortably when asked about the subject?

Whatever Dammbeck’s motivation (to get just this sort of ‘edgy’ footage presumably), to ram this subject home to those most affected smacks of a kind of intellectual hubris, (if not outright sadism) akin to sensationalist TV reality shows masking the antics of urban police making arrests for the cameras. If he were an academic, as I am, I’d call into question his ethics. I don’t like watching it, and maybe that’s the point, I’m not supposed to. It is like the watch-me-no-turn-me-off double take of lurid explicit porn. It is like watching a filmed accident or assassination. It is like having your nose rubbed in your own worst home truths, and I think this latter point is really at the heart of Dammbeck’s modus operandi. He wants us to watch him doing this to those people. How answerable are these people anyway? All that links some of them to Kaszynski is the fact that they were mentioned in the New York Times about their work, and had their hands blown off by his bombs. These ones are at least still around to talk to cameras. Others were not so fortunate.

Dammbeck’s status as East German film-maker might partly explain this brand of interrogation as reportage. East Germany, like much of the Soviet Bloc for decades elevated its top scientists and thinkers via state backed programs and university postings, never thinking to separate an individual’s genius from the long-term goals and aims of the State. All states do this of course, but the Soviet bloc made totally official any gifted student’s role in the eventual planning and running of the Communist (state capitalist) regime.

Kaszynski, the ultimate once-upon-a-time showcase poster-boy mathematical intellectual turned woodsman and survivalist isolationist-killer was himself the bitter fruit of the US’s university elite trained cold war and space race military/intelligence system. Like many of his counterparts in the Eastern Bloc, his fate and his status as LSD guinea pig was kept top secret. His decline into a Conradian heart of darkness, that sovereign place so few emerge from once well on their way was also an official secret.

So many radical and cutting edge European technological developments found a fertile home with ample finances in the USA after world war two, and these included liquid fuel rocketry (Germany) which led to the US dominance of space, LSD (Switzerland) from migraine treatment to paradigm buster. Even the idea at least of the personal computer had some of its origins in Europe. The USA took them from Europe and developed them in the service of its own interests.

Dammbeck uncovers the ways in which the government and business tried to unravel the mysteries of what makes human beings become fascistic and how this project was linked ultimately to ideas surrounding cybernetics, distributed systems such as Buckminster Fuller’s engineering, and the work of those who developed ARPANET, now the Internet. Nice work if you can get it and you can still get it if you try. Look no further than Stanford, Harvard, and the many spin-off firms of Silicon Valley and the entire mind-set of Northern California. This place is not just a geographical place, it is an entire mindset which keeps defining the way the future ends up looking and feeling for better or worse, and much of it has to do with countless fortunes in the form of cold-war and space-race dollars pouring through the pockets of tripped out hippies, freaks, and weirdos. Today the military and the entertainment sectors are running the show. The military today, as Bruce Sterling puts it, was once run like General Motors, but is now run like Microsoft. Competitors are tokens, a joke, and it now can shape both planet earth and outer space itself in its image.

It is a genuine tragedy that Dammbeck has not ever experienced the acid tests of the 1960s. I often lament that I never could take Keysey’s bus into the other dimension and then build a world out of experiments in media to try to rectify what the military had done.

Every time I see the film (and I have seen it over and over again, fascinated by the very fact of its existence) I ask myself: how can a man make a film about a 1960s counterculture that he clearly has no direct experience of? Should someone like myself, so enamoured of that story and with so much invested in that story having a happy outcome let its telling be so easily equated with its ugly flipside? Cannot the separation – that art and experimentation are fundamentally at odds with the ways they get co-opted by the forces of evil be preserved? Should not all of us that have a stake in this story make sure that this is the official version? I am outraged that Dammbeck has made me have to rethink the whole narrative.

How can Dammbeck draw us into his pursuit of one man by reminding us of a time that was self-evidently needed and important (the 1960s counterculture) and then set himself up as so confidently a judge that set of relations by implying that he is willing to factor in at least some of the ideas of the Unabomber? Only Stewart Brand dares to concede that maybe technology can, as the Unabomber says in his Manifesto, “go too far.”

The nature / culture divide like that of the city vs. country has underpinned a long standing cultural “problem” in Germany since it became a state in the 1800s. Mensch / Natur / Technik is the triumvirate which haunts western Europe and yet holds out as its best hope.

The horrors of technology fused with skewed picturesque national folklore were more than evident during the period of the rise of Nazism. The Stuka and the cuckoo clock were fused in the minds of most pro-Nazi Germans as one and the same type of imagined techno-kitsch utopia. Technology was viewed by fascists as totally neutral when the pseudo-science behind its obscene genocidal uses were fully and wilfully applied.

This familiarity with the dark ease with which technology can become so easily fused with picturesque folklore is nothing if not characteristic of the ways in which “geeks,” “hippies,” and “cyberpunks” bandy about computers alongside fantasies of worlds populated by hobbits, goblins, and flying hackers like NEO in The Matrix. Is crypto-fascism at the heart of any kind of technological fetishism? I’d have to say no, in my experience, but there can often be detected the whiff of danger from places which seemed innocent enough in retrospect. Like the Apollo missions which so easily now have become the race to fill space with weapons and “rods from gods.” Like the proliferation of nuclear weapons which can now be carried in briefcases and which threaten whole cities and the trade of which brings organised crime and fanatical religious cults into the same trade arena.

Dammbeck reminds me of that East European (Polish?) one learns about on the “making of doco” on the DVD, who saw Easy Rider over and over again, making it nothing less than a personal philosophy, a crutch to hold oneself up on as one endured the misery of a life under bleak drab authoritarianism. Until the day they finally meet Dennis Hopper and declare this fact breathlessly to their hero, only having lived the best possibilities of the Californian techno-utopia through the filter of a story once-removed. In Europe we have all had to live the American dream by proxy, even those of us who get to one day actually get to live here, the answer to a dream, we can never have lived the Californian sea of possibilities like the locals have, and do everyday.

Like Wim Wenders and his depressing if accurate and empowering view in Paris Texas of the USA as a wasteland of lost aimless wanderers, only just barely keeping it together. Kaszynski is a bit like Wender’s own Ulysses character in that film played by Harry Dean Stanton. Stanton’s Travis wanders in the desert, lost, alienated from all, but somehow finally at ease with his outsider status, replete with ‘white-trash’ icon, the red baseball cap. One learns in the film during the ill-fated reunion between Travis and his ex-wife that in a moment of madness, he had chained her to their trailer home’s bed before setting it alight and walking away, to prevent her ever leaving him.

Like John Wayne’s unhinged Ethan Edwards of the Searchers Kaszynski as Dammbeck paints him is the misunderstood ranter of truths told too strongly for the world to bear. He is that most popular of figures in Europe – the dark flipside to the American dream – the uprooted and self-exiled angel of death, who (like the dead Comanche Edwards shoots in both eyes to deny his passage to heaven) is condemned forever to ‘wander between the winds’.

I am fascinated by Das Netz for reasons I cannot explain. I love how Dammbeck carefully articulates the delicate cross-pollination of ideas which in the 60s and 70s and 80s spun off into counterculture forms like the amazing “acid tests” of Ken Kesey, the Whole Earth Catalog of Stewart Brand, the minimalist art and media movements of the late 1960s and 1970s and the fine art and experimental film and multimedia projects of Fluxus and others in New York and San Francisco later became reified into the big business model which dominates life as we know it today. I love this story partly because I see myself as having had a small role in it, being old enough to remember the time before the personal computer (my office at work is filled with mothballed Macs and PCs – I cannot bear to see them wasted) and the Internet, both played a crucial role in my development as an artist and as a filmmaker. But so did the myths of the 50s, 60s, and 70s anti-war- and anti-authority-driven countercultures. Where these two poles fuse and overlap and the points on the mind-map are many is where anyone who uses a computer and a camera should find a place for themselves, or risk living (in my view) outside of history.

When art and experimentation get big backing from the biggest players, the innocent art film, music, and computer freaks then have to leave town to let the big dogs piss all over where the artists once called their home. That once sacred place then reeks with the corrupted putrefaction of the purely commercially minded and Republican-backed military. That putrid reek now offends the whole world and has found its way into the cosmos itself.

If Kaszynski is not responsible for the horrors of a world gone mad with technological growth, he is painted by Dammbeck as that world’s most convenient scapegoat, the one who the whole time “told us so” whether or not we deserved to hear it, or indeed, risked getting killed by his bombs if we refused to. You don’t have to believe in technological determinism in order to condemn those who advocate its rapid and total removal in the violent way Kaszynski did. An utter impossibility anyway, as the hippies, the bushmen of the Kalahari, and the Amish alike have discovered. Better to forge an uneasy alliance and have your isolation with a bit of say, broadband, thrown in. Sacred isolation with a microwave oven. The Amish with his cell-phone (fact).

Seeing a film about the Kesey-led acid tests from someone who (I’m assuming) did not take part, and may in all fact have not fathomed the deeper, more subtle, cultural implications of this revolutionary set of gestures is like watching an up close and personal film about dolphins by someone who does not swim, nor sees the need to. It is thus based on a kind of bad faith that somehow this point does not matter, and most offensively to me, should not.

I think the film holds itself together extremely well as a film, is well made with a kind of knowing self-reflexivity (lots of shots of the laptop screen of QuickTime movies playing) and in parts very playful and deeply insightful as to the broader socio-cultural results of a lifetime of post-war technological changes which have led to the globalisation of Western Hegemony.

Das Netz revisits very, very familiar ground for those historians and media archaeologists like myself who have a vested interest in keeping the story “clean,” in which the good guys (artists, philosophers like Leary, Brand, Weiner, Fuller) are on one side and the bad guys (the evil CIA, the US Military, project MK Ultra et al) are on the other. Das Netz reveals that the truth could easily be that the two sides of the art-freak/CIA coin are really not so easily separated after all. Like the complementary opposites of the yin/yang, there’s a piece of the dark side in the light, and vice versa. Better to understand this most bitter home-truth late than never.

What is ultimately most fascinating at the end of the day about Das Netz is the way in which it so carefully makes its connections between cold-war-space-race-LSD-cybernetics-ARPANET-counterculture, without ever claiming (as most US documentary filmmakers would) or declaring any emotional or political stakes in the views or aims of that 1960s counterculture. Most cyberpunks, freaks and computer geeks I know of my generation hold this period in such high esteem and know from deep inside something of this rich legacy to have already made these connections for themselves and to continue to do so to this day.

Others, like many I share Caltrain with in the bike car to Silicon Valley every day, could “totally give a shit” and read their Neal Stephenson novels and absolutely love money and the stock exchange and were right behind the dot-com period, and some even back the war in Iraq and willingly went to join the “war on terror.”

Maybe it is actually these people that need to see the film more than me, as it is their bad faith, which is today the problem and a very major one indeed, not Dammbeck’s and most certainly not mine.

The trailer for “Das Netz” can be viewed here

DVDs can be purchased online from othercinemadvd.com

By David Cox

I’ve been playing in bars and clubs for years now as TELESCAPE and one of the biggest barriers to keyboard gigs is the sheer size and wieght of the average MIDI keyboard. And sure there are those small ‘laptop’ style keyboards aimed at DJs who want to throw in a few bass drones during a set, or kick in a few samples here and there. But for actual keyboardists, who play keys for a living, having a keyboard that matches up to the MIDI controllers put out by manufacturers like M-Audio at any scale other than full size is virtually impossible to find.

IK Multimedia

Until now.

iRig KEYS is the first ultra-slim and highly portable universal MIDI controller keyboard for iPhone, iPod touch, iPad and Mac/PC. iRig KEYS connects directly to the iOS device 30 pin dock connector or the USB port on your Mac/PC. It features 37 velocity-sensitive mini-keys — 3 full octave range plus one note, taking a minimal space on your desktop and can easily fit in a backpack or a carry-on bag.

What I like about it too is that it is solidly built, and looks pretty sharp also. The level of customization is good, and enables at least as much control as its full-size brothers.

iRig KEYS is Core MIDI and USB class compliant for a true plug-and-play experience both with iOS devices or Mac/PC, with no additional app, software or drivers to be installed to have it go and running. For total mobility, iRig KEYS is also an ultra-low power consumption unit.

I’ve been using mine since I recieved it for casual use with Garageband on the iPad and laptop, as well as with SampleTank with the iPhone, and it just works every time. Because when hooked up to an iPhone/iPod touch/iPad, it can be powered by the device, and for longer playing sessions it can be powered by the available USB port. When connected to a Mac/PC, the USB port powers it.

iRig KEYS is the ultimate portable keyboard players and producers companion. Use it any time and anywhere inspiration strikes you… simply hook it up to your device or computer and start playing. You can use iRig KEYS for live performance or for songwriting and composition with the included app and software or with a multitude of other MIDI compatible instruments and recorders on any iOS, MacOS or Windows system.

A solid keyboard, that fits in your backpack for plug and play keyboard fun anywhere.

Features

37 velocity-sensitive mini-keys (3 full octaves range plus one note)

Modulation and pitch bend wheels

Volume/Data knob (assignable)

Octave/Program Up/Down back-lit, soft-touch buttons

SET button to store and recall 4 different customized setups

Input for an optional sustain or expression pedal

Core MIDI (iOS) and USB class compliant (Mac/PC) – plug and play

Powered from the iOS device or Mac/PC USB

Comes with SampleTank FREE iOS and iGrand Piano FREE apps (download from the App store)

Comes with free Mac/PC virtual instrument: SampleTank 2 L (download from IK User Area)

A small controller with great features

For maximum playing comfort and versatility, iRig KEYS includes modulation and pitch-bending wheels, plus an input for an optional sustain or expression pedal that accommodates any virtuosic playing style, all housed in a sleek ultra-compact durable package.

Here is the iRig Keys official website:

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irigkeys/

By David Cox

I’ve been using GuitarJack for years now.

This beautiful device has been my constant partner whenever I need something to play my traveler guitar along with my iPhone. On the bus, in a plane, in the backseat of a car on my way to a gig. Its built like jewelry. Its solid, like a well machined piece from a camera or a tripod.

Now with the new iPhone 5 a new model has been released.

GuitarJack Model 2 is Compatible with New iOS Devices Using

Apple’s Lightning Connection Adapter

Los Altos, CA – November 7, 2012 – Sonoma’s GuitarJack Model 2 audio

interface for iPhone(R), iPad(R) and iPod touch(R) is compatible with

Apple’s new iPhone 5, new iPod touch, iPad mini, and fourth generation

iPad using Apple’s Lightning to 30-pin adapter cable. Because the

lightning adapter is purely digital, GuitarJack’s sound quality

remains incredibly dynamic and clear.

GuitarJack connects a wide range

of instruments, microphones, and other audio hardware to iOS devices

via 1/4 inch instrument and 1/8 inch stereo mic/line inputs and an 1/8

inch stereo/line output. Helping musicians achieve the best sound

quality on iOS, GuitarJack includes superior components, input level

control with 60 dB of gain plus 12 dB pad for 72 dB of adjustment,

configurable Lo-Z and Hi-Z modes, and more. GuitarJack Model 2 works

great with Sonoma’s iOS apps, which are compatible with iOS 6, as well

as third party apps like GarageBand. GuitarJack is Made in the U.S.A.

http://www.sonomawireworks.com/guitarjack/guide/#devices

About Sonoma Wire Works: Incorporated in 2003 and headquartered in Los

Altos, California, Sonoma Wire Works develops products and services

that help musicians enjoy playing, recording and sharing music. Sonoma

Wire Works’ flagship product is RiffWorks guitar recording software

with InstantDrummer, effects, RiffLink online song collaboration, and

the RiffWorld.com online community. These products have received

multiple awards for performance and innovation, including a NAMM Best

in Show Trendsetter Award. FourTrack, InstantDrummer, GuitarTone and

TaylorEQ iPhone Apps, AudioCopy/AudioPaste for iOS, StudioTrack

multitrack for the iPad, and GuitarJack are also developed by Sonoma.

Drum products by Sonoma include the DrumCore and KitCore plugins and

DrummerPack library, as well as the Discrete Drums multitrack drum

library. http://www.sonomawireworks.com

2012 Sonoma Wire Works. All rights reserved. RiffWorks and the RW

Logo, RiffWorld, StudioTrack and the StudioTrack iPad App Logo,

FourTrack and the FourTrack iPhone App Logo, GuitarTone and the

GuitarTone Logo, GuitarJack and the GuitarJack logo, AudioCopy,

AudioPaste, MAPI, DrummerPack, KitPack and Discrete Drums are

trademarks of Sonoma Wire Works. DrumCore and KitCore are registered

trademarks of Sonoma Wire Works. iPod, iPhone and iPad are trademarks

of Apple Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. All other

trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Reviewers rave about GuitarJack’s sound quality:

“GuitarJack’s sound quality is impeccable with no discernable noise.”

– Rolling Stone

“What makes this unit really stand out is the sound quality: using its

own A-D and D-A conversion and high-quality input circuitry, the

GuitarJack presents a crisp, clean sound, which has a lot more life

and vitality than that of most iOS guitar interfaces.” – Sound on

Sound

“Better, cleaner, more dynamic and more reliably useable.” –

ipadcreative.com

“Deeper, more resonant guitar tone that isn’t competing with

background hiss.” – big-geek.com

“GuitarJack’s sound quality is the highest of any iOS interface I’ve

used…GuitarJack stood out in sheer dynamic range and low noise, and

it seemed especially lively in the high ends, whereas many interfaces

seem to dull this down” – iheartguitarblog.com

“What struck me most was how clean the guitar tones were.” –

Musicappblog.com

“GuitarJack 2 provides a louder and clear sound to your guitar tone.”

– Mental Radiation Films

More GuitarJack sound quality comparisons:

http://www.sonomawireworks.com/guitarjack/guide/#sound-quality

Piano Software for iPad

Many’s the time I’ve been playing live piano in bars, nightclubs and settings with my ensemble TELESCAPE with live projections of silent films when I’ve wondered; “if only I wasn’t tied to this enormous Stienway Grand Piano!”

The lovely thing about real pianos is their luscious sound, but the downside is definitely the fact that they can weigh thousands of pounds. God forbid that I would actually have to move one of these enormous whales from gig to gig. And my fender rhodes is great and I always feel exactly like Ray Manzarek from the Doors when I play ‘Riders on the Storm” – sideburns and all.

The sheer scale and mass of pianos is always going to be the thing that gets in the way. Its now a staple of classic comedy to see an upright piano hit someone on the head at full force and demolish itself into pieces, or to roll down a flight of stairs as in that classic Laurel and Hardy movie to get a sense of how unwieldy they can be. Keith Emerson once spun around with one 360 degrees on a rotating stage rig to get attention, but that’s going way too far. That was the 1970s and such things were normal. There has to be a better way.

In recent years, portable pianos, digital pianos have put paid to the need for such heavy weightlifting. I’ve often wished I could just plug in a MIDI keyboard to my iPad to have a solid, real-sounding proper piano sound instead of being ball-and-chained to something that is the size and wieght of a wall safe or a smart car. Well along has come the IK Multimedia iGrand Piano for iPad to solve just this very problem with its 17 true-stereo, concert-quality pianos!

iGrand Piano offers a virtual gallery of sampled pianos including grands, baby grands, uprights and specialty pianos such as a detuned saloon piano and a vintage gramophone piano. All the pianos were meticulously captured via high-definition sampling across multiple velocities, and offer true-stereo sound, extremely low latency, and a level of playability and expressiveness that’s on par with the best sampled pianos on the Mac and Windows platforms. iGrand Piano is the premiere iPad piano app, unparalleled when it comes to sound quality and variety.

Each of the 17 pianos can be adjusted via seven different real-time parameters including Volume, Ambience, Lid (positioning), Brightness, Transpose, Tuning and Release. These parameters can also be mapped to external MIDI controllers. iGrand Piano supports Virtual MIDI and MIDI program change.

IK Multimedia offers two excellent options for playing and controlling the instruments in iGrand Piano, including iRig® KEYS, a portable 3-octave MIDI controller for iOS and Mac/PC; and iRig® MIDI, its CoreMIDI interface for iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Also, registered owners of iRig KEYS or iRig MIDI get to unlock an additional bonus piano inside iGrand Piano instantly.

In addition to its world-class sounds, iGrand Piano provides an onboard recorder with overdubbing, punch-in, quantize and a large visual metronome with a tap tempo feature. Recordings can be exported as WAV or m4a audio files using file sharing, e-mail and copy function.

For onscreen playing, the app features two keyboard views: one zoomed out, showing the entire 88-keys; and one zoomed-in, showing a 2-octave keyboard with larger keys, which slides to cover different ranges.

Price and Availability

iGrand Piano is now available at the App Store (www.itunes.com/appstore) for the price of $19.99. Purchasers of iGrand Piano get a selection of eight top-quality pianos (including one that’s unlocked after registering the app), and can add the other nine through in-app purchase of the Piano Expansion pack. A free version of iGrand Piano is also available, featuring one high-quality grand piano sound, and users have the option to add more pianos to it later.

IK Multimedia plans to release an iPhone version soon.

For more information:

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/igrand

August 8, 2012 2:18 PM MST

Cities of the Future

Twelve Years ago my partner Molly Hankwitz and I wrote the following tract about the dynamism of contemporary cities as depicted by popular culture then. It seems the more things change, the more they stay the same!

by David Cox and Molly Hankwitz

Urban space today is a site of unparalleled change, alteration and dynamism. The impact of globalised systems of economic power, mediated by electronics, have lent the contemporary city a mutable aspect. Cities seem to seethe with the potential for self growth, grown organically from the material that is the media age. No-one it would seem has a strong handle on where contemporary cities are going. Gone are the heady days of certainty which thrust skyscrapers out of a landscape of mining and manufacturing. These are the fluid and liquid city days.

We are all makers of the landscape of the imagination. Confronted by political dissent, the powers that be are clinging to models of urbanism which do not fit those employed by often victorious protestors. Against the physicality of retail and point-of-sale, and the protectionism of a trade focused idea of the city as mall, is posited the playful theatricality of popular protest, connected by cellphone, uplinked to the internet, sharing its anti-globalist message with the world.

The very idea of the city is itself up for grabs. Against a trouble-free paradise for shoppers policed by men dressed like black Tranformer robots, the protesters proposed a concept of the city as a site for popular expression and political celebration on a scale not seen for decades.

It is communications and media technology which mediate these new often provisional spaces, the media of accessible camcorders,the internet and mobile phones as tools of organisation and mobilisation. The battle in Seattle and its recent Washington echo were partly struggles to attain a kind of ‘city of the imagination’ and a city of ‘global liberty’. They are echoed in festival culture around the world, at provisional city events like “Burning Man”, in squats and reclaimed spaces utilised by the rave and techno underground.

By ferrels, by artists, by culture jammers. reclaimed spaces utilised by the rave and techno underground. The quest for free space holds a special place in the popular imagination and has been depicted in different ways in many films over the years. Against the background of a tear gas and rubber bullet street conflict for the soul of the “real” city is a scrim of mainstream media sign making in the form of popular entertainment. In movies, and TV the contemporary screen city is a place where buildings can morph at will into transluscent jelly, can alter their physical dimensions in response to the emotions of those around them. These are cities which overlap seamlessly with the desires of their occupants. From New Babylon of the Situationists, through the ‘plug-in’ city of Archigram through to the architecture of contemporary urban protest – squats, share houses, artist collectives, micro cinemas, reclaimed land, altered and appropriated spaces. Here are new types of cities; bristling with cameras, obsessed with surveillance, power, and the absolute unquestionable soveriegnty of the affluent individual.

Films like “Contact”, “Mission to Mars”, “Falling Down”, “Sliver”, “Heat”, “X-Men”, and “The Matrix” depict structures and matter suffering a crisis of integrity. Computer graphics render solid surfaces transparent, fluid and mercurial. People in these spaces look at the world around them and their own bodies as completely made over. They are transformed for us by the changes around them, as we are by those around us. Flying cars are a reality today. Buildings made of foam and buildings made of information are now arguably as important as anything made out of concrete steel and glass. Soon buildings will be grown like plants.

New paradigms are needed for these cities of the future. Our architectural and design and cinematic present echoes a time prior when architects and designers were imagining a city of interchangable components alongside a constant climate of urban threat. Signage and billboards are programmable like computer screens, and every strategy of the streetwise is instantly appropriated by the commercial sector to target some new perceived demographic.

The ideas of contemporary designers and writers in film, the internet and new media are offering new insights into what the city of the future might be. And a corporate shell of clean and affluent living is the farthest thing from their minds. This is the future. Here are the cities.

July 31, 2012 9:51 PM MST

David Cox: How much is the NA really about the impact of sensor technology on cities and people? Is it not the look and feel of these technologies on a largely unprepared population?

Molly Hankwitz: James Bridle is talking about emerging, increasingly ubiquitous zones between human and machine. Sensor technology is controversial and misunderstood. Cameras, processors and sensors are built in everywhere these days so they are getting response and he talks about machines actively melding with the city, which is ‘sentience’ an idea which starts to frame urban space in a wireless and augmented world at the point of the interface where the body ends and machine begins. Ubiquitous sensing “makes contact” thus with human subjects. I like his idea of exploring “machine vision” and “machine intelligence” as an urban experience.

In his talk, “Waving at the Machines”, Bridle reflects upon facades, parks, streets. He talks about Street View in particular and the elimination of restricted areas from view; how Paul McCartney blocks Google Street View’s access to his house. American citizens may start wanting “privacy settings” for Street View. The idea of making Google’s map an interrogated, non-map is so appealing. Google is deterministic and totalizing. This is to be avoided. I think Bridle is talking about the reverse panopticon when he acknowledges control, and also denies its importance. Americans, certainly, hate the idea of losing their privacy, but not all cultures are so concerned. Theoretically, the map/non-map would be loaded with cultures. Look at Germany. You can shut off Street View there.

National/military/industrial “nets” for surveillance seem acceptable when sugar-coated with Google Earth’s “freedom” to “see” but they need to be resisted, and they aren’t just American militarization. SIVE covers the Straits of Gibraltar, northern Africa, and Mediterranean countries.

William J. Mitchell wrote, after Foucault, surveillance “teaches us to behave as if we are being watched” and this starts to have its affect on social reality. Americans are gregarious people, so some of us get out and play with the surveillance cameras, others parade on Facebook or YouTube. Facebook, especially, supports a ‘me, me’ mentality. One is almost required to bare-all-to-be-real. These spaces are starting to exert substantial authority in real life though, as for example, more and more American lawyers now utilize Facebook information in divorce cases. Filmmaker Dominic Gagnon has commented in an interview I did on his films, about more and more people worldwide caught up in monocultural thinking. He’s French Canadian. The films I was interested in use personal webcam testimonial-type ranting from YouTube as their found footage and talk about subjectivity. (You can find that interview, which I wrote for Craig Baldwin, in Otherzine 22, here.)

Bridle positions himself as a universal subject and there really is no such thing, even though Google Earth would like “everyone” to think there is. There is nothing “universal” about the way the Internet is working today, nor how it was ever set up.

You can get out and flirt with the cameras as the Surveillance Camera Players have done, or get out and play with Art Against Algorithms in San Francisco to protest the pattern-detecting cameras coming in to our transportation system. As far as Web 2.0 is concerned, it’s the second wave, but, routinely our identities are scanned for ideas and information. Bridle sort of warns against thinking of surveillance as “creepy” and maybe he is right.Throughout the ages, inventors have made machines and inflicted them on humans. Industries have bought in and adopted machines and formed themselves through them. Dada artists dealt with their experience of industrialization through art and that’s what is occurring now.

David Cox: Is this not the “shock of the new” in audiovisual form?

Molly Hankwitz: Artists will respond to ubiquity of networks and devices and to the militarization of urban experience on a variety of levels and in different cultural contexts. London-based Proboscis’ designs a mobile software platform for public authoring of urban history. This work recognizes the ubiquity of devices as a positive condition and utilizes ubiquity to distribute public comment. Creative make-up is developed as British art to confuse facial recognition software as shown in Bridle’s talk. Hugo Ball might have done that. From another perspective, the New Aesthetic should connect to hacker culture more. Hackers often want a way out of the “seamless.” This subject of “machine vision” could become even more interesting that way.

Another idea I liked in “Waving at the Machines” was the technological “after image” left by machines sensing their electronic presence in some of the maps Bridle made while walking around London. It’s an “afterimage” like in photography that’s purely electronic; purely a function of the sensor tracing its own sensing. If Bridle gets further into locative media, he will leave his desktop for good. Given our surveillance society, I enjoy thinking about machines tracking each other and the possibility that they might eventually consume each other this way, instead of us. I find it comforting.

Long ago, digital architect Greg Lynn, observed that 3D modeling space was composed of computer-generated pieces called NURBs, which looked blobby. They were curvilinear form over quantities of Cartesian space. He then theorized that NURBs, a basic computer-generated building block of 3D space, could become a building block for a future architecture and used them to construct amorphous designs. This was the vision to use 3D computing softwares for architecture, beyond Auto Cad. This insight on the part of Lynn revolutionized architecture in ways which we have only just started to understand and now we are grappling with energy efficiency and climate change, where sensor technologies can play a major role. Many design aesthetics today recognize the crisis of a dwindling sustainability of planet Earth. Sensors help to locate structural and environmental data and to restore balance.

David Cox: Archimedia (collaboration between David Cox and Molly Hankwitz focusing on the overlap and interplay between Media, Technology, Urban Planning and Architecture) came up with an idea we called “archifracturing”. What is “archifracturing” and how does it relate to the NA?

Molly Hankwitz: You might have guessed that its meaning is still emerging. (smile) ‘artefact’–material decline in a digital image, ‘fracture’–breaking, splitting.. architecture- form, permanence. We were listening to “Waving at the Machines” and looking at Bridle’s samples of “glitches” and “pixellated” images and we connected them to popular CGI where material architecture is disintegrating, being destroyed, pulsating and dissolving into particles. Other times it’s about bodies having many parts, as if the networked self has become flesh. Inception, Tower Heist, 2012. In these films, lots of huge flat planes of glass granulate into dust and whole floors of office furniture slide and hurtle through space, or architecture represents psychological space as infinite simultaneously eroding structures in someone’s memory.

The graphic design that Bridle has picked upon is more like an accidental tearing or disruption in the images thorough artefacting, pixellation disturbing what would otherwise be perfect. I’ve never been a fan of illustrating such things as ‘tearing’ and ‘renting’. Famous models wearing expensive rags, but in this case, it’s kind of cool fakery, rustic. As if we are tired of ‘slick’ and going backwards. Lego bricks. 3D Lego ideas. Bridle references the influence of Minecraft.

Archifracture points to the metaphor of dissolution and disturbance in visual form. It could be interpreted as societal and economic breakdown, disintegration of surface, collapse, decay, erosion; degeneration, or a stand in for ubiquity, when the pieces are thousands. Not in a scary way, but as a digital metaphor. The architecture is digital, so its “permanence” as an idea, at least in terms of images and computer-generation, is immaterial and its archifracturing is part of it. Because what is material can so easily appear to be fluid, in the process of dissolution, malleability; sometimes shattering. It’s industrial modernity, again, this time as the effect of digital.

Bridle gives an example in the Telehouse West building, a seven story, data center in London which bears a facade of tiles, in shades of grey which appear to break down the surface of this building, itself an expression of networked space. The architects called it a “disturbance” when asked. In modern art there was asymmetry, a disturbance of symmetry. As far as “disturbance” designed into an architecture facade’s tile pattern? Brilliant. The solid is melting into air.

David Cox: Why does James Bridle insist upon the existence of render ghosts?

Molly Hankwitz: Render ghosts may be those caught in the networked culture who “lived” virtually within it. I don’t know. Are they cast off avatars, molted selves in the ether? My sense is that they might be an “imagined population” along the lines of Benedict Anderson, or the speculative citizens for a city like Dubai, who never moved in!

(smiles)

David Cox: Why do we need to invent specters in this high-tech of all possible worlds?

Molly Hankwitz: I can only suggest that invented specters are not necessarily conscious and may just represent a vulnerability or insecurity about identity that permeates culture because of theft, precarity, celebrity, mobility. Nowadays, Web 2.0 is underwritten by code-driven algorithmic ‘bots’ scanning our data and we can’t be sure who’s doing it. At the same time, as Geert Lovink pointed out in Eurozine recently, there’s a growing interest in netizens increasingly telling more personal details about themselves online, as if it makes us more “human” to do this. An abundance of human faces in Skype, Linked in, Facebook and profiles pages populate Web 2.0., significant difference from the 90s when people were disinclined to show themselves and made up false identities. Now its common. The Internet of People is a very recent international project which will bring social steering through design to the Internet of Things.

David Cox: The ‘cloud’ seems to have spawned new types of special ‘shed’ type buildings that house server farms and are largely uninhabited but for the engineers that tend the servers – what is the significance of this new combination – the myth of the ‘cloud’ on the one hand, and the large ‘sheds’ on the other, as James Bridle discusses in his talk “Waving at the Machines”?

Molly Hankwitz: Data centers are the physical equipment of ‘the cloud’ manifesting in cities and suburbs as hulking sheds with several floors of mainframe-type server space, air conditioned and rented to telecommunications companies. The Telehouse West building, we talked about earlier. One Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles is another, a completely uninhabitable building originally designed as multi-story office space by Skidmore Owens and Merrill now turned server space. It’s exterior (with a regular grid of windows) is nothing more than a sheath for the equipment. The scale of global networks is emerging out of cities themselves as built form. The real instantiating in the virtual. A lot could be done with this kind of physical transparency, in design. But, the ‘cloud’ is also inside everyone’s handheld device and connects us to our data.

There is some advantage to software stored in ‘the cloud’ because there is no need for manual installation of new software. It can be updated through the screen when cloud management sends update alerts. This saves cost for small companies, but users have less control over the storage of our data. It’s remote. The development of electrical grids in the late 19th century, is analogous to the current transformation to the cloud. Distributed electrical networks made multiple small-scale improvements possible. Clean light in homes and on streets and night-time illumination, for example, but, there were also large scale profits made by the centralization and consolidation of power companies and from citizens now having to pay for the service. ‘The cloud’ returns us to a more centralized organization for data management.

David Cox: Please tell me what you think is most positive about the NA and how it can help us formulate workable utopias?

Molly Hankwitz: James Bridle asks us to rethink the possible and he is drawn to everyday tools and signs in doing it. I also like the acceptance of low-res as an emerging trend in his images. It reminds me of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s attraction to the Las Vegas strip vernacular, but, also, British pop art traditions, the Independent Group and Archigram. Archigram’s Portapak project was portable chunks of the city packaged in pink cartons and available at supermarkets. ‘Cloud’-type grocery stores as urban revolution platform. The city as transformable through its own weirdly-new productive mechanisms, like big food chains. Archigram should have gone further with that one.

The New Aesthetic invites us to have fun with urban space; to instantiate bits of virtual vision into it. It might parallel Oldenburg’s oversized pieces of vinyl pie and overscaled ordinary objects appearing in public space. That work was all about the effects of advertising vision, TV, commodities, popular desire. Bridle is a conceptual artist. His artists’ books are very conceptual, like Sol Lewitt, Ed Ruscha. Where his critique begins to challenge the slickened surface of the city seen *only* through the screen, there may be some possible political engagement. Google Earth sabotage or something. (smiles)

David Cox: What is less helpful/worrying?

Molly Hankwitz: There is a lot of emphasis upon Facebook and Google. This does not suggest an autonomy. Drawing from them, even playfully, aesthetically, doesn’t really deal with what commercial spaces are doing in the Web 2.0 framework. Facebook is a privacy sucking market research device where we trade our privacy for public “feel” as it were. We do not have to know much of anything to make Facebook space. The popularity of FB is down by 8% because users are tired of the new Timeline function on their profile pages. I don’t know what this means, except that consumers have a say. The owners are busy making a bundle, while others avoid addiction. We’ve all heard about Facebook Moms obsessed with using social media community to manage their family and friends, spending all their time on line. The New Aesthetic tends to valorize the popularity of Facebook-type interaction. Guy Debord and the SI also played with modern media–television and film– and tried to be inside it and outside it, but they had a political focus not an aesthetic one. “Play” has obsessed new media art for the last decade, but this recuperation of the sixties SI vocabulary hasn’t led to revolution through the arts culture.

My major concern with the New Aesthetic is its universalism. There’s no critique which identifies gender, race, class. Digital cultures suffer terribly from this homogeneity and always have.

David Cox: Can the emphasis on drone technologies and machine vision help us formulate a new type of politics?

Molly Hankwitz: There probably needs to be considerably more mobilization around surveillance because its getting out of hand. Surveillance protects private space for the status quo, while violating it for others. Humans aren’t simply rats in a maze or ants in a hill to be observed and chided in our online lives.

Tim Pool’s hacker drone cams are a detournement. I stick with these hacker journalists for ideas because they are media activists and media activism has always hacked through the spectacle and created ways to see what’s going on. The problem today is accountability so I’m interested in the means by which news information, for example, always highly censored for home audiences, can be augmented by new technologies. PLOTS’ grassroots mapping kits (Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science) are designed for citizens’ to collect data and pictures. They have been around since at least the BP oil spill. This is a grounded, grassroots hacktivism because a) the kits are cheap and open source and b) to take back the aerial viewpoint in the era of Google Earth is a radical gesture.

David Cox: The NA’s ambivalent relationship to Occupy and Anonymous would seem to imply a political dimension, what do you make of this? How might this unfold in practical ways in the coming months/years? Could there be an “New Aesthetics of Politics” a “Processual Politics”?

Molly Hankwitz: Occupy grabbed reality back and called it financial theft. The movement has offered hope for democratic humanism, for revolutionary society, after Egypt and England and Greece and now Spain and Mexico and Syria. The movement is an instantiation of the virtualization of humanity into the real. This might unfold in practical ways by bringing renewed resistance to virtual life back into motion; by expressing it. “From ashes, quivers new life…” writes San Francisco poet, Jim Byron. The recent London riots and Occupy “encampments” already promise a new aesthetics of politics; dispersed, yet, organized.

___

Molly Hankwitz lives in San Francisco, California where she is a mother, a curator, a writer and a techno-artist. She was principal in the design and research collaboration, Archimedia from 1998 to 2007. Before that she was active in experimental film culture, anti-war, womens’ rights and housing. In 2010, she co-curated the locative media arts exhibition, citycentered.org and in 2011 completed a Ph.D.from Queensland University of Technology. She is interested in political dimensions of networks, social technologies and questions of aesthetics and history in electronic media. mollyhankwitz.org

David Cox is a writer, film maker, and instructor who lives in San Francisco. His email is davidalbertcox@gmail.com and his website is http://www.davidalbertcox.com

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by David Cox

Published in Coxblog and Examiner.com July 11, 2012 12:46 PM MST

I asked McKenzie Wark some questions on subject of the day, the New Aesthetic.

David Cox:

What are your thoughts on the so-called “New Aesthetic”?

McKenzie Wark:

I don’t really see the ‘new’ in it, but in general I like it, in the way that one likes an aesthetic, and an aesthetic is those class of things one ‘likes’.

That machines perceive, that their perceptions exceed human ranges, and that their perceptions produce their own artifacts. This all seems in line with a certain kind of modernism. The fetish objects of the machine world change, however.

David Cox:

So really what we’re experiencing is form of modernity, albeit one reflecting the unique properties of our own time?

McKenzie Wark:

Modernity in two senses. Firstly, the emblematic machinic vision, being, secondly, the one that draws attention to itself as machinic, and hence of its time.

David Cox:

How would you equate today’s New Aesthetics with the ideas and aesthetics (if that is the right word) of the Situationists? Particularly the game/map tactics oriented theories of Debord, the urban Constant, and the more esoteric Northern European tendencies of Jorn, and COBRA? There would definitely seem to be some overlap here. And as we know the SI’s stomping ground in London was also Spitalfields/Hoxton (the pre-gentrified version of course!).

<em>(Cox note – Bridle has mentioned the SI in his talks)</em>

McKenzie Wark:

There is no Situationist aesthetic. There’s really no connection.

David Cox:

Do you have any views on the the rise of a kind of superstition about machine intelligence or is this par for the course with modernity? Are ghosts-in-the-machine part of the deal when the shock of the new makes its impact felt? Why must phantoms and ghosts accompany British user-interface led digital design movements today?

McKenzie Wark:

Its always a category mistake to separate machine intelligence from human intelligence. There’s always a network between them. We are products of our prostheses, and always were, back to paleolithic times.

David Cox:

What century are we living in? Is Bruce Sterling right about Atemporality and temporality – is the NA purely temporal (not interested in the art of the conflation of time periods, but its opposite – being very much in the here &amp; now?) Funny, given that many of the ‘hipsters’ who embrace the NA actively embrace an Edwardian/Victorian dress sense (handlebar mustaches, old typewriters, tweeds etc – as William Gibson put it “its more important for them to *look* like D.H. Lawrence to have actually read him…!”

McKenzie Wark:

That whole steampunk thing was interesting when Gibson and Sterling did it — but not since.

David Cox:

How might we adapt the NA for political forms of empowerment? Are there ways to interpret the movement’s fascination with unmanned aerial drones for example into a new type of Praxis about US &amp; UK foreign policy? Might the movement’s easy but not overt alliance with Occupy and Anonymous suggest new types of what we might call “processual” politics? What might this look like?

McKenzie Wark:

I find, say, Trevor Paglen more interesting, and he predates this whole thing, as does the work of Jordan Crandall. As usual, its the right kinds of artists who were ten steps ahead on this.

David Cox:

In one of your books you once described seeing a render ghost (artifacting pixels on a digital cable news channel) whilst watching news coverage on TV of 9/11 – did this sense of uncanny underscore the mediated nature of this event-scene? How does ‘the uncanny’ feed into our sense of living in these current times?

McKenzie Wark:

Yep, i did the ‘new aesthetic’, in about 1989! That was a very uncanny year. Lots of ghosts in the televisual machine, and proliferating on the network machines.

David Cox:

On the subject of publishing James Bridle has been calling for new ways to counter the monopoly of Amazon and Apple and Google over the control and distribution of e-books and e-book data – as a writer what are your views on this? Do you have any views on the role of the writer in a time when not only the words, but the metadata and bookmarks and related information about the books is as important as the actual book is what publishers are vying for? What is the role of the author in this? Has the author and the publisher morphed into a new type of hybrid?

McKenzie Wark:

Well, I recommend O/R books, for example, who actually did a book about drones. They are trying to do ebooks outside of the Amazon jungle. Its why I did Gamer Theory in WordPress and why with the Institute for the Future of the Book we came up with the CommentPress plugin for it, so that it would be easier to do longform writing in digital form outside the proprietary formats. There’s a lot that’s being going on under all these headings for years, of which the above are just passing examples. But you know, you can do it, then promote it, or you can just promote it…

<em>McKenzie Wark (b. September 10, 1961) is an Australian-born writer and scholar. He works mainly on media theory, critical theory and new media. His best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory.</em>

<em>David Cox is a writer, film maker, and instructor who lives in San Francisco. His email is davidalbertcox@gmail.com and his website is <a title=”http://www.davidalbertcox.com” href=”http://www.davidalbertcox.com”>http://www.davidalbertcox.com</a></em>

Published in Examiner.com June 29, 2012 9:21 AM MS

Also published in Otherzine, and Alpine Review

By David Cox

The New Aesthetic is a term coined by publisher and designer James Bridle.James Bridle’s website is here.

Simply put, the New Aesthetic concerns itself with how the digital world and the real world are starting to overlap and intermingle in interesting, routine and unexpected ways. As search engines, online ‘bots’, spam generation engines, online mapping tools, google street view, machine vision and sensing technologies proliferate, our everyday life in the western technologically advanced world is starting to bristle with new types of augmentation and hybridity.

Post 9/11 security apparatus, pilot-less sensor-studded drone devices, biometric tracking systems, the ways that computer vision creates unusual and often funny mistakes and glitches, the unique properties of bitmap graphics, the staircase look of pixels in close-up. The unintended consequences of so many ‘smart’ sensors and cameras released into a largely apparently culturally unprepared society; all this is the raw material of the new aesthetic.

Like many early aesthetic movements, the New Aesthetic (NA) is deeply romantic. It thinks it sees ghosts where there are none; ‘bots’ online that can think for themselves. The photoshopped people in CGI architectural images at construction sites. The NA’s poster child James Bridle insists, for example that spambots are evidence of attempts by “the machines” to communicate with us, the humans. Would that we could only listen to them, he insists, in his talk “Waving at the Machines” and an Asimovian full acceptance of these new emergent clumsy intelligences might be possible.

New types of alliances, new types of understanding, new ways of living might unfold that would benefit us, if only we were able to open our hearts to the machines. Were it not for our stubborn refusal to do so, the childlike, touching ways the AIs out there show us they wish to join us would be embraced and aesthetics would give way to a kind of Astroboy coalition.

The NA strikes me as what Slavoj Zizek might describe as universalist liberal humanism. In a set of reformist gestures similar to those proposed by the “Occupy” movement to counter the banking sector, the NA would have us listen to “every data algorithm’s own story”. It wants ‘tolerance for the bots’. It is truly hard to argue for tolerance for phenomena whose very existence most people can barely fathom. The socio-economic demands of our time are too pressing and serious to reduce what the NA seeks to draw our attention to: machine aesthetics. Co-ordinated and ongoing relentless drone attacks are nothing to get all arty about, just ask the average rural Afghani.

Banks and the super-rich behave much like the soulless commercial AIs they unleash to their high-stakes bidding for them. When money circulates and is stolen with impunity on the unthinkable scale it is in today’s global ‘market’ and entire economies collapse overnight, it must be tempting to read intelligence into this epochal and tragic worldwide dance of ruin. The financial institutions and their moneybot AIs have one thing in common however, they are completely without empathy as to their effects on the innocent, they care nothing of what the 99% might have to say about anything. If the banks cannot be convinced to reform, then why should we conclude that the AIs that are their online proxies could be convinced to somehow see it our way?

In its universalist techno-spiritualist reverie/angst, the NA has much in common with the steam and clockwork enamored early modernist London Victorian middle class and its preoccupation with spectres and seances. In the late 19th Century, it was common for photographers to convince paying customers that they were seeing ghosts of the recently-departed in the double exposures of trick photographs. The hand-painted slide-shows that predated cinema due to their ghost-like stage-effects were called ‘Phantasmagoria‘.

Even Karl Marx was taken with the hooplah – hence the half-joking beginning of the Communist Manifesto “A Spectre is Haunting Europe…”. Karl knew the then hyper-new idea of Communism was viewed by its “opponents in power” as a ghost to be exorcised from its places of origin – the factories and offices of late 19th Century Europe. In our time, the time of Eurozone meltdown and Dronewar International the new ghosts are not so much the New Aesthetic’s fanciful kinect hack render glitches or bitmaps and street-view images of our land/datascapes, but rather the actual streets afire in Greece, Syria and everywhere else tyranny is meeting its match by the population.

Smoke and mirrors, rather than render ghosts and glitchcore of today’s retina displays provided the spooky effect back in Victorian London. Today, it is a world that fuses Bansky style political Hoxton street art with a genuine and understandable fear, terror even, of the unseen, everywhere-at-once unmanned aerial drone, a truly laudable sympathy for the global Occupy movement, a wry, British whimsical ironic take on what amounts to an Amazon-ian Apple-ized Google-ization of culture, mediated by ever-ubiquitous smart sensing devices. This is a world in which the environment itself can somehow tell if you are or are not not on side with Big Plans for the Future made on your behalf.

Its a Spime World After All.

How to contest so diffuse and so ubiquitous and so hegemonic a society as our global, digital ‘mirrorworld’ as William Gibson so eloquently put it? The antidote to all this control culture, as it was for those in the England in the 50s, 60s, and 70s was and is…. playfulness.

I was born in Birmingham, UK in 1963, and my childhood was filled with the belly laughter of relief that BBC radio shows like the Goon Show provided to postwar England. The Beatles and Pink Floyd later adapted the Lewis Carrol UK brand of (psychedelic) surrealism to otherwise economically struggling, drab postwar England. Monty Python’s Flying Circus, another middle-class surrealist gentle refutation to the constraints of UK authority gave another (albeit encoded and implied) semi-secret way out of grey Official England. And Punk – well if as he has suggested in interviews, William Gibson loosely based his latest book’s main story-mover character Hubertus Bigend on the Sex Pistols Manager Malcom McClaren, then James Bridle might easily have taken a few bookmark data-traces from the Bigend e-book!

So today’s brand of UK surrealism performs a similar inversion trick with resources that befit the contemporary British Alienated Middle Class Experience – software, photoshop, plugins, object-oriented programming, kinect hacks, arduino kits, DIY drones, quadrocopters, mapping tools, GIS, social media, online commerce, amid a world being increasingly shaped and controlled for profit by ever fewer corporate interests. Those of us who publish have less and less choice. Amazon Google or Apple? There has to be a better way. As it is with books, so it is with culture. And thus the New Aesthetic seeks to fire a laser through a cloud of ideas. James Bridle is a champion of Gibsonian thinking. Come to think of it he really is Bigendian in his ambition and audacity. All power to him.

Perhaps unsurprisingly the New Aesthetic has emerged from London, specifically, the digital publishing and user interface design hotbed of Hoxton/Shoreditch but its cultural influences in the two years since the term was first introduced have been felt globally. Hoxton is hipster ground-zero in the UK, and most of the best ideas in the UK end up here one way or the other. For a place so happening with new ideas, its locals sure do like to dress up as if they just walked out of an H.G Wells novel!

My dear London steampunk, please meet your renderghost with her face blurred out by streetview. And please see here the unofficial NA logo: a silhouette of a predator drone being carried away “UP” style, by a bunch of helium balloons. Terror device symbolically defused.

Earlier this month I asked a group of digital media theorists and writers to express their views on the subject of the New Aesthetic. I started with Bruce Sterling. Mr Sterling’s views on the topic have been erudite, to the point and timely. His article for his blog Beyond the Beyond has helped frame a valuable context here in the USA in particular. As more contributors make their views available, I will publish them as individual posts here at Coxblog.

David Cox, June 20th 2012.

I asked Cyberpunk Science Fiction writer and design-fiction futurist Bruce Sterling some questions about the New Aesthetic, as I was intrigued by many of the ideas that he expressed in his WIRED hosted blog “Beyond the Beyond”. Sterling is ambivalent about the more mystical/obscurantist aspects of the NA, with its insistence upon supposedly quasi-sentient ‘bots of the Gibsonian “Wintermute” (and Summerblind?) variety out there thinking and acting for themselves online.

But he is also very optimistic about the movement, seeing in it (as indeed do I) evidence of a fresh and welcome feeling of excitement in contemporary digital culture. The New Aesthetic he argues, has freed up the imagination of creative people working with digital resources. It lets us creatives think in new ways about what we do. Ways that offer a conceptual direction away from the mere tools alone.

David Cox:

Is what we are experiencing/have experienced with the “New Aesthetic” really new or is it part of something really new or is it part of an older discussion? The reservations you expressed in your WIRED essay seemed to reflect a concern about the form that it took suggest that you did not think that is was formed enough, that the tumblr of images was a “collection of jackstraws” I think was the metaphor you used. (Your argument was) that the images of drones, bitmaps, maps (was not really) tantamount to a movement, that there’s not much rigor there and that it does not really constitute sufficiently focused enough strategy to change things, although this is a generation that knows no other way to formulate its views. Its relation to the broader culture is one mediated by social media, and so has a more diffuse form?

Bruce Sterling:

First to the issue of “is the New Aesthetic really new?” I’d say those images are “new'” pretty much by definition. Aesthetics obviously is very old. James Bridle doing a project called the “New Aesthetic Tumblr” is over, and receding into the past. But machine-generated imagery that is unlike previous forms of imagery is all over the place. So, yes it is new, for any reasonable definition of novelty.

As for whether James Bridle’s image collection had any analytical rigor, I’m inclined to think he had more analysis going on there than he liked to let on; but I rather think James prefers writing, journalism and publishing to the trying role of a public New Aesthetic visionary. When you have a breakout viral hit on the Net nowadays, the opportunity-cost can be pretty stiff.

On the issue as to what a New Aesthetic ought to do, what the “strategy” is, well, that’s unsettled, but I think that James’s year-long intervention there has raised the morale of tech-art people quite a lot. It’s legitimated their practice in their own eyes, and helped to free them from their traditional hangups on specific pieces of hardware. At least it’s possible to imagine a strategy now — instead of merely saying, I’m an artist, but I do digital electronics, you can re-frame your efforts as something like “a new aesthetic of processual vital beauty,” and you’re not so handcuffed to the soldering irons.

On the generational issue, there’s some anxiety among the aging that people under 30 actually think like Tumblrs nowadays — that they’re unmotivated and diffuse, or in the shallows, or mentally crippled by too many pixels — allegations along that line. Obviously they’re a troubled generation, but Tumblrs are not major problems to rank with a major Depression dominated by dogmatic gerontocrats. If we’re going to get generational, then we ought to start the discussion with the amazing mental stasis of Baby Boomers, people who used to be exceedingly reckless and inventive and haven’t had a single new idea since 2008.

David Cox

How British is the New Aesthetic? How London is It – is it global? Should the global aspect be considered from the US or broader European perspective aspect? Being British I can recognize the more whimsical dimension – similar to Monty Python, or British Surrealism or Pink Floyd, a certain kind of charm, whimsey, dandyish – ironic juxtaposition – the balloon with the drone –

Bruce Sterling:

How British is it? It’s pretty British. How British is anything nowadays? You can always make a claim that, say, the Beatles aren’t British but mere Elvis imitators. London is a big center of interface-design these days. I think the New Aesthetic is strongly related to British interface-design thinking: there’s this black box, and then there is our considered and erudite set of reactions to that black box, our way to deal with it.

David Cox:

On the new deus-ex-machina/ghost-in-the-Machine – so-called ‘render-ghosts’, spambots as sentient beings and all that. There is kind of naive mystical occultism that you criticize in your wired article. You argue that machines are not inherently “friendly” Bridle’s yearning for a communication with machines speaks to a kind of a gnosticism; a kind of Terrence McKenna sensibility. the fascination with patterns between things, particularly spambots and the like, the ways algorithms generate odd syntax as evidence of attempts to communicate with us humans. New Aesthetic is not embodied in the individual images or modes of communication but perhaps in a fascination with connections between them.

Bruce Sterling:

On the mysticism issue, the render ghosts and the desires of the machines and so forth, yes, I think that’s a major failing. I think it’s self-deceitful and is likely to get in the way of good work. On the other hand artists are often mystics –it’s like the attitude that there’s a living god in this block of inert marble, and I have to release him with a hammer and chisel. A lot of great art is based on colossal superstition. Just visit the Vatican sometime.

I take your point about gnosticism and Terence McKenna, but if that’s the path one wants to choose the endpoint is psychedelic art. There’s digital glitchcore New Aesthetic stuff already that looks a bit like bad-trip psychedelia, it’s like paisley swirls as 8bit pixels. The problem with psychedelic art is that the art doesn’t develop and the drugs lose their charm.

If New Aesthetics is bringing something new here I think it’s “processuality.” It’s about the aesthetics of watching the code run, as opposed to static printouts of code as psychedelic underground comix. The issue of social relations, of finding meaning through the network, that’s very important but also metaphysical — it’s about how we know what we know. It’s an issue of “media philosophy.” Problems here which used to be quite speculative and farfetched are becoming urgent. I’m hoping for rescue.

David Cox:

Aggregation – your excellent talk at the European Graduate School on Atemporality and the Passage of Time brought together a similar approach to that of the New Aesthetic and I was wondering if you saw this as perhaps evidence of a general trend. Your slide show/flickr set seemed to favor images of expressions of the uncanny. Images that show ideas that appear to occupy two time periods simultaneously. In fact Bridle uses computational re-photography in his talk Waving At the Machines (images popular online that show a historical photo held up by someone or photoshopped over the place as it appears now, aligned visually to match the placement) – multiple times simultaneously – woman 17th clothes while she’s throwing a McDonald’s sign.

Your talk at the European Graduate School – a semi-random collection of images – looking for evidence of ideas that seemed to communicate two different times simultaneously – Babbage engine that’s been modified, the NA is not atemporal – its temporal – the philosophy of aggregation, slow accumulation – in and of itself a new sensibility – a new sensibility – of collection is the Artform, Bridle seeks to disrupt common assumptions about the internet and time – the souvenir – published a book on his twitter posts – published a book on all the entries on the Iraq War –

Bruce Sterling:

“Strategy of aggregation” is an interesting way to frame the network-society habit of burying people in lateral cruft. Today I watched a tidal wave of Twitter grief over the death of Ray Bradbury — bad enough that I should learn he’s dead, but there’s also a ‘strategy of aggregation” where I’m confronted with a sandstorm of wails of pain, so many that you’d think the natural death of this 91-year-old gentleman was equivalent to, say, an earthquake or hurricane. My strategy on Twitter is obviously to aggregate a whole bunch of guys who know who Ray Bradbury is, but the social effect of this kind of reaction is new and different — is Ray *really* more important than an earthquake? How can one judge that?

Is it atemporal? Well, it’s certainly not. In fact it’s a deliberate reaction against atemporality, the New Aesthetic is about as anti-atemporal as one can get. It always interests me a lot that people who don’t understand atemporality don’t understand the New Aesthetic, either. The New Aesthetic is a deliberate attempt to break this steampunk stasis of atemporality, to get things rolling again by emphasizing the genuinely novel aspects of our contemporary experience. But atemporality is quite strong and just saying that you don’t care for it, or that you find it limiting, isn’t enough to defeat it. The defeat of atemporality will have to come through lived experience. I hope it doesn’t require a big catastrophe, like the way the first world war abolished the happy-time neurasthenia of the Belle Epoque.

Then there’s the issue of James Bridle doing tech-artsy things with print and publishing. He is a publisher, but I think other hacker-artist figures find a lot to admire in these interventions of his. It’s easy to be, say, a member of BERG doing strange augmented-reality comic-book experiments and to see that James Bridle is a fellow-traveller, somebody who gets it. Where you go with it after you get it, that’s another matter. A matter as yet unknown.

This interview first appeared on Coxblog

Bruce Sterling is a writer and futurist – Beyond the Beyond is his blog

David Albert Cox is a film maker, writer and instructor based in San Francisco. He is the author of Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back!

His website is http://www.davidalbertcox.com

First Published in Examiner.com

June 11, 2012 1:52 PM MST

A small portable mix

By David Cox

Sometimes you need a mixer. Not a massive 24 track job for something to record a major album, just a small portable job to take with you to a gig when you’ve been asked to do a spot of DJ’ing. Or something to enable you to play guitar along with an .mp3 when you’re playing a small cafe or on the sidewalk.

When I started using the device I found that I appreciated its small size and lightweight form factor. The mixer is powered via USB, and what I liked about it are the bass & treble controls and the slider that lets you choose input channels.

To have a mixer that you can carry with you in a fanny pack along with a couple of iPhones or an iPhone and an iPad means that with just these and the mixer you become a self-contained DJ.

I’ve tended to use it mainly to toggle sound inputs on my home studio desktop – PC/iPad iPhone/DVR, that kind of thing and for this its great. But then I can disconnect it and take it with me on the road to configure how I need to for situations when I’m performing as telescape, or lecturing (often I’m miking my voice, and mixing this with audio or input from DVD or other audiovisual inputs).

So on the whole I endorse the iRig mix products and recommend you buy one.

What follows now are the offial PR materials:

iRig™ MIX is the first mobile mixer for iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad. iRig MIX offers the same controls you would expect from a professional DJ mixer (crossfader, cues, EQ and volume controls, etc.) in an ultra-compact mobile mixer that can be used with a huge variety of iOS DJ mixing and other apps. It is a complete DJ system for rehearsing, performing and recording. The lightweight and slim design of the iRig MIX allows it to be easily carried in a regular iPad bag. For the first time on any DJ mixer – iRig MIX can be used for mixing any type of audio source (coming from mp3 players, CD players, etc.) with an iOS device using automatic tempo matching and beat syncing. This is accomplished with X-Sync, a feature that works in combination with the DJ Rig free app from IK Multimedia that is included with iRig MIX.

A DJ Mixer

iRig MIX allows DJs to use a traditional setup with two devices (one plugged into each of the independent channels) OR a single iOS device. For the single iOS device setup, the output of the single device is split into dual-mono and sent to the individual channels. This flexibility, combined with the iRig MIX’s portability gives aspiring and pro DJs a compact system that can be used everywhere…anytime. Now, you can practice when you want – perform when requested – because your “Rig” is always with you. You can set up in minutes for house, backyard, dance and “after” parties. Play in your bedroom, dorm room, or at sporting events before the big game. Planes, trains and automobiles once meant that your DJ gear was inaccessible. Now, no matter where you are or where you are going, you can mix and rehearse sets.

Not just for DJs

iRig MIX also provides the perfect mixing solution for solo musicians or small ensembles that use one or more iOS devices to play live. It features an extra guitar/microphone input that facilitates processing with popular apps like AmpliTube and VocaLive or any other apps that offer real-time audio effects and processing. Its standard RCA output connectors provide direct connection to PA systems or powered speakers.

Maximum Portability

With its slim, lightweight form factor iRig MIX is considerably smaller than traditional DJ mixers and can be carried anywhere you take your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch, is easy to stow and perfect for performers on the go. The iRig MIX also has minimal power requirements allowing it to be powered not only by the included power supply but also by a suitable USB battery pack or a laptop USB port for maximum mobility to mix anywhere. And because the mixer and an iPad only take up about as much space as a laptop, you can leave it set up all the time so you’re ready to go when creative inspiration strikes.

Airport Mix

Features:

2 stereo inputs with gain, bass, treble and volume controls, independent cue on each channel with LED indication and channel cross-fader

Instrument/microphone/extra input with volume control can be processed by iOS apps (such as AmpliTube, VocaLive)

Stereo output with RCA connectors, master level and LED meters

High quality, pristine sound

Quality headphone output for master or cue monitoring with independent volume control

Input switch splits Input 1 into dual-mono for use with DJ mixing apps on a single iOS device

“X-Sync” mode allows auto-sync with any audio source using the included DJ Rig free app

Can be powered with the included AC adapter, battery pack and laptop USB ports

Includes 4 free apps: DJ Rig, AmpliTube, VocaLive, GrooveMaker

All IK mobile apps are available for download from the App Store.

How it works

iRig MIX Mobile Mixer is designed to accommodate virtually any small mixing and DJ-ing situation you may encounter: mix from a single iOS device, two devices, or an iOS device and an alternative music source (CD/MP3 players, etc.). Plus, there’s an additional channel input that allows you to hook up a microphone, guitar or bass and use real-time iOS apps to process the signal, making iRig MIX the ideal small-format portable mixer.

Hit Single

iRig MIX allows you to mix from a single iOS device. If you use a DJ app on your iOS device like DJ Rig, then mixing on one device is a breeze. The signal from one device is sent into channel 1, and with the input switch set to single device, the incoming signal is split into two mono signals and sent to each individual channel. This allows you to mix two sources in real-time using a single device, but with both channels on the mixer. (A DJ app like DJ Rig is required for this setup since it sends two sources through the stereo out jack on your device.)

Dual-ing iPhones

Plug an iOS device into both inputs and you’re ready to mix in a traditional dual-deck format. In dual-device mode, you can easily cue and beat-sync source material for seamless transitions. Each channel has a 3.5mm (1/8″) input with an input gain control, treble and bass EQ controls, a “cue” button for auditioning material via the headphone jack, channel level faders and channel crossfader. iRig MIX is extremely easy to use and one of the most intuitive mixers you’ll ever put your hands on.

Play with the Band

iRig MIX isn’t just a DJ Mixer. In fact, you can use it for small groups or solo work as your main PA mixer. When you plug an instrument or microphone into the auxiliary 1/4″ jack on the bottom of the mixer, you can use an iOS device to process your signal when it’s plugged into channel 1 (make sure X-Sync is off). The signal travels from the input jack, through the gain control, out of the dual-mode channel 1 input jack, through your iOS device signal processing app, back into the channel 1 input jack, through the EQ, fader then out through the main outs. This way, you can use your iOS apps like VocaLive (vocals) or AmpliTube to fine-tune and sculpt your sound on stage in real-time. Amazing.

X-Sync-opation

When using the free DJ Rig app, something amazing happens… you can automatically beat-sync tunes when the X-Sync button is active. With beat-syncing, there’s never an awkward gap or pause in the music so you can keep the non-stop groove going and never miss a beat.

Fits in a bag

The ultra-compact size and low profile of the iRig MIX allows it to easily be carried in a regular iPad bag. Plus its low-voltage power supply (only 5VDC) allows it to be powered not only by any regular mobile device charger but also by suitable USB battery pack and laptop USB port for maximum mobility to mix anywhere.

http://www.ikmultimedia.com/products/irigmix/