"AI’s automated forms of decision making, regardless of their specific instantiation or situational impact, all contribute to a general understanding that non-datafied forms of experience are not relevant. They are ineffective: They are not part of the formula and have no hold on the world. Converting experience into data, abstracting away from any situated perspective, is what makes an experience real, consequential."
bulgarian state radio and television female vocal choir - pilentze pee (1975)
mica levi - love (2014)
bing and ruth - the pressure of this water (2020)
[mp3] - 17:49
"This is what I mean when I say I would like to swim against the stream of time: I would like to erase the consequences of certain events and restore an initial condition. But every moment of my life brings with it an accumulation of new facts, and each of these new facts brings with it its consequences; so the more I seek to return to the zero moment from which I set out, the further I move away from it: though all my actions are bent on erasing the consequences of previous actions and though I manage to achieve appreciable results in this erasure, enough to open my heart to hopes of immediate relief, I must, however, bear in mind that my every move to erase previous events provokes a rain of new events, which complicate the situation worse than before and which I will then, in their turn, have to try to erase. Therefore I must calculate carefully every move so as to achieve the maximum of erasure with the minimum of recomplication."
autechre - vletremix23 (1995)
david lang - the little match girl passion: have mercy, my god (2007)
low - dancing and the fire (2018)
[mp3] - 17:01
new materials, awaiting new designs
drawing, design, print two color silkscreen collaboration with kelli cain, 2011.
mlr inspired landscape cutup.
"what are you reading about?"
"the history of the internet."
"again?"
ryuichi sakamoto - solari (2017)
gowns - clawless (2007)
kali malone - litanic cloth wrung (2019)
[mp3] - 19:34
sculpture of home of creature later becomes actual home of creature
fireside, frenetic group conversational mix of comedy and doom. a proposal emerged:
the most important post-collapse skill is friendship
reckoning: three scenes from the barn
bound. forty foot ladder. you think you need to, but once getting that high you question why. it's impossible to move around. borrowed from a friend who says oh you hold onto it, because they don't want to move it either. a cursed object. somebody probably wants it, for some reason, but it's also too hard to find that person. so it just takes up space. luckily this one doesn't deteriorate. but others in their same situation do. many you didn't even ask for, but were bestowed into your perpetual care. in a way these objects might be a metaphor, but in this case you actually are really stuck with a ladder.
seen. things you stored, for historical value and anti-obsolesense, too much forgotten technology. a black cable appears to have some grey something on it. on closer inspection it is actually a grey cable covered in black. this object was stored for over a decade without humidity control and assuredly dusted multiple times with bird shit. for some reason it was brought into a previously clean part of the barn, which now has what the victorians would have called "bad air." every object and surface is now suspicious.
unseen. after a protracted vinegar-fueled reclamation of space from advancing mold, you eye a pile of forlorn rugs and army blankets which have moved rarely over the years. their smell is known before approaching. bagging begins, fully masked and gloved, but a different adversary emerges. a burning in your arm, explosive buzzing, instinctively you perform the timeless way of fleeing from the invisible. the hornet bites cause your hand and arm to swell to unrecognizability, everyone finds this hilarious.
universal question diagram. recreated drawing from the age of alchemy. possibilities and interconnectedness. screen from 2015.
"As they say, with the rising tide lifting; there’s no liberation in isolation.
I want us to be a part of the ocean, not the boat."
so we made a new thing
but really an old thing
from over a decade ago
and so there was this impulse that we had to
somehow make the new thing actually new
with a fancy new application or something
but i guess we decided not to do that
this light pattern is an experiment we made a few months ago
with a demoscene-era plasma technique
the important stuff all happens in one line of code
which we wanted to mention simply to spread the concept of
permacomputing and also
despite the grid fundamentally being interactive
sometimes a visual or sound can powerfully stand on its own
like when nine inch nails had this same new thing on stage
just visualizing and hell they are still cooler than us
but really the point is
the grid hasn't meaningfully changed for two decades
still doing nothing yet
containing endless horizons to explore new instrument design
a vehicle for new skills and
perhaps making new friends
but we guess everyone knows that by now
so it's new and it's the same
and that's mostly why there's not really a new killer app
lesser reasons include
us opening an art store and
still tending a farm and finding time to make music
such as this forthcoming softbits cut you're hearing now
but we are glad to be building these again
and look forward to seeing what comes next
moondog - theme and variations (1953)
james holden - in the end you'll know (2023)
dead can dance - how fortunate the man with none (1993)
[mp3] - 18:16
we were in college, the father of a friend visiting, telling us that the world is covered in a fine layer of shit
didn't really take this seriously despite him being a doctor, the delivery made it sound like a joke
this remains one of the more profound truths i missed at first pass
returned from elsewhere
lamenting that the city only had three birdkind
and sensing disapproval of my using the term "streetbirds"
reflexively way too loud
"i fucking love seagulls!"
"Permacomputing is a nascent concept and a community of practice centred around design principles that embrace limits and constraints as a positive thing in computational culture, and on creativity with scarce computational resources."
"how'd your gig go??? did anyone cry? haha that's why my one friend used to always ask... how was the show? did you make anyone cry? that was his metric for how a show went. i always used to say that at least i cried. and i had a super serious talk with him once where i tried to explain in all sincerity that maybe its not everyone's intention to have the audience cry at a performance. and he in all honesty just couldn't relate to that idea at all."
apocalypse glow, borrowed studio
preparing sounds and ways of being
to share with those who might listen
seeing different light, with friends
attempting to improve my capability to identify and estimate distances of one hundred feet, which is evidently the standard unit of water tube and electrical extension cord, which we string across the fields in a suddenly-eternal-feeling drought mitigation battle
however, the spruce seem to think everything is fine
during the Q&A i congratulated myself on not having said the word 'capitalism' during the entire talk, and the audience suddenly applauded. (whereupon we then proceeded to discuss capitalism for the remainder of the session.)
smoke travels two thousand miles, coloring moonlight
no rain, fire warnings, freeze alerts, all together
interspecies anxiety, dawn breaks again
"We are stuck with the problem of living despite economic and ecological ruination. Neither tales of progress nor of ruin tell us how to think about collaborative survival. It is time to pay attention to mushroom picking. Not that this will save us—but it might open our imaginations."
(attempting to revive forgotten pathways as i've lost my notes)
tehn@nnnnnnnn.co