Russell Davies

blog all dog-eared pages: sound art

Mike Migurski invented a very nice way of recording his reading and sharing it, in a series of posts: 'blog all dog-eared pages'. Since he seems happy for others to follow the format I thought I'd do the same. It's a handy way of recording what strikes you about a book. I dog-ear a lot. And underline and scribble in the margins. But then seldom look back at what I marked. So this might be a way of getting more out of my reading. Especially since I'm planning to try and expand beyond my usual repertoire of space opera, Dorothy L. Sayers and business books from airports. I'm trying to read about things that I think I might like if only I knew more about them. Sound Art by Alan Licht is a great example. I'm going to excerpt the dog-earings and link to the artstuff that appealed to me from pictures and descriptions. Because this is mostly new to me I don't have a lot to add to the quotes, so the things I've dog-eared are just things that struck me or that caused tangential thoughts.

I thought it was a tremendous book, serious without being weighty, gave me a sense of some interesting stuff out there, and a sense of how it fitted together. And googling Mr Licht let me find, via Dan Hill, this beautiful piece he did; A New York Minute.

Page 13:

A friend recently commented that avant-garde art is now commercially viable and extremely successful, whereas avant-garde literature, music, and film are usually uncommercial and generally unsuccessful. He's right, but that is because art doesn't have the inherent entertainment value of a narrative that those other art forms have. It doesn't have to appeal to the masses to be successful-as long as it catches one collector's (or curator's)attention, the person who created it can make a fair amount of money from it. Literature, music, and film, however, depend on popular opinion and public demand. This is because they're the primary sources of entertainment besides sports. And that is because of the potential to be engrossed by a storyline and characters, dazzled by spectacle, or have a catchy tune stuck in your head all day. If an effort in any of these disciplines fails to live up to this potential, it's largely considered to be a disappointment; in fact, it's intrinsically disappointing regardless of its actual aesthetic worth. Part of the reason "sound art" has become such a popular term is because it rescues music from this fate by aligning this kind of sound work with the aims of non-time-based plastic arts, rather than the aims of music.

I like this idea of art being viable because it can succeed through reaching a much smaller group of people. One of the things that's interesting about the fragmentation of music is the way smaller and smaller audiences can support more and more specialised artists (artistically, if not commercially).

It also chimes with something I've been thinking about for a while; the idea of commissioning technology like you commission art. There are loads of devices and things I'd like to see built, just for me. I have none of the skills to build them, and I'm not trying to prototype a product, these aren't things that millions of people are going to want and Samsung are going to want to build. These are things that I'd like for me. And it'd be great if there was a marketplace for that, like there's a marketplace if I wanted to get my picture painted on a horse. Maybe there is. I should look harder.

Max Neuhaus - Listen - 'field trips' to listen to sounds, guided by the artist

Stephen Vitiello - Fear of High Places and Natural Things

Ed Osborn - Audio Recordings of Great Works of Art - the Aural Aura Of Masterworks.

Page 39:

"It is this sense of perspective with the introduction of studio effects, particularly echo, that Brian Eno felt made "the process of making music much closer to the process of painting." David Toop has written that in the echo-heavy Jamaican reggae dub genre "the mixing board becomes a pictorial instrument" creating "depth illusion".

I'm not really sure why I dog-eared this page. Except it seems interesting and true.

Page 41:

Bill Viola has written of Gothic cathedrals: "Ancient architecture abounds with examples of remarkable acoustic design - whispering galleries where a bare murmur of a voice materializes at a point hundreds of feet away across the hall or the perfect clarity of the Greek amphitheaters where a speaker, standing at a focal point created by the surrounding walls, is heard by all members of the audience". In modern times architecture has been less preoccupied with acoustics, "sound as a medium is still lost a lot in our culture," sound artist Bill Fontana has said. "Architecture hardly thinks about it. We design space visually and don't think about the relationships between sounds that exist in space."

Modern buildings do seem to be acoustic disasters. Which makes cities even worse, and not something that urban planners seem to think about. And maybe they can't, maybe the urban environment is just too chaotic to be designed for sound. Perhaps there's salvation in the fact that we carry aural environments around with us these days, and, unless we've got really, really good headphones they don't totally blank out the city, they just sit on top of it. I'm always surprised there's not more ambient music designed for this; not for quiet rooms but for the loud environments we're forced to move through. Though Ambient Addition would still be the ultimate answer. Perhaps to everything.

Edgard Varese - listening to his Poeme electronique. That is just a great picture. Henry Miller described him as "The stratospheric Colossus of Sound". You can see a 1958 performance of Poeme electronique on YouTube.

Annea Lockwood - Southern Exposure: Piano Transplant No 4. a "defunct" piano is set up on a beach and left to sound on its own.

Page 75:

"In 1969 Stockhausen staged an outdoor concert in the Giacometti courtyard (with Joan Miro sculptures) at the museum of the Maeght Foundation at St Paul de Vence, in which musicians sat on roofs, ramps, and in the courtyard, integrating sounds from frogs, cicadas, and other animals. After three hours each musician started to to walk off, still playing, into the forest. At 2 AM there was "a twenty-minute-long dialogue with car horns. I [Stockhausen] started it but then all the people who hadn't left began making horn music with each other, and as one after the other drove off, they exchanged sounds for miles down the road."

I still listen to the Helicopter Quartet every now and then. You have to listen to it, you can't have it in the background, but if you pay attention, it rewards it. But it fits in absolutely with the image I had of Stockhausen as a rather humourless, stern fellow. None of the recent obituaries did much to undermine that and nor did his telling off of Aphex Twin, Plasticman et al for being too repetitive. But this story makes him seem rather playful and light. Maybe it's the pastoral setting. Or the image you get of little 60s cars wondering drunkenly down the road, honking.

Doug Hollis - Sound Garden - also on YouTube.

Jean Tinguely - Homage To New York "a self-destroying mechanism"

Page 145:

Cage: "A music which is like furniture...which is part of the noises of the environment, that will take them into consideration."

You see this quote a lot when people talk about Eno and ambient music. And it always make my mind wonder and stray off the point to imaginary designs for furniture - featuring built in musical instruments. In my head I have elaborate designs for an armchair with a thumb-piano built into each arm so you could sit and idly fiddle on them while watching telly. And I've always wanted to attach drum pads to the steering wheel of the car, wired into the stereo, so you can drum along more effectively. And to make a coffee table which uses marble-run style actions inside the legs and under a glass top to play a little tune. Anyway.

Page 210:

Morton Feldman, after a discussion with Brian O'Doherty concluded: "My obsession with surface is the subject of my music. In that sense my compositions are not really "compositions" at all. One might call them time canvasses in which I more or less prime the canvas with an overall hue of the music...I prefer to think of my work as between categories. Between time and space. Between painting and music. Between the music's construction, and its surface." Between categories is a defining characteristic of sound art, its creators historically coming to the form from different disciplines and often continuing to work in music and/or different media. But in the last decade sound art's identity between categories has intensified, particularly as the term itself has spread. Eno's ideal sound installation is "a place poised between a club, a gallery, a church, a square, and a park, and sharing aspects of all of these."

Maybe that's why I find Sound Art appealing; the idea of it, at least. And maybe why it's getting popular (and I get the sense it is, is it?) - because of the way it hangs between categories. That seems to be an increasingly modern state - finding yourself suspended between previous definitions.

Joe Jones - Mechanical Fluxorchestra. I just like the way this looks.

attention footprints

Sorry if this is boring but Matt's thought yesterday about Peak Attention has really stuck with me. And then reading this piece today about visualising radio and the idea of creating glanceable content made me realise that thinking about your attention footprint might be useful. (In a pretentious, just-finding-new-metaphors-for-things kind of way). It might be interesting to think about whether you were delivering enough beauty or utility to merit the attention you were burning in delivering it.

Most urban spam is so annoying, for instance, because it's a waste of attention. You burn a lot, for not much reward. If people are unconsciously conserving attention for the times they really need it they'll be grateful to those who're doing information design sufficiently well that they only require the minimum.

A good principle for advertising might be to follow the idea Matt Jones outlines here. Create things that either demand very little attention but still do something for you or things which really reward a lot of it. What starts to annoy people is the stuff in the middle - like those animated perimeter boards at football matches - they demand extra attention without giving me any other value than the still ones.

Just a thought. I'll stop now. Sorry.

2008 - the year of peak advertising

There've been things buzzing around my head for a while about the fact that it seems inevitable (to me) that 'in the future' there'll be less advertising and less commercial media. I couldn't find the bit of grit that would precipitate it into a bigger bit of grit though, until I read an almost throwaway but genius thought on Matt Webb's Interconnected yesterday:

"2008 is the year we hit Peak Attention. You can either carry on encountering as much as you do now, giving every input less and less attention every year, or you can start managing it, keeping some back to take long-haul attention flights. What are the consequences of living post-Peak Attention? Nobody will be able to understand anything hard unless they make sacrifices."

I love the way that reframes the idea of attention scarcity. And it made me realise that 2008 may well also be the year of Peak Advertising. In the West at least. The year in which there is the most advertising. And after that there's less and less each year.

Most traditional media seem to be in a period of creative flowering and commercial decay. I guess we'll end up with a mixture of 'free' ad-supported newpapers and proper paid-for ones, but I can't see that all the newspapers we have now will survive. And they certainly won't grow the total advertising bucket. (I'm hoping newspapers will merge like British comics used to - The Daily Mail incorporating The Express.) Television's never been a more vital medium because/despite never being a more uncertain business. And as Chris Anderson points out in his Nokia keynote - magazines only exist because they're subsidised by advertising. With all of these things shrinking, they're not going to attract more advertising money. And there's not going to be more of them. So, less advertising.

And then there's societal pushback. The disruptive marketing arms race has invaded so many corners of our lives that we've noticed, and decided we don't want to put up with it any more. So advertising gets more and more regulated, pushed out of kid's TV, various categories of advertiser gets banned and urban spam gets regulated out of existence (ish). People who protest against this kind of thing always cry that this will lead to less media. Well, yes it will, and it seems we're happy to live with that.

So, is it all migrating to the internet? Every web 2.0 start-up seems to think it's going to be funded by advertising. Many will be. But they won't all be. There's not enough advertising money to go around. And while online advertising growth is bound to continue, it's not extra money, it's money coming out of other places. Google are probably dragging some money into advertising from small businesses that didn't do it before but will that replace the money that's coming out of advertising and into the construction of more direct relationships and into better, more communicative products? Who knows?

And if you're a real person, advertising money moving out of a magazine and onto the internet means you're  less likely to see it.  If the online advertising promise comes true (though I have to admit I'm skeptical about that) then increased relevance and targeting means you won't get attacked by so many irrelevant attention seekers. So even if there isn't actually less advertising online, it'll feel like there is.

But, you still might argue, all that's happening is that is advertising moving from one place to another. It's still going to be all over the internet, there's not going to be less of it.

Well, yes. Except for two things:

Firstly, the web not only spawned adwords, it also birthed the adblocker. Digital media allows you to be in more control of what impinges on your attention than the real world does. That's not going away.

Secondly, there are lots and lots of non-commercial alternatives that are free and quite good.  And 'free and quite good' is really hard for regular commercial media to deal with.  Whatever you think of this blog, you're reading it now, and while you're doing that you're not watching Hollyoaks or reading The New York Times. And I'm not doing this for advertising revenue, I'm doing this because I like doing it. And I'm not the only one, millions and millions of people are going to be creating material that's free and quite good and doesn't require advertising. Murdoch can't compete with 'free and quite good'. He can't compete with wikipedia and Craig's List. The only way to compete with that is 'expensive and brilliant' and a) that's hard and b) difficult to get people to pay for. So in might work in some niches but it won't work everywhere.

It's a simple equation - there's a limited amount of attention in the world, if more of it is going to personal, non-commercial, un-advertised-in media, less of it will go to advertising and advertising will shrink.

The only exceptions I can see for this are the growth markets of Asia, Eastern Europe and South America. They're going to get lots and lots more ads. Which is why the big ad groups look at the world like fag companies - they're not really bothered about the West any more. I suspect though, that just as it won't take them long to adopt and adapt consumerism, it won't take them long to reach their own Peak Advertising year.

Mostly of course, this is upside. We'll be bothered with less stupid advertising. And although there'll be less people in advertising the people who remain will mostly be tasked with making more intelligent and useful stuff. And there'll be less pointless media.

I do worry though that we'll end up with a bifurcated media world. Premium Media for those that can afford it (pay a bit more, get no ads, watch/listen to everything you want to) and Free Media for the rest - poorer quality stuff, supported by advertising aimed at that particular audience, leading to a downward, lowest common denominator spiral. That's something that needs solving. But I don't think it'll be solved by more advertising.

Or I could be wrong. Anyway.

 

signs of the urban seasons

One of the joys of city life is the way you're intimately connected to the changing of the seasons, the rhythms of the year. The ebb and flow of the life is marked through thousands of intricate little moments giving us city-dwellers an intuitive grasp on the march of time and the progress of the year, connecting us deeply and intimately to the earth and its immemorial turning. I sometimes feel for the country folk, who must lack these tiny moments of connectivity to the eternal order of change. And while this kind of sensitivity can't be taught, (it flows from an innate connection to the universal cycle of the city) I thought it worthwhile noting, through the year, some of those minuscule details that a city-dweller will pick up on almost unconsciously, but that might pass the rural visitor by.

Let's start with now; the turning of the year, sometimes known as January (literally 'the time when it can be cold') or more commonly Start Of Q1. One of the first signs of January is the way houses start to shed their Christmas Trees, leaving them in the streets to melt back into the pavement. To be renewed and repaired so they can re-appear on the pavement again, and in shops, in December.

The January twilight (or 'lighting up time') is often marked by the twinkling of restaurants who put lights up at Christmas and thought they looked nice anyway and decided to leave them up. Most of these will be gone by February (literally 'the time when it's still cold, but also depressing').

And of course, you have the gyms with amazing, joining offers.

And the umbrella corpses that don't survive the thinning of the herd that comes with the first big wind.

I think this is worth a flickr group. This ancient wisdom must not be lost.
 

toy hacking - day two

Well, I'm buzzing. I like hacking toys. Not so much because we learned anything specific. But because it opened my eyes to what you can do with these things, and made me unafraid to do it.

Ben and I hit the limit of our technical abilities, and the possibilities of our bits of toys, by lunchtime.

But I'm quite proud of the conceptual leap we managed to make in constructing this. We took a remote-controlled car and turned it into...a remote-controlled car. But one that works far less well and is much more complicated. In fact we turned a cat, a helicopter and a car into this. The helicopter is operated remotely, when you turn the rotors the vibrations set of a contact mic that used to trigger a miaowing sound in a little cat. That's been unplugged from the cat's speaker and connected via relay to the car's motor. We wrapped the mic in cotton wool and tape so it wouldn't be sensitive enough that the motion of the car would trigger it and keep it going forever. It worked quite well. (You know, in a pointlessly stupid, but satisfying to us, kind of way.) Turn the rotors on the helicopter and the car drives off.

tinker machine from russelldavies on Vimeo.

(It didn't start again because the battery kept falling out.)

I can see how you might find that a little underwhelming, but don't just the workshop by our feeble efforts, some people made some rather magical things, hopefully they'll turn up online somewhere. And, I don't think the thing is the point, the point is how we're now looking at the world slightly differently.

toy hacking

Toy hacking was big fun today. We most spent the day dismantling and examining. Nothing useful or interesting built yet. Hopefully that'll be tomorrow.

But it was fantastic to get beyond the nervousness about cracking things open and peering inside. It helps when you realise 'the toys are cheaper than their components'.

phones for me

MAKE magazine have a saying "If you can't open it, you don't own it". I like this idea. And I own this biscuit tin. I can open it whenever I want. Most technology terrifies me though, I'd be horribly worried about cracking open most of the things I own. Which is one reason I'm excited by the toy-hacking workshop tomorrow.

But I recently took a step in the right direction, following the death of my favourite ever phone - the  K800i. I had vowed to keep this for as long as I could. Sailed through the upgrade opportunity. Turned my nose up at the N-95 and the iPhone. Didn't need those. Happy with what I had. I'll have this forever. Good old sustainable Russ. But then it died. Thoroughly. I wandered from repair shop to repair shop and they pronounced it un-revivable. So following brief dalliances with various devices generously loaned to me, I went to get another from Orange. Except they wouldn't give me one. They pressed the new one on me. The K850i. How different can it be, I thought, so I said yes. And with remarkable speed it turned up at my door.

And, it has to be said, it's not an attractive phone. Good camera. (Though I preferred the old  shutter-camera door to the little button thing.) But otherwise not good.  Silly wannabetouch buttons on the bottom and it looks fat and glossy, like a 300ZX with a neon under-body kit.

And the back's not much better. I stuck some playmobil stickers on it, but it didn't make it any better. So, I thought, I can't wait to get rid of this. As soon as the year's up, I'll be done with it. But I realised that was bad thinking, so I wondered if I could get to like it any more by personalising it somehow.

Me and Arthur had been playing a lot of Warhammer, and been painting figures, and we had all this paint and spray around so I wondered if I could paint it. Maybe paint it like a Warhammer phone.

So I taped it up and gave it a good spraying with 'chaos black'. (And it looks good with the tape on. Like some kind of fetish object. That'd be a good aesthetic for a phone.)

And, although, I've not got the patience to do this tidily, it looked a lot better already. So, then I tried to work out how to embellish it.

I was going to just use Warhammer Ultramarine decals, but they look a bit too right-wing and militaristic out of context. Fine if you're playing a wargame, not so good to just pull out of your pocket. I've not solved this yet. Keep looking for the right stickers. I then had a bit of a scare, we had a really cold day and I got condensation in the camera lens, everything was all blurry for a while. And it occurred to me that I was going to struggle to get Orange or SE to fix it if it was all nasty and black. That seems to have fixed itself though, so I don't have to face that yet.

What I've discovered now though is I seem to have created accelerated graceful aging. The worn paint makes it look a lot older that it really is, but in quite a cool way. So I think I don't need to find stickers or anything, I just need to respray it every now and then, in different colours, and before long it'll get that knackered, lived-in, paint-layered, Millenium Falcon look Will Wright so admires.  Next I want to work on making my own sounds for it, then I'm going to try and screw up the courage/know-how to do some of this.

everybody needs a decision unit

naked thighs and cotton frocks

(You'll have to excuse me if too much husbandly pride creeps into this post.)

Anne recently won a short story competition with a fantastic story called Naked Thighs and Cotton Frocks. Her prize was publication in a short story anthology (named for her story) from the smart and enterprising folks at Leaf Books. You should of course buy many copies from Leaf themselves and therefore support small, interesting publishers. But Anne has a few review copies to go to anyone who wants to blog about the book, so if you'd like a copy you can email her: anneshewring at hotmail.com. Or get in touch via her blog. Writers of reviews may well be blessed with reciept of these extremely exclusive limited edition promotional badges.

diaries

There was a lot of talk of people giving up blogging last year, probably a combination of Facebook, Twitter and generally running out of words. But I'm excited to see that lots of people who haven't posted for ages have started again. (I'm not adding any links in case I spook them.)

But I also suspect we're gradually working out what this kind of short-form, periodic writing is good for.

One thing it's clearly brilliant at is diaries, not writing your own, but reading historical ones. I find reading a diary all at once a bit dense. But reading it at the same pace it was written, relating it to the rhythms and coincidences of your own life, is perfect.

The daddy is still Phil Gyford's Pepys' Diary.  A joyous thing, a work of love, a gift to the internet. It's more than a diary, it's a daily portal to Pepys' whole world. Just look here at all the things Phil has done to enhance the basic diary. If you've not looked before the Story So Far section will get you going. You should subscribe.

And I recently discovered (via a mention on the radio I think) WW1: Experiences Of An English Soldier, which is a fantastic thing; transcripts of the letters received from a WW1 soldier, posted  90 years after they were written. With all sorts of additional commentary and scans and context. Again, it seems to make the thing more meaningful, to read it at the pace it was written.

Slightly different, but equally useful and captivating is Matt Webb's RSSification of The Notebooks Or Leonardo Da Vinci. I'd never read this any other way. It's too big, too daunting, too abstract. But, as a little slice of thought in my bloglines reader everyday it's brilliant, a welcome alternative to all the wittering about brand utility and  GPS. And, very often, there's something in there that makes you stop and think and want to explore more.

I wonder what else could/should be dismantled and delivered like this.