film club XXXV + XXXVI: krapp's last tape | LOL

[Some of the later pictures in this post are marginally NSFW, scroll with caution.]

Over the past few weeks Film Club has watched two films that deal with the relationship between human beings and their technologies of communication, recording, and archiving.

First up was Atom Egoyan's memorable adaptation of Krapp's Last Tape, Samuel Beckett's meditation on old age. (It's available on the third disc of the Beckett on Film set.)

In this play, the main character, Krapp, spends his days in a dwelling which (at least in this particular production of the play) is crammed to the gills with journals, notes, and files.

He's an old man, and he appears to be going at least partially mad from extended isolation. There are no other characters in the play (or the film), it's just Krapp and us.

As it turns out, Krapp has been something of an obsessive self-documenter for much of his life, and he has spent many years keeping a sort of audio journal. The central dramatic event of the film is simply Krapp selecting a spool of audiotape out of his archive and listening back through it.

If you've ever kept a journal (or audio journal, or blog), and then revisited it years later, you know that this is not an activity that comes without its fair share of emotional risk. It has the capacity to summon up fond memories, yes, but it also has the capacity to summon up regrets, remorse, feelings of loss, irrational contempt towards one's younger self, etc. In short, it can be the stuff of drama. John Hurt does a fantastic job embodying the complexities and subtleties of Krapp's reactions:

The play's most clever conceit is its doubling of this entire dramatic mechanism: the tape that Krapp selects to listen to is one from his late-thirties, but the tape was made on an evening when Krapp had engaged in the activity of listening to an even earlier tape, one from his mid-twenties. Krapp at thirty-nine listens to himself at twenty-five and thinks "God, listen to that arrogant, self-important, foolish young man. Look at the mistakes he was making, and he didn't even know it." Krapp at sixty-nine listens to himself at thirty-nine and thinks the same thing. One gets the sense that there's never a point in life at which one can speak in a way that one's future, hopefully wiser self will respect.

So, in Beckett's universe, the pleasures of one's life—being grounded in the present—tend to deliquesce, whereas one's regrets and remorse—being grounded in the past—tend to persist. Therefore, there can be no comfort in the archive: attempting to experience a pleasure via its documentation only helps to remind us of its loss. This is the stuff of real terror.

To get the idea of our follow-up, LOL, you could almost think of it as "Li'l Krapps." Where Krapp is about an old man looking back on recordings of his life and lamenting what an arrogant, self-important, foolish young man he once was, and the mistakes he once made, then LOL is about a group of arrogant, self-important, foolish young men, making recordings of their life and making mistakes, but still young enough not to have had the experience of looking back on this with regret.

The other big difference between LOL (made in 2006) and Krapp (originally written in 1959), of course, is the increased ubiquity of recording, archiving, and communications technology. I'm a little surprised that Facebook people seem to dislike this film quite as much as they do (it's only pulling in a pretty low 2 1/2 stars at Flixter's "Movies" application), for it seems like it's made by and for them. (The weak characterization of the female characters might have something to do with it, I guess.) But still, I'm pleased to see a film that acknowledges the existence of a behavior as contemporary as taking a picture of one's own haircut with a cell phone:

And I'm always pleased when people in movies use actual browsers instead of some phony movie-world browser:

As you might have guessed from that preceding screenshot, one concern that LOL shares with Krapp's Last Tape is the mediation of pleasure, although in LOL this is specifically located around the erotic electronic image, either pornography located on the Internet:

...or the amateur image transmitted between members of a relationship as an expression of erotic connection:

...or even the (ever-growing) areas where these two categories become indistinguishable from one another:

Whether this sort of image-transmission constitutes interpersonal connection is one of the more genuine areas of concern in this film. As for whether the surplus mass of electronic documentation we generate these days will, forty years down the road, constitute something we can paw through to generate the kind of reflections that characterize Krapp's Last Tape remains to be seen.

Despite the fact that I'm now in MA, and my Film Club collaborator Skunkcabbage remains in Chicago, we're going to try to keep the Film Club going. Our next film will stick with this "mediation" theme, although see how it gets interpreted by the world of horror: we'll be moving on to George Romero's latest, Diary of the Dead (2008).

Labels: media commentary, memory, old age, technology

Monday, August 04, 2008
11:22 AM
0 comments

proprioception

Over at her LJ, Angela writes "I don't really get what I am supposed to do with Facebook. What is the appeal?"

Lord knows I have asked myself this question enough times, not about Facebook per se but about various other social-networking type sites... long-time readers of this blog may recall that I once did a freaking six-part series on this topic way back in 2004 (one, two, two, three, four , five, six).

The gist of some of those old posts, in a nutshell, is a complaint that many of these sites bill themselves as being services through which you can meet new people, and yet they systematically deny users the tools necessary to sort the dataset in ways that would help a user to actually meet new people. Facebook, which has some of the most inviolable privacy controls in the social networking world, strikes me as one of the ones that's hardest for everyday people to use in this regard (although I can see that this might be different if your network were especially close-knit; it is significant that Facebook was developed for use on college campuses (specifically Harvard) and has been open to the general public for less than a year).

But in any case, in the intervening years, I've come to think of the very label of "social networking sites" to be something of a misnomer. In my own experience, it seems that people are using them more as "social modeling sites." By which I mean that people use them mostly to keep in touch with friends that they already have. People hit the sites, sign up, add their friends, and then (often) stop looking around any further than that.

My own experience is an admittedly limited pool, but researcher danah boyd, crunching data gathered by the PEW Internet & American Life Project, finds that the numbers bear this out: "91% of teens are using social network sites to stay in touch with friends they see in person while only 49% are using them to meet people (ever)."

A lot of these sites struggle because people (adults?) can't be bothered to go in and update their profiles on a daily basis, which limits their value as a way of keeping tabs those people. (Have you logged into Friendster or Orkut lately?) One of the things that's genius about Facebook is that it's so friendly towards third-party plug-ins, which, if you play your cards right, can allow your profile to update steadily without ever even logging into Facebook. My own page has widgets from Netflix, del.icio.us, and Last.fm, all of which auto-update as I go about my daily business of watching movies, scavenging links, and listening to music. If I could find Flickr and LibraryThing plug-ins that I liked, my profile would update with photos and books, too...

Granted, checking out what I'm listening to, linking to, or photographing is a poor substitute for (say) face-to-face interaction, a phone call, or a letter, but I think that to view them in an either-or schema like that is missing the point: all that Facebook minutia just serves as an extra layer of information that a friend can have access to.

Wired journo Clive Thompson, in a enthusiastic piece on Twitter and Dodgeball, describes the minutia that flows through these services as "granular updates," and claims that these updates ultimately yield a "subliminal sense of orientation." I think we could think of Facebook in the same fashion.

Once upon a time I might not have been convinced that being constantly in micro-touch with people would have been at all appealing, but given that constant overages have forced me to switch to a phone plan that allows me to send unlimited text messages, I think it's safe to say that those days are safely in the past.

Update: after discovering the Scrabble plug-in, Angela no longer wonders what Facebook is for. :)

Labels: internet, networks, relationships, technology

Friday, September 07, 2007
11:08 AM
0 comments

Over at Clive Thompson's interesting blog Collision Detection, there's a post on the findings of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, which finds that two-thirds of Americans feel they could stop using Internet search engines entirely without much change to their lives.

I like Thompson's reply:

"During the workday, I use search engines several times an hour -- and for several extended periods during the day I'll be doing queries several times a minute. If I were to average it out, I'd say I probably do a search every 15 minutes while I'm at work at my desk. Obviously, I skew pretty far off to the side of the bell-shaped curve here because I'm a) a journalist, b) a technology journalist, c) a blogger, and d) someone who regards the Internet, functionally, as a part of my consciousness. Search engines aren't merely the way I find information: They're part of my basic thought processes."

Hear hear. (The number of Google searches I do while writing an average Imaginary Year entry would probably surprise people, and I'm currently working on a set of projects that use Google even more fundamentally, sort of in the style of flarf, only minus the comedy.)

The comments thread on Thompson's post is full of people praising Google and talking about the usual signs of Google overuse (using it as a spell-checker, etc.), but I also found this comment on "the changing nature of the Web" to also be insightful:

"An unindexed mass of pages made centralized search engines a necessity. These evolved into even more centralized portals. Now we're seeing these portals lose ground to decentralized blog networks [...] The Web is becoming increasingly more social and decentralized in nature. I use Google pretty often, but classic internet search is just one of many, many access points at my disposal now."

Labels: internet, technology

Friday, February 11, 2005
4:27 PM
0 comments

New Macs are coming bundled with GarageBand, a piece of loop-making / multitracking / music production software.

Predictably, the ease-of-use of the product has led some to question whether GarageBand is "truly" enabling creativity or is "just" allowing people to enjoy the experience of being "artistic" without the hard work and discipline that we normally associate with the actual making of art. (See, for instance, this parody of GarageBand: a fake Apple product called "AtticAuthor.")

The parody is admittedly clever. And it's true that, like many other easy-to-use production tools, GarageBand may enable some users to hurriedly produce formulaic output which appears superficially "professional." But I believe in creative amateurism, and so I come down on the side of cheap tools for cultural production every time. I'd defend the point more extensively in this post if I hadn't already done so in a very similar argument almost two years ago, and if Jean Burgess hadn't been doing so quite eloquently over at Creativity / Machine. Visit this archive for five thoughtful posts defending GarageBand, as well as other posts on the topic of "vernacular creativity" (great phrase!).

Labels: amateurism, creative_process, technology

Thursday, February 12, 2004
1:13 PM
0 comments

cosmopolis

Cosmopolis, the new Don DeLillo book, is something of a disappointment. The book's primary set-pieces—an anti-globalism protest, a hip-hop performer's funeral, a rave, and a Spencer Tunick-esque mass gathering of nudes—all feel slightly stale: there is nothing here as inventive as White Noise's Airborne Toxic Event or Most Photographed Barn In America; nothing here as accomplished as Underworld's "super-omniscient" Giants-Dodgers game.

That said, there are some interesting thematic threads woven throughout the book. Like DeLillo's last novel, The Body Artist, Cosmopolis permits the appearance of elements which are overtly fantastic. In this novel, the super-natural is embodied by two pieces of image-capturing technology (a surveillance system and a camera-watch), which are so sophisticated that they begin to display events that have not yet occurred.

These devices are the most dramatic symbol of one of the book's central thematic concerns: the predictive capabilities of technology. The protagonist, Eric Packer, is an asset manager who has made millions by accurately predicting the inherently unpredictable fluctuations of currencies, with the assistance of sophisticated information-gathering technologies. The book seems to suggest that as these technologies improve, they grow ever-closer to penetrating the veil of the future.

Thinking about this reminded me of something that ex-hacker Steve Steinberg mentioned over in the Boing Boing sideblog, which warrants quoting at length here:

"[T]o be a hacker in the late 1980s was to know something profound about the nature and degree of connectedness before everyone else ... today, an equally singular and premonitory view is coming into focus at a few of the edgier hedge funds on wall street.

[...] we have all heard that companies from Wal-Mart to Cheescake Factory rely on sophisticated data mining to run their business. Every customer is analyzed 43 different ways until They know what you will buy before even you do. Even ignoring the enormous gap between rhetoric and reality, these algorithms are at best myopic. Like the idealized model used in undergraduate physics -- no gravity, no friction -- these companies imagine their business in isolation.

But money flows through a network with thousands of significant nodes-- to partners, from customers, away from competitors. The airline industry has come the closest to this kind of holistic analysis, thanks to their penchant for collusion.

But right now the only people who really want to see how all the pieces fit together -- to datamine entire industries, economies -- are on wall street. Coincidently, the web has already made many businesses so transparent that an outsider can know almost as much as management.

Surely, with enough determination.. a lot of bandwidth, some fast computers... somebody will build the first detailed map.. a topography of money flows.. to see what's next."

Labels: book_commentary, capitalism, information, technology

Tuesday, September 09, 2003
11:09 AM
0 comments

My collaborator Chris took a look at that dub production site and consequently suggested we apply some of those techniques to sounds like harpsichords and music boxes, creating a sort of "Victorian dub."

This notion intrigued me, and I set out to do a little web research on early musical automata. Found this page, featuring samples from a restored music box, and then searched upwards from there and found that it was part of a larger collection of sites associated with the Mechanical Music Digest, an e-mail forum dedicated to, well, early musical automata.

Piles of information and strange sounds and weird links on that site. Glorious. Here, once again, is a reminder of why I love the web.

. . .

This also reminds me that when I eventually make it back to San Francisco, I hope to return to the Musee Mecanique to do some field recordings (although actually a little hunting reveals that I could simply buy this CD of sounds from the Musee Mecanique's collections).

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Tuesday, September 03, 2002
10:24 AM
0 comments

I went to see Anti-Pop Consortium last night.

(For those of you who don't know, Anti-Pop Consortium is a hip-hop / electronic improv band from New York, featuring veterans of both the Nuyorican Cafe poetry scene and Survival Research Labs. Their latest record, Arrythmyia, is out on WARP Records, "pioneers of weird electronic dance music.")

It was an amazing set. Philip Sherburne sums up the "live experience" quite well in last week's Needle Drops.

The only thing I'd want to add is a mention that Anti-Pop Consortium are now doing what all the best electronic musicians have done: they are imagining new ways that humans and technology can co-exist, not only peacefully, but fruitfully.

(Projected on the video screen behind their set were images of breakdancers, Marvel Comics characters, anime robot-girls, and wireframe animations of rotating skeletons and slithering machines. The same terrain seen from different viewpoints?)

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Saturday, May 04, 2002
12:00 PM
0 comments

William Fields links to "Songs in the Key of F12," an article from the "music issue" of Wired.

At first, this article sticks pretty close to the normal journalistic line about laptop music, which, for the record, is usually an ambiguous mix of pros (look at the cool toys!) and cons (it's so boring to watch; for all we know the performer could be checking his e-mail / updating his weblog / playing Minesweeper). But about halfway through, it begins to pick at the tricky question about who is "in control" of this music: the musician, or the algorithims in the software?

This question does not have an easy answer. (It may not even ultimately be a meaningful question.)

I've been talking to people about the music that I make with Number None, and invariably whoever I'm talking to asks "oh, what do you play?" I've taken to answering machines, since most of the sounds I produce for the band are elicited from a computer or an analog synthesizer. And sometimes, I feel less like a musician and more like a technician of some sort—sometimes the machines seem to generate the music on their own, and my role is simply to help that music find its way out into the world.

Or, as Shawn "Twerk" Hatfield says in the article:

"I'm trying to make new sounds, computer sounds. ... I'm never able to get the sounds that I hear in my head ... so I just play with randomness and let these things happen naturally. The networks of sound generation I set up are just spewing out all of this chaos, and from that I pull out the pieces that are worthy. It's like a garden that you're constantly trimming and manicuring."

Labels: creative_process, music_commentary, technology

Friday, April 19, 2002
11:23 PM
0 comments

Spent a few days over the weekend hacking out some mockups of cover art for the Number None CD.

It was hard to think of an image that would convey our aesthetic very well. My tendency in design these days is to lean towards the ultra-minimal: super-clean expanses of white space broken up only with stark, perfect geometric forms. You know, the kind of thing that is easy to do well with Adobe Illustrator.

And that would be a decent fit if Chris and I were making minimal, clean laptop music. But we're not.

Which is not to say that we don't use technology. Chris can play some instruments well, but without machines I would have nothing of value to bring to this band. I love using the machines as generative technology: I'll set up a system on the computer, plug a sample into it, and see what emerges. Or I'll "play" the guitar using only the knobs on the effect pedals. But the end result is not clean. The music is dirty—irregular, fecund, low-fidelity. Recorded live to a single microphone which also records the room hiss and traffic noise. The Illustrator look just didn't fit for this project.

But then it occurred to me. The right technology to use for the cover art was the photocopier.

For a long time I've loved photocopiers. (See number 17.) I love the things that are made with them. And it seemed to be fitting to use them for this project: as with the recording technology Chris and I have at our disposal, photocopiers are cheap and lo-fi (the punks knew this first), and, as with the sound manipulation software I use, with photocopiers you can appropriate just about any sort of input, push a few buttons, and be rewarded with often magnificently unpredictable output.

How about links?

Here's a history of Photocopy Art.

Here's some information on Choreography For Copy Machine (Photocopy Cha Cha), a 1991 animated film made entirely from photocopies (I saw it in 1999, and it was wonderful; I wish a Quicktime version existed).

And here's some images from the (somewhat) recent book Fucked Up and Photocopied : Instant Art of the Punk Rock Movement.

Labels: number_none, technology, xerography

Tuesday, April 09, 2002
8:40 PM
0 comments

Glenn McDonald's The War on Silence currently has up a review of Bob Mould's new album Modulate.

The further Mould gets away from his Husker Du days, the less interested I get, but the review is interesting because it presents the dark flipside of Kevin Kelly's vision of new technological tools engendering a flowering of amateur music.

"Samples, drum loops, sequences, factory presets, combs, performance controllers -- on the best of the new equipment you can punch a few more buttons and twist knobs and change the noises without ever having to learn a grammar at all. Spend ten minutes with a Karma and you can have two club anthems and a car commercial. Give the Media Lab a couple more years and it won't even be that hard. Gesture, and you perform. Think, and you compose. You have music inside you, the promise goes; machines will remove the barriers that keep it from getting out. And as entertainment, this may be extremely engaging. But it isn't art. Or, more precisely, it isn't your art."

I don't know if I agree with all of McDonald's points, although he picks on them better than I can here, spending a formidable amount of time thoughtfully listing "clauses and clarifications and exceptions" to his own arguments.

Douglas Wolk, over at Lacunae, responds to McDonald's essay, by writing: "as much fun as [shortcuts] are to take ... having some kind of understanding of how musical theory actually works is what really lets you do worthwhile things." I might argue that theory (with the possible exception of Michael Nyman's text Experimental Music) doesn't always account well for conceptual music, a category which includes a great deal of the music generated by technological shortcuts. But, that said, I see Wolk's point, and my only qualification might be that the technology that makes it easier for amateurs to make something musical may be a gateway to the theory, not simply a replacement for it. I would never have linked to that page on polyrhythms if I hadn't spent a few months playing around with the drum machine in AudioMulch.

At the end of McDonald's review, he forgives Mould's digitalia experiments by writing "Some aspect of the new technology will let Bob Mould do something that nobody else could have, and how is he going to figure out what it is without trying all the buttons?" I would simply suggest that that statement has the potential to be true, not just for Mould, but for everyone.

Labels: amateurism, creative_process, music_commentary, technology

Wednesday, March 27, 2002
3:15 PM
0 comments

This Kevin Kelly article, "Where Music Will Be Coming From," is interesting and mostly well-reasoned. (It's a New York Times article, so if you don't have an account with them, use member ID invisible-city, password reader.)

I think this is accurate:

"Digital copies are not only perfect and free, they are also fluid. Once music is digitized it becomes a liquid that can be morphed and migrated and flexed and linked. You can filter it, bend it, archive it, rearrange it, remix it, mess with it. And you can do this to music that you write, or music that you listen to, or music that you borrow.

At first glance it seems audiences were drawn to online music because of the power of the free, but in reality the rush to online music came from digitized sound's ever-expanding power of liquidity. Once music could swirl around one's life unencumbered, the millions of people who downloaded peer-to-peer file-sharing software suddenly and simultaneously imagined a thousand ways to conjure with music's liquidity. It wasn't only that it was free; it was all the things you could do with it.

Once music is digitized, new behaviors emerge. With liquid music you have the power to reorder the sequence of tunes on an album, or among albums. To surgically morph a sound until it is suitable for a new use. To precisely extract from someone else's music a sample of notes to use oneself. To X-ray the guts of music and outline its structure, and then alter it. To substitute new lyrics. To rearrange a piece so that its parts yield a different voice. To re-engineer a piece so that it sounds better on a car woofer. To meld and marry music together into hybrid breeds. ... With digitization, music went from being a noun, to a verb, once again."

And I think his conclusion is accurate:

"Music could experience a similarly exuberant, irrational flowering of the amateur spirit.

Part of the reason people have been inspired to create text, graphics and action in the digital realm has been the arrival of new tools. Fans of music are already ... making music in the way that a camera makes an image -- by starting with what is there and adding a unique view to it. Just as the introduction of the Brownie camera changed photography from an expert's art to a ubiquitous public expression, with the right tools in hand it is not a very long hop from now to a time when everyone makes music in a small, amateur way."

But I disagree with his thoughts about how people will sift through the ensuing mountian of music. These thoughts (which appear at least three separate times on this bullet-pointed list) don't go beyond "people will pay others to sift for them," an unsubtle hint to people looking to make money off the future. (Unsurprising, given Kelly's long-running tendency to operate as a corporate-friendly visionary.) But there has always been more music than people can possibly listen to; this is not new. And, yes, people have made money by providing accessible guides to that music, and, yes, this will continue to be true into the future. But I think that the real trend here, which Kelly misses, is the increase in noncommercial fan networks.

Mailing lists, suggested discography pages, weblogs, Amazon collaborative filtering systems and Listmania lists, submonitions pages: these things are proliferating wildly right now, and they all serve to amplify basic word-of-mouth. As a result, it is easier than ever to find music you will like, not harder than ever, and this makes it less likely that recommending music will be lucrative in the future.

Think of MP3 swap networks, which have all the benefits of the old underground cassette networks, only without the expense of postage. And, like the cassette swap networks, MP3 swap networks are participated in by both fans of obscure music and obscure musicians seeking kindred souls. And it's easier than ever to find kindred souls right now. I see the amateur musicians out there finding other musicians, who are pursuing similar experiments, and then swapping tracks with them, eventually perhaps bonding together as an identifiable unit. Anticon and Elephant 6 are perhaps recent successful examples of this phenomenon...

I am indebted to Dirk Hine for the original link to the Kelly article.

Labels: music_commentary, networks, technology

Thursday, March 21, 2002
11:23 AM
0 comments

Nanoloop is "a synthesizer / sequencer for the Nintendo Game Boy (TM) . As it is a pure software product and stored on a normal game cartridge, it can be used on any Game Boy and as it provides all necessary functions to produce nice electronic music, no further hardware is needed."

• Nanoloop users discussion forum
  
• pile of Nanoloop-assisted MP3s
  
• Nanoloop compilation album on Denmark's Disco Bruit label. Includes a Merzbow track (which you can hear in RealAudio).
  

Thanks, Neil.

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Thursday, March 07, 2002
11:31 PM
0 comments

Some preliminary sources on videogame music:

Chicago Reader article on 8-Bit Construction Set, a group that released an album of locked grooves, samples, and songs created on an Atari800 and a Commodore 64.

Information (including MP3s) on Output 64, a compilation (on the German label Enduro) of remixes of the music from Commodore 64 computer games. (Enduro also released Input 64, a compilation of unreworked C64 game music from 1985-89.)

"[T]he aim was clear: the selection of artists should reflect and bolster the original versions’ incredibly broad spectrum of approaches (despite the technical limitations of the Commodore 64’s SID sound chip), disregarding all musical boundaries and preconceptions."

Information on Matt Wand's 1½ Volt Music.

"The piece uses a dozen pocket game machines (Gameboys) programmed to generate permutations of the composer's score which was structured using the rules of the game TETRIS ( ie: as gaps appeared in the music the score is adapted to fill them).... the project continues the artist's long standing interest in totally portable and cheap noise/music making apparatus."

More on this later, perhaps.

Labels: music_commentary, technology

Wednesday, March 06, 2002
9:53 AM
0 comments