Matju, I see your point and I won't try to convince you that this work is something you don't believe it to be.
However, I believe our disagreement born from a very different viewpoint on the nature of an """"artistic"""" intervention. Your technical analysis is excellent, but it seems to me it goes over the real scope of the work.
A reliable, efficient, accurate and consistent sonification system for IP addresses was not what I aimed for. The project is a simple critical observation. That's my personal view of it and that's what I aimed for in first instance.
I agree with you, it's hard to imagine not obvious ways for censorship to enter music, and that's one of the reasons why I'm happy experimenting with it.
M
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.cawrote:
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
If one can't reasonably hear the censorship in it, is it appropriate to
advertise the work using such a title ?
How would you define a 'reasonable listening of censorship'?
Well, perhaps there isn't one that can be done with IP addresses. IP addresses don't mean much to people, even less than phone numbers do, because the DNS and WHOIS systems do their best to hide those numbers away from people. There are hardly any well-known IP addresses apart from 127.0.0.1 and 192.168.0.1, which are reserved for things outside of the internet anyway.
Then there is the problem of putting numbers in any way that the numbers could be recovered (or recovered enough) from the data. In the case of IP addresses, anything one bit away is a totally distinct address, so, if such distinctions are hard to hear, you aren't really playing the IP address, but rather, a fragment of it. The way you play it, even if someone could make sense of MIDI notes as high as 255 (when even just 140 is above Nyquist...), there are 24 combinations that would sound the same (for most IP addresses), because in an IP address, the order of the bytes is important, which is not rendered as such (you'd be either preserving the order or doing anything else that amounts to doing the same). Thus there are many combinations of non-banned addresses that sound exactly the same as the banned ones.
Both things led me to think that in this work, the IP addresses are secondary, the fact that they are banned addresses is secondary, and the concept of censorship is secondary.
That said, I don't know how censorship could enter a music piece as music.
However, there are obvious ways to make it enter as lyrics : you write a song against censorship, and then it will get censored in China, and now it's doubly relevant to the topic of censorship.
Sure, but in this case soundfile is only for online documentation, the
work is exhibited as multichannel audio installation, the audience can interact with the software and read relevant information about the how/what/why.
Ah, that's very nice. Will you put some of it online one day ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC