(sorry for x-post)
Dear all, Piksel team just released a full video of my recent presentation in Norway for Piksel 2010. The talk focused on the current state of IT censorship technologies and a related sonification work titled Golden Shield Music ( http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/golden-shield-music/).
If it could be of interest, please check the video at:
Piksel team published many other videos related to the exhibition, performances and presentations hosted at Piksel 2010. You'll find many interesting projects on the Piksel blip.tv channel at:
(among the other projects you will also find the full video of UKI – a viral performance by Shu Lea Cheang with Martin Howse. Sonicscape with participation of Piksel10 artists Oscar Martin Correa, Marco Donnarumma, Joachim Montessuis, Alejandra Perez, Eleonora Oreggia, Julien Ottavi)
Best wishes,
On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
Piksel team just released a full video of my recent presentation in Norway for Piksel 2010. The talk focused on the current state of IT censorship technologies and a related sonification work titled Golden Shield Music (http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/golden-shield-music/).
Would a random selection of non-censorship IP addresses make the same patch sound recognisably different ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
Yes, although atm the score would keep the same time structure, notes would be and sound different.
Should publish the patch when I'll have some time to fix few things.
M
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
Piksel team just released a full video of my recent presentation in Norway for Piksel 2010. The talk focused on the current state of IT censorship technologies and a related sonification work titled Golden Shield Music (http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/golden-shield-music/).
Would a random selection of non-censorship IP addresses make the same patch sound recognisably different ?
_______________________________________________________________________ | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
Yes, although atm the score would keep the same time structure, notes would be and sound different.
But I mean, how can one distinguish between sets of censorship IP addresses and non-censorship IP addresses, by ear ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
Duh!? The censored ones will have the notes replaced with rests.
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010 09:35:17 -0500 (EST) Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
Yes, although atm the score would keep the same time structure, notes would be and sound different.
But I mean, how can one distinguish between sets of censorship IP addresses and non-censorship IP addresses, by ear ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
funny, you said "I don't want to make a nice music", but when I listened
to the recording, I could only hear the nice music, and no IPs or chinese
tentacles.
On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
Piksel team just released a full video of my recent presentation in Norway for Piksel 2010. The talk focused on the current state of IT censorship technologies and a related sonification work titled Golden Shield Music (http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/golden-shield-music/).
Would a random selection of non-censorship IP addresses make the same patch sound recognisably different ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
@Matju: I guess you can't. If the system would be based on a real time flows of IP censored and non-ones, I think it would make more sense to code something which could emphasize the difference. Perhaps this way it would be a different work.
@Joao: Yes, indeed. I tried to create a simple straight-forward conversion of data into sound, without working at all on harmony, scales, etc. Also the design of the synths is nothing too complex on purpose. I wanted the work to focus mostly on the intervention itself and not on its outcome. Although I myself don't think that's a "nice piece of music", I didn't expect that degree of musicality.
M
On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 3:36 PM, João Pais jmmmpais@googlemail.com wrote:
funny, you said "I don't want to make a nice music", but when I listened to the recording, I could only hear the nice music, and no IPs or chinese tentacles.
On Fri, 17 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
Piksel team just released a full video of my recent presentation in Norway for Piksel 2010. The talk focused on the current state of IT censorship technologies and a related sonification work titled Golden Shield Music (http://marcodonnarumma.com/works/golden-shield-music/).
Would a random selection of non-censorship IP addresses make the same patch sound recognisably different ?
_______________________________________________________________________ | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
-- Friedenstr. 58 10249 Berlin (Deutschland) Tel +49 30 42020091 | Mob +49 162 6843570 Studio +49 30 69509190 jmmmpais@googlemail.com | skype: jmmmpjmmmp
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
@Matju: I guess you can't. If the system would be based on a real time flows of IP censored and non-ones, I think it would make more sense to code something which could emphasize the difference. Perhaps this way it would be a different work.
Ok. Thus your music doesn't really have anything to do with censorship.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
Not directly. The involved process does.
M
2010/12/20 Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca:
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
@Matju: I guess you can't. If the system would be based on a real time flows of IP censored and non-ones, I think it would make more sense to code something which could emphasize the difference. Perhaps this way it would be a different work.
Ok. Thus your music doesn't really have anything to do with censorship.
_______________________________________________________________________ | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
2010/12/20 Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca:
Ok. Thus your music doesn't really have anything to do with censorship.
Not directly. The involved process does.
Why does it matter, that the involved process does ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
I could also ask why does the fact that the resulting music itself doesn't have much to do with censorship matter? (even though I think it's a little overstated, as the music is a direct translation of those data)
I reckon the modalities by which a process happens do matter in my personal methodology. However the response of a viewer to such process can be diverse from one individual to another.
M
2010/12/20 Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca:
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
2010/12/20 Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca:
Ok. Thus your music doesn't really have anything to do with censorship.
Not directly. The involved process does.
Why does it matter, that the involved process does ?
_______________________________________________________________________ | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
I could also ask why does the fact that the resulting music itself doesn't have much to do with censorship matter?
Because the title of the work is « Sonification of IT censorship technologies » and this title is the public's first contact with the work.
If one can't reasonably hear the censorship in it, is it appropriate to advertise the work using such a title ?
Also, if the media you give for documenting the work is a soundfile, and not a way to witness the process, how can the audience relate to your process instead of just to your soundfile ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
Because the title of the work is « Sonification of IT censorship technologies » and this title is the public's first contact with the work.
Sonification is the exactly the process I was talking about.
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'?
Also, if the media you give for documenting the work is a soundfile, and not a way to witness the process, how can the audience relate to your process instead of just to your soundfile ?
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.
_______________________________________________________________________ | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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
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
Ah, that's very nice. Will you put some of it online one day ?
Technical information are on-line, I can provide a more detailed description if you really need it :)
Regarding the software, yes, as I mentioned in a previous email, I need a moment to fix few things and publish it.
M
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 9:18 PM, Marco Donnarumma devel@thesaddj.comwrote:
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
-- Marco Donnarumma aka TheSAD Independent New Media Arts Professional, Performer, Teacher Ongoing MSc by Research, University of Edinburgh, UK
PORTFOLIO: http://marcodonnarumma.com LAB: http://www.thesaddj.com | http://cntrl.sourceforge.net | http://www.flxer.net EVENT: http://www.liveperformersmeeting.net
This is a classic example of the ongoing (mis)communication(s) between artists and scientists. In this case, I think Mathieu is confusing the purpose of art with the purpose of a scientific paper. One's aim is to establish and demonstrate facts, the other to explore possibilities and inspire imaginative (and often non-linear) connections.
For me, far too much of this art-science stuff errs on the side of technical demonstration. And far too many artists lack the training to engage with the real media of their work and instead hire technicians to realize it for them. The flip side of that coin is that poetry is often unquantifiable ("program me something sad" says the media artist to their trusty technician) and causes segfaults in engineer-type brains ;-)
D.
On 12/22/10 9:18 PM, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
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.
greetings
if i understand you, one of your indirect points is that artists need to get more scientific. this seems correct to me [art has always been practiced by leading scientists, think of einstein and his violin]. and at the same time, this does not mean to ignore imagination- it means you must do everything.
On Wed, Dec 22, 2010 at 7:02 PM, Derek Holzer derek@umatic.nl wrote:
This is a classic example of the ongoing (mis)communication(s) between artists and scientists. And far too many artists lack the training to engage with the real media of their work and instead hire technicians to realize it for them.
as most of us know, traditional artistic training does not cover what tech savvy artists need to know:
- how to program [something]
- how is information stored and retrieved using [relational] data bases
- what is the network like both as artistic medium [there is some
activity here] and for propaganda purposes
and for all artists:
- what is the role of money in art culture [a subsidiary to: what is
the role of money in my life] ?
but learning how to do art is hard enough. and understanding technology from a tools perspective is hard enough. so why is it that any artist will take this upon themselves?
because it's necessary to their art works. [that's enough]
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, john saylor wrote:
if i understand you, one of your indirect points is that artists need to get more scientific. this seems correct to me [art has always been practiced by leading scientists, think of einstein and his violin]. and at the same time, this does not mean to ignore imagination- it means you must do everything.
Imagination is most meaningful when it is anchored in real life.
It's one think to imagine Einstein's space bending, and to imagine Minkowski's four-dimensional space-time, but it's another thing to know that a satellite's atomic clock has to be adjusted because it _drifts_, and that timeflow² + speedratio² = 1 isn't a formula that Einstein made up from nowhere.
In a very different domain, if I read a novel by Kafka, Camus, M-C Blais, Zola, C Gauvreau or whoever else, the content makes sense because it is anchored in real life. Even when impossible things or unlikely things happen in the novel, there's something in it that is relevant to real life.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Derek Holzer wrote:
This is a classic example of the ongoing (mis)communication(s) between artists and scientists. In this case, I think Mathieu is confusing the purpose of art with the purpose of a scientific paper.
That's right, the purpose of art is to have no purpose. Thus spake Captain Haddock, as he explained why he had bought a large plexiglas sculpture of the letter H, in Tintin's (unfinished) opus 24 : http://www.decitre.fr/gi/16/9782203017016FS.gif
;)
One's aim is to establish and demonstrate facts, the other to explore possibilities and inspire imaginative (and often non-linear) connections.
That's a typical Romantic conception of it. Before that time, art and technique were largely interchangeable words (they still can be, depending on context), and a lot more people knew that the word «technique» comes from classical greek «τέχνη», which has several meanings including «art» and «craftsmanship». In Romantic times, an anti-scientific strand of artists took over, who were really obsessed by their emotions. We are still under that influence, but the reason we're having this discussion is in part because there is a partial reconvergence of art and science happening these years. Some may call it a confusion.
I think that it's pretty clear that to establish and demonstrate facts, one needs to explore possibilities and inspire imaginative (and often non-linear) connections. It's so intertwined, that it's necessary.
Nevertheless, in the scientific culture, much of the «artsy» part of the job has been swept under the carpet although the job's greatest successes depends on it. (I guess that this would be why Einstein appears in that book about creativity that was mentioned some days ago)
For me, far too much of this art-science stuff errs on the side of technical demonstration.
If technical demonstration can be one of the many purposes of art, ... Gallery contents of the last century is one long argument that art can be anything at all and always escapes any definition.
I too think that art errs a lot : someone needs to pee in Duchamp's urinal, imho. We just don't quite agree on which art is erring.
Yet at once, I don't wish that Marco's work had been a technical demonstration ; it's not what I said. My wish is about valuing the possibility to sense the input through the output. That does happen to be a necessary feature of scientific visualisation and/or sonification, but it doesn't mean art can't have this feature.
The flip side of that coin is that poetry is often unquantifiable ("program me something sad" says the media artist to their trusty technician) and causes segfaults in engineer-type brains ;-)
It's more like "program me something interesting" and then the engineer-type brain suspects he's being asked to be the artist, and that the nominal artist is in fact some kind of curator except he gets the credit for the whole thing.
But that's the worst case : usually it's a lot more pleasant than that, and the artists' requirements are usually very graspable.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
--- On Thu, 12/23/10, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca Subject: Re: [PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies To: "Derek Holzer" derek@umatic.nl Cc: pd-list@iem.at Date: Thursday, December 23, 2010, 2:51 AM On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Derek Holzer wrote:
This is a classic example of the ongoing
(mis)communication(s) between artists and scientists. In this case, I think Mathieu is confusing the purpose of art with the purpose of a scientific paper.
That's right, the purpose of art is to have no purpose. Thus spake Captain Haddock, as he explained why he had bought a large plexiglas sculpture of the letter H, in Tintin's (unfinished) opus 24 : http://www.decitre.fr/gi/16/9782203017016FS.gif
;)
One's aim is to establish and demonstrate facts, the
other to explore possibilities and inspire imaginative (and often non-linear) connections.
That's a typical Romantic conception of it. Before that time, art and technique were largely interchangeable words (they still can be, depending on context), and a lot more people knew that the word «technique» comes from classical greek «τέχνη», which has several meanings including «art» and «craftsmanship». In Romantic times, an anti-scientific strand of artists took over, who were really obsessed by their emotions.
Which strand of composers are you talking about?
We are still under that influence, but the reason we're having this discussion is in part because there is a partial reconvergence of art and science happening these years. Some may call it a confusion.
I think that it's pretty clear that to establish and demonstrate facts, one needs to explore possibilities and inspire imaginative (and often non-linear) connections. It's so intertwined, that it's necessary.
Nevertheless, in the scientific culture, much of the «artsy» part of the job has been swept under the carpet although the job's greatest successes depends on it. (I guess that this would be why Einstein appears in that book about creativity that was mentioned some days ago)
For me, far too much of this art-science stuff errs on
the side of technical demonstration.
If technical demonstration can be one of the many purposes of art, ... Gallery contents of the last century is one long argument that art can be anything at all and always escapes any definition.
I too think that art errs a lot : someone needs to pee in Duchamp's urinal, imho. We just don't quite agree on which art is erring.
Yet at once, I don't wish that Marco's work had been a technical demonstration ; it's not what I said. My wish is about valuing the possibility to sense the input through the output. That does happen to be a necessary feature of scientific visualisation and/or sonification, but it doesn't mean art can't have this feature.
The flip side of that coin is that poetry is often
unquantifiable ("program me something sad" says the media artist to their trusty technician) and causes segfaults in engineer-type brains ;-)
It's more like "program me something interesting" and then the engineer-type brain suspects he's being asked to be the artist, and that the nominal artist is in fact some kind of curator except he gets the credit for the whole thing.
But that's the worst case : usually it's a lot more pleasant than that, and the artists' requirements are usually very graspable.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
Pd-list@iem.at mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
--- On Thu, 12/23/10, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
In Romantic times, an anti-scientific strand of artists took over, who were really obsessed by their emotions.
Which strand of composers are you talking about?
I'm not very much talking about composers. I have the impression that Romanticism tended to have a separate meaning when it was only about music. I was thinking mostly about literature.
I don't know what it meant in terms of how composers approached composition back then. If someone could tell me if there was any general change of techniques that is relevant to what I'm saying...
I didn't study art history, so, I don't have enough background to talk so much more about it.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
--- On Thu, 12/23/10, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca Subject: Re: [PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies To: "Jonathan Wilkes" jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: "Derek Holzer" derek@umatic.nl, pd-list@iem.at Date: Thursday, December 23, 2010, 6:59 PM On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
--- On Thu, 12/23/10, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca
wrote:
In Romantic times, an anti-scientific strand of
artists took over, who were really obsessed by their emotions.
Which strand of composers are you talking about?
I'm not very much talking about composers. I have the impression that Romanticism tended to have a separate meaning when it was only about music. I was thinking mostly about literature.
Ok, so then which Romantic writers are you referring to who were writing anti-scientific stuff?
-Jonathan
I don't know what it meant in terms of how composers approached composition back then. If someone could tell me if there was any general change of techniques that is relevant to what I'm saying...
I didn't study art history, so, I don't have enough background to talk so much more about it.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
I would say that in this particular case (golden shield music), the
problem is the "abstractization" of the material. as Marco himself
admitted, due to the synthesis model he used, any numbers would have
triggered a not very different result, and the music alone (I don't know
the rest of the installation) doesn't let the intended meaning go through.
since someone asked how to make censorship clear, I would propose (in the
same way to make something else clear) for example to change the sound
content, so that we can get a more clear objectification of what's being
dealt with. just of the top of the head I can give a concrete realisation
(which will have a different result): instead of "abstract" tones, use
voice samples speaking out the IPs / or flustering, as being menaced / or
computer "reading" / or voice samples but with some variable distortion
(that can be controlled by the country from where the site comes, ...)
This would be a proposal so that the result is more connected with the
concept and process of the installation. Predicting some critiques,
someone can say "with the IPs I don't know what are the sites", but they
don't really have to know. It should be enough to get an idea of the
quantity of manipulated sites, I guess that was the intention of the
installation. Or then, another level could use the whois data to sonify as
well... of course the possibilities are endless.
From my side, I just resume: if you have a clear process/concept that
gives it's identity to the project, it's a bit of a pity that the final
result looses power because there isn't a strong enough "palpable"
(whatever that is) connection. Going too far with the "palpability" could
result in a "technical demonstration", but letting things too loose means
that you're not expressing anything at all, you're just making "nice
music" (which is what you said yourself you didn't want to do). The
question is finding the balance.
And of course, you can always write an article.
João
This is a classic example of the ongoing (mis)communication(s) between
artists and scientists. In this case, I think Mathieu is confusing the
purpose of art with the purpose of a scientific paper. One's aim is to
establish and demonstrate facts, the other to explore possibilities and
inspire imaginative (and often non-linear) connections.For me, far too much of this art-science stuff errs on the side of
technical demonstration. And far too many artists lack the training to
engage with the real media of their work and instead hire technicians to
realize it for them. The flip side of that coin is that poetry is often
unquantifiable ("program me something sad" says the media artist to
their trusty technician) and causes segfaults in engineer-type brains ;-)D.
On 12/22/10 9:18 PM, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
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.
On Thu, 23 Dec 2010, João Pais wrote:
Predicting some critiques, someone can say "with the IPs I don't know what are the sites", but they don't really have to know. It should be enough to get an idea of the quantity of manipulated sites,
The number of blocked sites isn't meaningful : a one-page, one-topic site might count just as much as a million-page site that took a million more man-hours to write (think wikipedia). And then there is the relevance of those pages to each person.
There are many sites that we wouldn't mind getting blocked, and sometimes sites that we may believe ought to be blocked, but the problem is more about the criteria being used. If my government were to specifically only block IPs of the foreign sites that are used for the purpose of massive banking fraud in my country, I'd agree, and I'm sure that this would get massive support. OTOH, freedom of speech also gets massive support, but making a website faking a famous bank isn't considered Speech in that sense.
Censorship itself is easy to justify, but what can be censored, and how we decide what to censor, and what we reveal about the decision process, are the big questions.
if you have a clear process/concept that gives it's identity to the project, it's a bit of a pity that the final result looses power because there isn't a strong enough "palpable" (whatever that is) connection. Going too far with the "palpability" could result in a "technical demonstration", but letting things too loose means that you're not expressing anything at all,
Do you think that increasing palpability, by itself, causes something to look like a technical demonstration ? And do you think that technical demonstration, in itself, isn't able to be expressive ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
Censorship itself is easy to justify, but what can be censored, and how
we decide what to censor, and what we reveal about the decision process, are the big questions.if you have a clear process/concept that gives it's identity to the project, it's a bit of a pity that the final result looses power because there isn't a strong enough "palpable" (whatever that is) connection. Going too far with the "palpability" could result in a "technical demonstration", but letting things too loose means that you're not expressing anything at all,
Do you think that increasing palpability, by itself, causes something to look like a technical demonstration ? And do you think that technical demonstration, in itself, isn't able to be expressive ?
no. but someone said that, and I wanted to go one step ahead of possibly
coming critique.
On Sat, 25 Dec 2010, João Pais wrote:
I wanted to go one step ahead of possibly coming critique.
me too.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
On Wed, 22 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
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.
Yes, we do have radically differing viewpoints. For example, I don't even think that the scope of the work ought to exclude what I talked about.
Technique is artistic.
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.
Yes. It's important to make experiments.
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
--- On Wed, 12/22/10, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca wrote:
From: Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.ca Subject: Re: [PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies To: "Marco Donnarumma" devel@thesaddj.com Cc: pd-list@iem.at Date: Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 8:02 PM 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.
Throw Beethoven's Eroica into a DAW and replace all the sforzandi with a 1000hZ sine tone.
-Jonathan
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 -----Inline Attachment Follows-----
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On Mon, Dec 20, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Mathieu Bouchard matju@artengine.cawrote:
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma wrote:
I could also ask why does the fact that the resulting music itself
doesn't have much to do with censorship matter?
Because the title of the work is « Sonification of IT censorship technologies » and this title is the public's first contact with the work.
If one can't reasonably hear the censorship in it, is it appropriate to advertise the work using such a title ?
Also, if the media you give for documenting the work is a soundfile, and not a way to witness the process, how can the audience relate to your process instead of just to your soundfile ?
Maybe the wisdom is exactly that, that a censored world will sound just like a non-censored world, and one will not be able to percept that "something is missing", which is dangerous if you think about it. Imagine you go home one day and some important things of yours have been stolen but you go on without noticing their absence, even with the time passing. Scary!
Andras
On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, András Murányi wrote:
Maybe the wisdom is exactly that, that a censored world will sound just like a non-censored world,
Well, in a censored world, when I lookup Paul Desmarais' links with Nicolas Sarkozy on CyberPresse, I can read it aloud like this : «404». This certainly sounds quite different from the article I originally read, which had ended up on the website by mistake. This «mistake» gave me a glimpse of what a noncensored world could be.
(OTOH, the way the local newspapers are gradually turning into blogs with near-realtime comments, it's getting harder for newspaper owners to oppose the flow of information, but that still depends on their customers' vigilance)
and one will not be able to percept that "something is missing",
There are usually omissions that are made in most any censorship job, especially because it's getting harder to control information, even though the tools that help finding what to censor are improving too. But it's true that given a nearly endless supply of « i'm just doing my job » pawns, a country can get pretty close.
Imagine you go home one day and some important things of yours have been stolen but you go on without noticing their absence, even with the time passing. Scary!
Now, will this cross the mind of any visitor of the exhibition ?
| Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ---- Villeray, Montréal, QC
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András Murányi -
Andy Farnell -
Derek Holzer -
john saylor -
Jonathan Wilkes -
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Marco Donnarumma -
Mathieu Bouchard