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Cultural Value in the Age of “Mass Amateurisation”
Tom Coates’ insightful and focused article “Weblogs and the Mass Amateurization of (Nearly) Everything“, and the followup by Tom of bbCity, have come at just the right time for me. For the last few weeks I have posted several short pieces on the social impacts of cultural profileration and the democratization of creative technologies, mostly […]
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RIAA’s Legal Blitz Begins
From Wired: The music industry began a promised wave of lawsuits on Monday, suing 261 people it accuses of illegally distributing about 1,000 copyright music files each, using peer-to-peer networks. FOXNews.com adds an “innocent victim” scenario by pointing out that a 12-year-old New York City girl is among these “pirates”. Meanwhile, the EFF says individuals […]
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Subsonic Weirdness
From a Reuters Story: Mysteriously snuffed out candles, weird sensations and shivers down the spine may not be due to the presence of ghosts in haunted houses but to very low frequency sound that is inaudible to humans. British scientists have shown in a controlled experiment that the extreme bass sound known as infrasound produces […]
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Blogger Weblogs: Tweaks for Non-Geeks
[Note: This is one of the posts imported from my old Blogger-powered weblog. As you can see, I’ve made the move to Movable Type, but I’ve left this post intact in case someone finds it useful.] If you have a BloggerFree-powered weblog that you are keen to make more interactive without making the move to […]
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Retro Analog Technologies in Visual Culture
I write a lot about the proliferation of digital production and its effects on concepts of creativity and aesthetic value in established music subcultures – and I have often thought that the resurgence in analog synthesis/retro music technology is connected somehow to the availability of digital production tools to the “masses”. It’s not a phenomenon […]
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Reverberant | Sound Art
Reverberant | Sound Art | Info. “This site documents collaborative sound art projects by Iain Mott, made primarily with Marc Raszewski and Jim Sosnin. The work explores the physical relationship between sound and the public and integrates sculpture, audio electronics and video. Interactivity is used to heighten the aesthetic experience, engaging and directing participants in […]
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Testing Ownership of Digital Music
Let’s pretend we are deeply naive for a second: when you buy a CD, are you buying the music it contains? Or an aesthetically value-added material object that enables you to access the music? i-Tunes (and other online digital music outlets) would prefer us to believe the former, and the price differential between ludicrously expensive […]
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Remix your TV
VJamm is far more than a toy. It’s a lean mean VJ machine, a software instrument which allows you to play 16 audiovisual samples and collate them together to make your own video remixes – in essence triggering and sequencing video loops in a way analogous to audio sequencing. The software has proved popular in […]
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George’s i-tunes track reaches $15,000 on ebay
George’s iTunes m4p has reached a bid of $15,000 on ebay. Either there are a lot of wingnuts putting in bids for fun, or someone is really really committed to some fuzzily formulated anti-hegemonic principle or other. Either that, or someone really, really, wants a totally non-unique inferior-quality compressed recording of Double Dutch Bus by […]
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Resonant Cities: Call for Sound Works
New Media Scotland seeks sound works for Drift: an exploration of sound art and experimental music which comprises live events, radio broadcasts, moving image and publications. We are seeking sound works for ‘Resonant Cities’: Internet radio streaming that explore the sonic identity of our surrounding space and that engage with the fragmented ‘noise’ of the […]