Due to a particular series of links and backlinks, I was introduced to a website called The Vanishing Point yesterday. The gent who runs it, and other like-minded souls, make a hobby of entering old buildings, ancient drains, abandoned houses, and so on. The habit / hobby has been given the rather high-falutin’ name of ‘Urban Explortation’ – and while I may be slightly skeptical of the overarching motives and ethics of some of the praticioners, I cannot deny that they bring back drop-dead amazing photos and a remarkable sense of wonder and history:
Digging through all the pictures of huge industrial culverts, old power complexes, and abandoned, rotting buildings also helped crystallize a few particular thoughts in my head. The fact that my clean, shining life-style is built on top of 140 years of rubble is a little disturbing, and the fact that the world of Web 2.0 and clean vector graphics is powered by thousands of pounds of pressure from ever-falling water is humbling to say the least.
So I was watching the Delta Heavy DVD with Leenie, and we were struck by how *bad* the visuals were. Now, granted, this was 5 years ago, but still. Why can’t club visuals look like this?
The answer, of course, is that unlike the BT videos, club visuals aren’t meticulously produced videos, specifically designed to match each song. So it goes. But what if there was a way to generate art that good and that matched on the fly?
What if you hacked something together, using the legendary Milkdrop as the base, and then hooked it up to Jitter, and most importantly, Google? You could ask Google to find you images and video to manipulate that relate to the and even to the artist and remixer, then throw them into a pre-made engine in Jitter / Milkdrop that renders them out in time with the music?
For those of you who have a fear of The Tide Pool Store, you can now get our stuff (except for the longer previews, free tracks, buyable parts, and bootlegs, of course) at JunoDownload. Forward the foundation.
I am all kinds of delighted to tell you that the remixes of ‘Despegue’ that I did for Fade have been released! You can get them at Beatport and other fine download stores, or on vinyl at respectable record shops everywhere.
The release has also been charted on Balance for the last five weeks, peaking at #9. I’m pretty stoked about that, even if lots of it can be blamed on Fortier having a mix on the record.
I just tried an interesting visual experiment: load a WAV of a file and an MP3 of a file into Soundforge or Peak or any audio editor, and cue them up to the same place. Then zooooooom in, and compare the waveforms. Eventually, at high enough levels of zoom, you’ll start to notice differences in the waveforms.
Then, try drawing in changes to one of the files, and see how much you can distort the waveform without your ears noticing it. Sound is a shifty, shifty thing…
Let me be perfectly clear here, from the start. The single best part of Nintendo’s masterful new console is in fact, the multitude of awful puns you can make with it’s name. Wii-volution, Wii-mote, Wii-diculous, Wii-markable, and so on. Love it.
Of course, the next best thing about the Wii is that it totally changes how video games and interactive media are played, leaves Sony and Microsoft gasping in its wake, and instantly returns Nintendo to the unquestioned top of the console pile. I cannot stress enough how much fun this machine is, nor can I do justice to the reactions it garnered from a collection of hardened, cynical people who have been playing video games for their whole lives. The Wii is awesome, in the most exact sense of the word.
At the very least, Nintendo have the perfect cult hit on their hands, especially with the library of old games. At the very most, Nintendo have fundamentally and completely changed how video games and “interactive media” are played and perceived, ushered in the first steps towards virtual reality, broken the arms race of graphic processing power, created dozens upon dozens of new game concepts, and so on. The significance of the Wii cannot be overstated.
Meet Visual Acoustics, by Alex Lampe. Also, meet a song I made with it and two minutes of editing in Nuendo. It’s essentially a mouse-driven music player / synesthesia machine, and you can make it sound all kinds of hep pretty easily.
Slate presents the Top 10 Civil Liberties Violations Of The Year (USA edition). Remember folks: not only can the President define what ‘torture’ is or isn’t, he can also have you arbitrarily arrested and detained indefinitely as an enemy combatant. Smile! You live in America!
So my step-sister and her family got me a quite fantastic gift for Christmas, right out of the blue:
SCIENCE FICTION OF THE 20th CETURY, by Frank M. Robinson. It’s a gorgeous, coffee-table sort of book, that goes from HG Wells to the pulp magazines to the Big Three to Crichton and Gibson and the state of modern “speculative fiction”.
And while I was reading it, I was struck by a thought. The book discusses how, when the first pulp SF magazines came out a little less than a century ago, the readers were all nerds, kids who wore glasses and got picked last in gym class, who spent hours in their garages tinkering with vacuum tubes and blinking lights. Sound like anyone we know?
Fast forward to the 1980s. I never worse glasses, and would rather have read than blow things up in my basement. But I also spent a king-hell amount of time being in a story, all the way from the “Wizard Needs Food Badly” of GAUNTLET to the epic star-sweeping plots of FINAL FANTASY. If I had been born in 1915, I would have read AMAZING. As is, I played BALDUR’S GATE instead, or got lost in STARCRAFT.
And so did everyone else I knew. I could talk to just about any close friend and say “ZERG RUSH!”, and they’d at least understand it. The entire nature of media has changed (maybe not for the better). WORLD OF WARCRAFT is a perfect example. My generation’s stories are not in text – they’re in silicon and flash at you 60 times a second. I can’t say that this is a better state of affairs, but it is the state of affairs, and anyone who wants to tweak the minds of people these days (though that doesn’t even really need a story – witness DEFCON) had best be prepared to deal with it.
Tide Pool brings the hotness for winter, with this new tune by Vancity’s own Caleb Fox. Check it out.
