For an inexplicable reason I love generative projects. Maybe it’s the appearance of magic that I like, or maybe the embodiment of an abstract idea seemingly discorporated from a human mover. A ghost in the machine for as long as you can suspend disbelief. The Perpetual Storyteller Apparatus by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus is one such project where the you could be forgiven for staring at the machine, trying to get some meaning out of its scribblings.

Because magic is about diverting your viewers attention, much of generative art leaves you trying to decipher how something is made or what the internal mechanism is. Once you realise that the stunning graphics that you see are pulsating in rhythm to a certain noise, there is little but aesthetics and perhaps admiration for the technical skill of the artist left. And while technical skills are important to have, we don’t make art to show them off but rather hope to tell a story or present information in a way or setting that is enlightening or amusing.

Back when I lived in London, I saw Scott Draves in a pub where he presented a beta of what would become the famous Electric Sheep project. By having abstract patterns — “sheep” — swap genes with each other from one online computer to another, and having users pass judgement on which sheep they liked most, an ecology of sheep was formed, pretty and less so. It’s an excellent example of a generative project where the process (strings of software that communicate and mutate while your computer is “sleeping”) gives us a new take on computers and their relationship to each other, while the end product speaks leagues of the end users aesthetic sensibilities. (The individual sheep which we’ve voted up or down, thereby influencing their reproductive ability)

But this is an old project, epochs ago in Internet years, and I have a hard time finding interesting generative art made today. I’ve been poking a bit at Processing, a programming language geared towards artists and similar folk, which is perfectly suited to take any data and muck about with it. Since it’s relatively simple and accessible it has generated a lot of projects that are half baked and conceptually weak; This is fine as long as we view the projects as stepping stones, as experiments in visualisation. But it’s so easy to get stuck with fiddling the knobs of random parameters that you end up spending you time changing hues instead of a coming up with a reason for why you’re doing it in the first place.

In the time of Flash 1.0 I was in awe of what Joshua Davis was doing over at Praystation.com, and most of that was only him fiddling with autonomous processes and the possibilities of Actionscript. Today we have Flickrvision and We Feel Fine, which take their data from the cloud and present them in a new way. This is good stuff, but it’s the exception to most other art or “new media” projects that show up. Computer art too often lacks either in technology or theory, and it ages miserably.

(My mum stopped accepting “hand-made presents” some time ago, so one should hope that artists would be self-critical enough not to show every ashtray they’ve created.)

But perhaps there is a truth to get at behind a generative, or random, process (not that the two are interchangable, but they are similar enough for this topic) if by a “controlled randomness” we utilise a background noise to decide the outcome. Maybe it reveals an underlying truth about the universe or somesuch. That would certainly be in line with numerology and astrology; Trying to discern a pattern. Perhaps the cosmic microwave background radiation is interferring with our world and by looking long enough at the noise of a tv showing static we discover the pattern of God. The movie Π comes to mind, as does the ramblings of any number of nutters who’ve stared into the sun long enough.

I’ve included this here mostly for completeness sake and because it’s an old and interesting sci-fi idea: If the universe is deterministic there can be no true randomness. The “real” that shines through, the almost invisible hand of the maker, will show in everything — why it should appear more in “beautiful” works of art is another matter — and there is a Truth in there. Thank Goodness for the uncertainty principle I say. There is randomness, so there doesn’t have to be a pattern for us to find, and maybe what we enjoy is randomness. Whatever.

What Duchamp did with his 3 Standard Stoppages was interesting because it spoke about our relationship to art. It’s not the result, nor the process in itself that was interesting, but audience going “oooh” at the audacity.

So a goal of using magic where you are allowed to see what the magician is doing could be that the end result is valuable, not the process itself. Someone mixing flour, yeast, water and salt will make a bread – itself an extraordinary transformation of the starting material – but they’re not doing it because the process is awesome but because bread is a good thing. And it’s not art, or at least not interesting art; The latter is a worse offence.

[flv:https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Delinquest_sleep_logo.flv https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Delinquest_sleep_logo.png 640 360]

In the above video, made for Delinquest, I dick around with After Effects: The horizontal blur reacting to the music. I haven’t made the effect, but I control the parameters. It’s a nonsensical example, but still an example of a generative process. It always starts with someone telling someone else to do the work, and then you end up with instructions being the work and suddenly you’re back at the screen, watching the iTunes visualizer, experiencing beauty like a child and patting yourself on the back for choosing this particular song.

I’m not saying the end product is irrelevant or – heaven forfend – isn’t art, but one has to realise that even though aesthetics can be appreciated as something good, they’re not a discreet phenomena but at one end of a sliding scale which has “abstract beauty” at the other end. Or maybe “being a smart-ass.”

The book fair came and went, and I went there and came back with a small folder with information on an ebook reader by NUUT that’s being launched in Sweden by Royal Line. It was the first time I got to see eink up close, and it does read just like paper. The model was rather slow on updating the pages, and the controls were limited (I would have loved to be able to bookmark specific paragraphs, not only pages) but it was a neat machine and I can see it becoming a staple in every house and academic institution once the kinks are ironed out.

The price is still a hurdle though. It was sold at a discount for 2400 SEK, which is at least 1400 too many monies. Hopefully they’ll get some stiff competition now that Amazon Kindle is being released in Sweden for 2000 SEK. It seems to be their six inch version that will ship, and although its functionality is somewhat crippled (no web nor RSS feeds if the articles are correct) it still seems to be a better deal than the NUUT.

Now you know what to get me for Christmas. I will as usual assume that a check valid for “massage with full release” will suffice as a reciprocal gift. Except to family members, who instead get checks for “just massage.”

I don’t know why, but I’m channeling Attenborough at least once a month lately; It’s my own romantic period. Imagine his voice when reading this post and see if it makes more sense. I almost guarantee it.

Rachel Sussman has photographed the oldest living organisms that we know of, and the pictures are available here. The pictures themselves are unassuming, and even though one might be disappointed with the blandness of some of the flora, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there; To not judge a book by its cover, or something equally profound and boring. [Via Wakaba, who just got back to Japan]

While working in London I tried to occupy my time thinking up websites and community projects. One of those ideas that never took off was Tree of the Month, a website where I imagined that people would document a particular tree that they had a relationship to. While researching the subject I stumbled upon a book by Thomas Pakenham called Meetings with Remarkable Trees, wherein he tells stories associated with 60 trees in the UK. It’s a fascinating book if you have a penchant for contemplating the vastness of the universe and the short span of human life. In other words, if you’ve ever found yourself staring at a yew, crying because you’ll be dead and buried before it will grow out of childhood, you might like that book. Apparently, there are plenty treehuggers about since he’s published two more books in the series. You are encouraged to buy Remarkable Trees of the World and send me a copy.

By the way, seeing as the domain for Tree of the Month is still available, does anyone know of an arborist who’d be interested in working on this? The idea needs to be fleshed out, but still. Trees, dude.

In the same vein of “the universe is wicked, yo!” NASA and MTU has been publishing Astronomical Picture of the Day since 1995, and if you read space fare (Like Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks or the brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin) you’ll have no trouble whatever imagining yourself in them, the laptop screen a porthole onto the galaxy. Some of the colours might be false, but look at the size of those space clouds! I’m a huge space weenie, as explained previously.

While on the topic of future: Why not learn Esperanto instead of farting into your chair? Or are you happy to make do with Europanto, the hodgepodge language that all Europeans speak whenever we’re talking to someone we don’t understand? Willen you vielleicht desert haben efter food oder vamos to playa direct?

Although meant as a pisstake on Esperanto, the idea of a common language that you grow aggressively by using what little you know of your listeners vocabulary is interesting. It’s easily dismissed as nonsense, and much of it reads like gibberish, but instead of looking at every language that you need as a discreet set of rules, you take a modular approach and just use words in whatever syntax you think is appropriate. Adaptive tourist linguistics.

Closer to home, there’s plenty to be fascinated by. WTF Nature! is a Livejournal dedicated to crazy stuff that surround us. Again, reading science fiction or fantasy you grow accustomed to descriptions of strange creatures and places, but if you take a detached look at your surroundings you might cultivate some wonder at how bizarre yet together our planet is. Why don’t you nip outside and ponder a bush or fondle a beetroot, hmm? Let that inner hippie out and feel as one with the cosmos for a bit. It’ll do you good.

Here you go kids, four new ring tones for your mp3-enabled cellphones, all courtesy of Delinquest! Show the world what it means to suffer the too-cool-for-school attitude of someone with a speakerphone and no empathy!

With a 100% guarantee of looping, download them in a package only 381 kilos of bytes: Ringtone_01.zip

The Lebensraum of tomorrow, today!
[Audio:Lebensraum.mp3]

Please dont, I can pay.
[Audio:Please_dont.mp3]

Who did let the dogs out?
[Audio:Bang_boom_boom.mp3]

Do you enjoy food?
[Audio:Food_food.mp3]

We just got back from the alternative Copenhagen art fair. It’s too early to say if we were a smashing hit, but at least some people got smashed so let’s call that a partial win. It’s not always obvious what you take away from a happening like this. You’re supposed to hobnob and get to know others in your field and get invited to co-operating with galleries and such. Etc. Some of us did get invited to other spaces, and Skup Palet is more corporeal now than it was before, which is a good thing.

Because Skup Palet is such a diverse group I guess we all had different ambitions with our presence. I for one wanted to see what this whole art fair business was about — never been to one more than five minutes — and watch performance art or at least talk to performance artists. As therapy, you understand. There was a flesh-and-blood dadaist doing his thing, which was so quaint it went to bad and back to good again. There is little avant-garde left when nonsense poetry is regarded as something “classic.” Goodiepal did a performance in the shape of a lecture, a form I used for my MA and which Olle thinks is awesome; I found it “cool and stuff.”

We represented with Frustration Canon and A Message To Be Found (the latter a project that Olle and I put together) and visitors and other artists seemed to enjoy both. Both were interactive; The former more ambitious and the other taking the shape of the ubiquitous “laptop with a webpage,” where all the relational aesthetics in the world can’t hide the fact that the my Macbook was incidental to the situation. (Much like a movie on slavery needs a person of colour, any colour.)

Frustration Canon is an idea based on something that I threw together some years ago. Ever since I put that thing up, Anna has urged me to do something more with it, to take it a step further as she puts it. Which sounds like a good idea but I have no inkling of what it implies. To me it was only ever about making a webpage where three people bang their heads on a desk. When I envisage “taking it further” I can only imagine variations on a theme, but not all that much new content. More banging, banging on other surfaces, banging in high definition.

It’s flattering when someone likes ones work, and the art fair was an opportunity to make something more of the idea; Anna and Jan took the original concept and ran with it. Together with Pär, who set up the video playback in PD, they attached a contact microphone underneath a table and invited people to bang their foreheads on the red X, a vinyl sticker taped to the surface. There are other details to the setup, but that’s basically it: Invite people to booth, promise them it won’t hurt too much and put them on the big 42″ screen mounted prominently on a wall.

As it turns out, people are quite happy to hit their heads in exchange for a pin and a smile. I don’t reveal it that often, but when I apply myself I can become an intolerably cheerful fucker. With a manic grin, flattery and a kind of friendliness you wouldn’t believe, I raked clients in one after another, all the while most others of our troop looked like undertakers annoyed with the living, doing little to dispel the image of artists as brooding and difficult.

What made Frustration Canon a good choice of work to show as an introduction to Skup Palet is the overly symbolic gesture of literally “banging ones head in frustration” as it applies both to an artistic “struggle” as to working in a group, with all the inherent difficulties of organisation and egos getting trampled. Ten artists pulling together is more often than not an exercise in futility – it’s like herding cats; Angry, philosophical, drunk, cats. It takes a great deal of work to make teamwork work, and if you take away nothing else from the video then perhaps use it as an illustration of your own life as a member of any given collective. Originally, we had talked about letting the “bang” synchronise once every half hour or so, but that was a bit too complicated to pull off at such short notice.

The version below is a more recent edit, with people from Enrico Pallazzo banging their heads, synched to make a melody. I think Robert might have done the edit, I’m not sure. The look and sound of the piece is different from what we presented in Copenhagen, but the individual framing of the shots are more or less the same. In Copenhagen the videos were shown in a 4×4 grid, randomly appearing and occasionally in a different pitch.

My and Olles work, A message to be found, has the shape of a website service; You write a message and then hide it for as long as you like. It’s a delay of a day, a week or tens of years. You can add an image to your message, and are encouraged to tag what you’ve written. If you write a love letter to your boyfriend, you might tag the message “John Doe, love letter, Bombay 2009, honeymoon” and those keywords would end up somewhere on the generated page. The idea being that the search engines (today that means “the Google”) will index the page based on the keywords in lieu of the content – since the content won’t be visible for another n years. Until the message is revealed you only see a countdown timer.

It’s a message to be found but we don’t know by whom or under what circumstances. In five years time pages might be indexed differently. HTML 4 might only be accessible by legacy browsers when the whole Internet moves into the next iteration of Second Life or Facebook or smell-o-vision. The project is based on Flash which looking back hasn’t been the most search-friendly format, although that might resolve itself with time and more computing power thrown on the ambition of a semantic web.

There are similar services, like Future Me which allows you to delay messages, as well as services that send out notices if you don’t ping their server for a while (the service, assuming that you have died, sends out your missives from beyond the grave) but A message to be found differentiates itself by being a delayed public publication. The distinction is small, but it’s an interesting enough experiment and it’ll be fun to see what indexes will pick up the messages, and what messages have been written. Every once in a while Olle checks in on how many messages have been written, and there’s a small but steady stream of them being entered.

As an aside, Radio Lab recently made en episode where some of the above mentioned services come into play. It’s the After Life episode and you could jump to the end of the show if you want to hear that segment, or listen from the start to an excellent hour of excellence.

Exactly! We don’t have answers to any of these questions. We are Googling “cockroach eggs maybe bed why? please no” currently. We might have to burn everything. EVERYTHING.

→ Manical Rage, Garrett Murray: One of the Worst Things Ever Happened to Shawn Last Night

Patrick McLean has finished podcasting How to Succeed in Evil and those of you who’ve held off on listening to this until the last episode would be available have to wait no longer. Go listen to his soothing voice and excellent story. You will enjoy it.

Here is a sound toy for you to make adorable 16 note loops on: Inudge.net. [Via Manical Rage]

I ended up honourable mention in the Michael Jackson monument design competition. Do I put that on my CV?

And just a couple of days later Warren Ellis links to an article about anti-cancer nano-tech. If it comes shaped like a glove, my five minutes of Photoshop messed up some scientists’ five year on a pun. Still, I better get royalties.

I’m on the outskirts of Copenhagen right now, where SKUP PALET is participating in the Alt_Cph. The show opens at 1400 and we’re “adding the finishing touches” as it’s called. All is going swimmingly. There’s an assortment of people and I’m looking forward to the opening in a couple of hours. Petúr might show up with his half-clone later which will be interesting. I wonder if the kid skateboards yet.

On Sunday I fly to Warsaw and then get on a buss to Sanok for my grandmothers funeral. I will need to borrow a shirt and black pants when I get there, as well as visit a barbershop. I don’t do funerals so don’t know how to dress or behave. I guess I’ll take my queues from the rest of the family.

A couple of days later I’ll fly from Warsaw to Copenhagen for the alt_cph 2009 where we’re participating with SKUP PALET. Having an ambulatory career is part and parcel of the romantic notion of the artistic life but I don’t feel all that much enthusiasm about it. If I had a car or a boat I guess slow migration wouldn’t be bad, but these shit airlines are so far removed from any romantic ideals that only the movement remains, none of the glamour.

We need to bring back zeppelins or slow trains. There is no dignity to travel today. I don’t think this is me whining about the lack of comfort — remembering that the cheap flights of today were pipe dreams ten years ago — but there’s no fun in just going somewhere. A five day trip would require you to prepare mentally for moving somewhere; You’ll be more fluid and maybe less stuck in one place, paradoxically because travel would be more difficult.

Whatever, I’m just bummed about the reason for the trip. I’ll occupy my time taking pictures of Poland to show folks back home later, as per Wakabas request. Maybe I’ll do a slideshow and commentary. Who would be up for an hours worth of lecture on travel in Poland?

A couple of years ago I was working on a photo series of my extended family; Uncles, cousins and all the extra personnel a family aquires over time. With the omission of a grandfather I got all of them except my maternal grandmother. She was complaining about being too old and ugly to be in a picture, and that she’d rather we remember her by the pictures from back when she was still an imposing matron – with keen eyes and a barking laugh – rather than this old woman of waning health.

I ended up taking a picture of the blanket that would have been the backdrop to her portrait, to make sure that she’d have a place in the finished work.

A couple of years ago she’s still be up and about, occasionally leaving apartment where she’d moved in with her daughter. My mom got her an articulated bed to make getting up easier, but after a while she couldn’t manage that by herself and required full time help.

She’s had arthritis for a long time, and with other illnesses that accompany old age she’d become sickly. The last couple of times my mom came back from visiting Poland, she’s been upset at the amount of pain and suffering that her mother was experiencing, and the inability for anyone to alleviate it.

Grandma died early this morning and we’re looking at ways of getting to the funeral. I haven’t been to Poland for a while, but it’s becoming a bad habit of going for shitty reasons. It’s hard to figure out how to feel about her death; About the unfairness of suffering, of dying and of being left behind, living. There were no things left unsaid nor any promises left hanging, but still there is a void.

She’d talk of her experiences during the second world war, of being imprisoned in a German camp, of losing everything and starting anew in Sanok. She spoke of the house her family used to have, of her time as a hospital nurse, of when lightning struck a pole not ten metres away. If she had any misgivings about her kids or grand-kids it was that none of us had become a lawyer or a doctor – careers worth pursuing and sure signs of intelligence and character – and more than once she’d admonish me for using my talent for arguing on her instead of making a career out of it.

She was tolerant and had an open mind, but took no shit and for as long as she had the faculties of movement she’d pull your ear if you were being stupid. My habit of saying “meh” came from her, but where I might be detached and distant, she had an explosive pronounciation which made it carry so much more meaning. “Bah! Meh! Humbug! Don’t say stupid things!”

Even though she will be missed, I don’t begrudge her a release from the endless suffering she lived with for the past years. No matter how much we’d wish it wasn’t the case, death is sometimes still our only remedy.

This weeks Electronic Explorations is a tour dé force of glitchy dubstep. Slugabed was new to me. The music tires you out quickly if you’re working or doing something that requires concentration, but as far a biking at night is concerned it’s absolutely brilliant – Not to mention its use for “dancing like a god” which I occasionally do.

Listen to it at Electronic Explorations Nr. 82 and subscribe to the podcast while you’re at it.

While on the topic, how about you check out Indian Electronica as well? The podcast hasn’t been updated in a while, but there are 19 episodes to catch up with as a start. And don’t worry your pretty little head, it’s not Goa trance stuff – what kind of a person would I be if I recommended such horrible things?

If you’re more into indie pop, blalocksirp.com releases monthly collections on The Pirate Bay. Most of it is rubbish, but it’ll give you a broader overview than radio, and there are occasional gems in there. Don’t forget that listening to new music will keep your mind fresh and third eye open. (On that note, check out Blip.fm)

The best indie rock mixes currently available in the universe are being served by blalock. You’re welcome.