Das Kleine Pseudo-Organic

[imomus]

Back in 2000 I wrote a piece called The Post-Bit Atom which looked at new forms of respect for non-digital stuff which were then emerging amongst people who sat in front of computers all day. It was a thought very much prompted by my environment at the time, Manhattan Chinatown, where digital designers brushed up against people whose job was selling melons from a box or frogs from a bucket. It was all about the differences and the affinities between those two activities.



Since then, I've found the idea of the "post-bit atom" quite a useful one to describe some things I notice happening. First of all, computers are getting better at mapping the real world, whether it's with Google Earth, or their ever-improving digital sound capture capability, or weather prediction, or virtual sex. Secondly, the things which can't really be communicated in digital form have taken on a new importance and a new dignity. One-off artworks, performances, new types of social gathering like Pecha Kucha, music played on acoustic instruments, very visceral rock performances by the likes of Lightning Bolt, all these things have seen a resurgence. So the boundary between "what computers can just about do" and "what computers can't yet do" has become a very interesting and important place, and real estate values are rising, as it were, on both sides of it.

Rinus Van Alebeek, who's organizing the second Berlin Kleine Field Recordings Festival, to be held in February, puts it this way:

"Sometimes... a person's website is the final destination of his productivity. The majority of the performing artists I met through internet. It is easy to maintain a digital relation. But to my idea there is also life after the world wide web... Berlin can be considered one of the cities in the world with a amazingly lively experimantral / noisical scene. Musicians who have dedicated themselves to this artform often incorporate field recordings in their performances / compositions. But they seldom make appearances where exclusively field recordings are used. I don't know of any venue in Berlin with a programme that includes at least one weekly performance of pure field recordings."

So Rinus set about organizing a regular festival event, completely without sponsorship, in which people just play ambient sound, no music. (I actually complained when one of the performers last time started playing some techno basslines, and Rinus went and had a word with him! Only natural organic sound, please!) On February 9th I'll be playing some field recordings I made in Japan at the Festival, at a Berlin venue to be announced, as part of the Travelogues day of the festival.

Meanwhile, I'm interested in how the web streams pseudo-organic experiences towards us. The Guardian today has a fairly conventional illustrated podcast in which crime writer Ian Rankin guides us around "his" Edinburgh. It's talky and rather stale, and the photos are completely lacking in atmosphere or texture. Better are Arte Radio's Cartes Postales Sonores, audio postcards from various exotic locations. And much more innovative is Cornelius' Google Maps remix project, in which he superimposes sound clips on moving Google maps, allowing you to blend his clips with those of other artists, then zooming in on Nakameguro and running a little movie that pays tribute to the Eames' "Powers of Ten" film, substituting a piece of sushi for the sunbathing American family of the original. Since the iPhone does both audio and Google Maps, perhaps Cornelius can hack a way to link the two: Tokyo bike rides that change the balance of the mix you're listening to according to which corner you turn, for instance.

Comments

sights and sounds

[(Anonymous)]

"perhaps Cornelius can hack a way to link the two: Tokyo bike rides that change the balance of the mix you're listening to according to which corner you turn, for instance."

Nick, I think you actually linked 3 concepts in your post. Wouldn't that bike ride then be considered a field recording?

I love the idea of streets having there own sounds, and their intersections creating new sounds. What would spring and crosby sound like?

-J

[(Anonymous)]

There's an underlying expectation amongst field-recording enthusiasts that the practise of this, er, art 'does something', when in fact all it does is further the cause of general autism.

[(Anonymous)]

That's a little excessive, in protracted listening field recordings tend to become tedious and I personally have some difficulty -by dint of the random aspect of field recording -in considering it an art form. Nonetheless field recordings have been incorporated to extraordinary effect within art forms by composers as diverse as Schaeffer and Rautavaara. It is worth investigating further rather than just summarily rejecting.
Thomas Scott

[cap-scaleman.livejournal.com]

It's been such a long time since I did a field recording... But my habit is to record my friends talking and then "remix" them in a Negativland kind of fashion.

[(Anonymous)]

shut up scaleman - you do talk some sh*t

[charleshatcher.livejournal.com]

And there's no cure like travel
To help you unravel
The worries of living today.
When the poor brain is cracking
There's nothing like packing
A suitcase and sailing away.
Take a run 'round Vienna,
Granada, Ravenna, Sienna
And then a-'round Rome.
Have as high time, a low time,
And in no time
You'll be singing "Home, Sweet Home".

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

The more I work with computers, the more I think you have to make things sound 'wrong', because otherwise computers make everything sound so 'right' it's inaudible and idiotic. That's one of the last things we humans can do, get things wrong. Without that there's no possibility of innovation, and precious little to be interested in.

The perfection available with computers has left us unimpressed with glossy textures. Now we ask our computers to randomise things, fuck them up.

Couldn't agree more. The more our technology becomes an extension of our organic selves and less of a hard, cold imposition, the more interesting it becomes.

Mediated sensation still can't hold up to actual sensation. But until we can download the humidity of a summer night in a NJ bog, or the wet, silky sensation of a tree frog's skin (let alone a three-dimensional algorythm that approximates its form and size), then these flattened representations will have to do. But then, their incompleteness and limitations allow one to fill in the blanks, to participate imaginatively. That's the best thing about mediation, after all. Well, that, and you can't get virtual lyme disease (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/07/05/)--at least not yet:



A nocturnal transmission! (http://www.lordwhimsy.com/trifles/webbsmill.mov)

Thrill to the sound! (http://lordwhimsy.com/trifles/pinebarrenstreefrog.mp3)

[imomus.livejournal.com]

They're digital, my dear Whimsy, and yet they sound both pre- and post-digital! The sound of our origins,,, and our destination too!

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

No other frog sounds like Hyla andersonii, especially hypnotic en masse--it's a privilege to encounter them. Only a few large colonies left in existence.

As far as cities becoming more like ecosystems (that is to say, even more than they are now): This little series I did a while back--a kind of Calvino-inspired, organicist exquisite cadavers--might be of interest. A couple readers really made some wonderfully rich contributions. It was an organic process, you see:

FUTURE CITIES SERIES, PART ONE: SARRACENIA (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/03/13/)

FUTURE CITIES SERIES, PART TWO: SPHEKOS (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/03/14/)

FUTURE CITIES SERIES, PART THREE: EVENKIA-TUNGUSKA (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/03/15/)

FUTURE CITIES SERIES, PART FOUR: BENTHOPELAGIA (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/03/27/)
FUTURE CITIES SERIES, PART FIVE: XYLOBARA (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/04/07/)

FUTURE CITIES SERIES, PART SIX: ASPERGAARD (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/04/26/)

FUTURE CITIES SERIES, PART SEVEN: LYRIAMORA (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/2006/05/01/)

[lord-whimsy.livejournal.com]

[grzeg.livejournal.com]

Cornelius’ Google Maps remix reminds me of a kind of surrealist (or was it situationist?) mapping, like making a map of Paris from the flânarie of a drunk (was that Debord’s 'Psychogeographical Map'?).

..which remind me of a colleague’s project of (re)mapping a city (in this case, Kyoto), through which he did not use conventional means of recording the city, i.e.: visual, rather took audio indexes, capturing sounds like the Tōryanse song at the crosswalks, raven caws at the Imperial palace, the political banter and national anthem from the right-wing vans, welcoming shouts from ramen shops, monk chants, etc. In the end, he had a remix of his samples, a re-presentation of his experience of the city.

I agree emphatically in part with your view, but I can see some possible objections: why would mediating organic sound through a podcast or remix or re-presenting sound out of context make that sound fake? Does not the mediated sound become a reality as real as the one from which it was derived? Or, when the average urban dweller dons a set of earbuds from his or her iPod while moving about the city, isn’t he creating his own aural landscape, as real as the one he is disengaging/ignoring?

How do you exactly define ‘pseudo-organic’ or ‘natural organic’? I would imagine the (ambient) sound of the city as being organic -- a city, metaphorically being a living, breathing macro-organism... does that qualify it as also being natural, artificial, or… ?

[cliffliquid.livejournal.com]

i love these posts of yours which re-declare liveness. You'd have thought it was such a skewed perspective, to regard 'liveness' as one of a choice of different media. But really it has to be compared now, because... we can go for so long without it.

I've just been involved in a project doing 'live portraits'.
http://laotragente.blogspot.com/

-
for excellent field recording podcast the great Patrick McGinley at London's resonance fm is a weekly gem:

http://murmer.soundtransit.nl/radio.html

ant

[womanonfire.livejournal.com]

geotagged google world map of sounds
http://freesound.iua.upf.edu/geotagsView.php

a clarinet was heard

[(Anonymous)]

Nick, You put a smile to my face..actually on that day we were having a talk. And you + grlfrn was having a salad. Then you looked up and made that remark about that clarinet. Which seemed perfectly okay to me. So that's why I got up and had a word with the mp3-Jay rather then with the musician, (who might have been dead for years btw. and performing from his digital sarcophagus).

Living musicians can do what they like.
It' too late now to tell them what I like.

Until soon, Rinus