August 2008
Welcome to the new and improved Vague Terrain. This relaunch marks the beginning of a total reconstruction of this project, we feel an expansion into a more participatory blogging platform is quite overdue. Please bear with us as it will take us a few months to transfer our archives over to this new framework. Vague Terrain 10: Digital Dub is now live! Please check out this body of work. The issue contains submissions from: Aguno, DubRocket, Eduardo Navas, Jonah K, NAW, Ohrwert, Segue, The Straggler and interviews with Paul D. Miller (aka DJ Spooky) and Kevin Martin (aka The Bug) conducted by Eduardo Navas and Corina MacDonald. At the moment, the only other issue online is Vague Terrain 09: Rise of the VJ - we hope to get another two issues archived/reformatted within the next six weeks. Since you are here, why not create create a user account? This will allow you to comment on blog posts and (in the near future) submit content to the site. Thanks to the wonders of Drupal we also have OpenID support, which makes logging in and identity management a cinch. Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any feedback or suggestions. |
|||
 [photo: timsnell]
A detrivore takes pre-existing materials, breaks them down, and uses them as building blocks to form something new." This quote lifted from detritus.net succinctly sums up the core activity that goes into remixing. To remix is a process: it is an activity, to be deployed as a verb and not a noun. In remixing, one acts upon existing cultural materials pilfered from the vast landfills of the already mixed and mediated landscape. Remix actively negates claims of originality and origin, and equally does not aspire to any finality or final work. By the very logic of the process, any remixed material can itself be submitted to further reworkings in the heap. This jumbling, sampling, splicing, recombinant activity is based on ideals of impurity - a state in which there is neither any "pure" original content at the beginning, nor any "pure product" down the line. Trace elements always abound. The remix embraces and celebrates hybridity and contamination. From Samples From the Heap: Notes on Recycling the Detritus of a Remixed Culture by Bernard Schütze in HorizonZero 08: Remix. [via remix theory] |
|||
Algorithm: A step-by-step problem-solving procedure, especially an established, recursive computational procedure for solving a problem in a finite number of steps. The conflation of these two definitions is the basis for Chicago-based, DJ Benja's algoriddim project which expands the database logic of web services like discogs to track the riddim's of some 21,000 songs. While discogs tracks the expected taxonomy classes pertaining to a release (label, artist, remixer, engineer, etc.) algoriddim indexes by riddim, so you can track the many versions of a specific rhythm/instrumental arrangement. This breaking down of tracks into "chunks" is the same kind of logic that drove Jesse Kriss' History of Sampling visualization (2004). Also worth noting: DJ Benja hosts the Iman Selection podcast - tune in! |
|||
 Aidan Lane from the Centre for Electronic Media Art, Monash University, has released Nodal, a generative software application for composing music. From the Nodal page: It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes (musical events) and edges (connections between events). You interactively define the graph, which is then traversed by any number of players who play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes Nodal does not make any sound by itself ? it only generates MIDI data. Which is the mistake I made myself at first. It is so well put together that I assumed it was a virtual-synth, when I first was exposed to a beta version of the tool a few months ago. After figuring out that it was a tool for generating MIDI data it all came together for me and now it is an essential tool in my own studio. In fact I used this tool to help generate some of the sounds used in the naw release for the Digital Dub issue - to give you an idea of how this tool can be used. Nodal is based on an original concept by Jon McCormack. It is free for personal use and available for Mac OS X based computers (Universal Binary). Visit the Nodal page for more information. |
|||
Montreal-based Defasten (aka Patrick Doan) has a new film project called OPENLAND in the works. There isn't that much info on the project available yet but the trailer for the film was launched this week. Keep an eye on the project website for updates. |
|||
 As everyone makes a dash for the Korg DS-10 application or the various Iphone apps coming out on a daily basis in the world of handheld music making, the Glitch-DS is a diamond in the rough. What is Glitch-DS? It is a FREE homebrew Cellular Automaton music sequencer for the Nintendo DS. It?s perfect for creating IDM and Glitch style loops. This simple tool has become a key tool in my studio and I wanted to direct Vague Terrain readers towards it. This tool has generated some interesting work that can be found on the newly created forums for GltichDS. So check it out, you never know it might become a mainstay in your studio as well. Like any other tool out there, there is always a community interested in hacking it. Check out this strange hack using the Nintendo DS Trigger Mod for GltchDS. |
|||
 Diapason, a Brooklyn-based gallery for sound art, is initiating an open call for the following: 1. Residencies |
|||
 Swedish artist Anders Weberg has been working on an interesting project over the last year that explores the intersection of contemporary art production and distribution. P2P-ART.com is a series of projects made for, and only available through peer to peer networks. A succinct statement describes the project as follows: The original artwork is first shared by the artist until one other user has downloaded it. After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it. The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist ... Feel free to don't or download the film, watch it and share it for as long as you like. Or delete it immediately. The aesthetics of ephemerality. Thus far Weberg has distributed four video projects in this manner. The imagine accompanying this post is a still from Emphasis, which can (probably) be found by plugging Emphasis[2008]by.Anders.Weberg.P2P-ART.com.XviD.avi into your favourite search engine. |
|||
 As a followup to his recent Amazon Book Network visualization, Burak Arikan recently created a suite of social maps documenting the evolution of his twitter network over time. Burak describes his curosities guiding the project as follows: I decided to look at what kind of interest groups emerge as I cure my Twitter social graph. Do my Twitter friends have always growing interconnections? How do people relate? Do I have friends who link together otherwise disconnected communities of interest? Do my Twitter clusters expand or contract over time? Check out the related blog post which documents and contextualizes the project. |
|||
Studio XX is presently soliciting innovative proposals for interactive media projects to be entirely created using Open Source software. Digital Ludology, which will run from October 2008 to June 2009, will bring together six selected Artists with leading game industry professionals, providing them with free comprehensive professional development workshops focusing on Blender?s 3D animation software, open source game engine, interactive scriptwriting, project management and gameplay theory. Deadline for Proposals: September 24, 2008 More information: http://studioxx.org |
|||