This week began with tutorials… one for I_P and one for Exhibition 2. I am required to split my brain into a double take on the future. I mostly feel that I am failing in this. Is getting brain freeze from conversation a thing? Is it possible for me to avoid diluting my efforts with new stimuli?
The week also featured a potentially contentious workshop. I declined the offer to virtue signal and berate myself, and, avoiding all words, I created something unexpected. I followed the initial instructions but resisted the opportunity to assemble a “profile” from the list. I didn’t feel the need to embroil myself in an empathy exercise, so as artists often do, I made a self-portrait – Death By A Thousand Cuts.
It represents my own story as a displaced individual, an outsider on the inside, a seeker of refuge and solace in the soup of human indifference, lacerated by interaction in a puzzle with no end.
Reflection – what did I think of this workshop? Well, it makes me aware of the gulf between attitudes and the dichotomies we face. It also disclosed a common experience between the participants and an empathetic urge towards others. It provided me with the opportunity to not follow instructions and to interpret the task in my own way. Was it a lost opportunity to walk in someone else’s shoes? Am I interested in explaining myself, at all?
Research Tree
Following my nose, I stumbled upon the MMXX T-APE Bytebeat Sequencer and Fractal Exprorer. This is an instrument that looks like an audio cassette but which allows you to play with the computer generated sounds to create music. http://phonicbloom.com/tape/
My explorations uncovered Bytebeat artist Viznut, the Demoscene and a whole host of artists who involved themselves with programming computers to create music and art.
Viznut is credited with the invention of Bytebeat. He published his findings via this video in 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GtQdIYUtAHg
and also in this more academic paper: http://viznut.fi/texts-en/bytebeat_exploring_space.pdf
“A bytebeat program is a small C program consisting of an infinite loop, outputting to the terminal an endless string of ASCII characters. These chars can then be piped to another program and interpreted as raw audio output.”
If only I’d known about this when I was making Hardcore Techno in the mid 1990’s! Although bytebeat didn’t exist back then, I’m sure there were other programmers exploring coding using previously popular languages.