Acerca del autor

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. He is the author of Rhythm Science and Sound Unbound, both published by the MIT Press.

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. He is the author of Rhythm Science and Sound Unbound, both published by the MIT Press.

Erik Davis is an American journalist, critic, podcaster, counter-public intellectual whose writings have run the gamut from rock criticism to cultural analysis to creative explorations of esoteric mysticism. He is the author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Age of Information, The Visionary State: A Journey through California's Spiritual Landscape, and Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica.

Hugo Award-winning science fiction author and futurist Bruce Sterling has been called by Time "perhaps the sharpest observer of our media-choked culture working today in any genre." Three of his novels have been New York Times Notable Books of the Year, and he has been a contributing writer for Wired since its conception. In 2005 he is "Visionary-in-Residence" at Art Center College of Design, Pasadena. Bruce Sterling's blog Beyond the Beyond has been active since 2003.

Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky, That Subliminal Kid, is a composer, multimedia artist, and writer. He is the author of Rhythm Science and Sound Unbound, both published by the MIT Press.

Daphne Koller is Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University.

Frances Dyson is Emeritus Professor of Cinema and Technocultural Studies at the University of California, Davis, and Visiting Professorial Fellow at the National Institute for Experimental Arts, University of New South Wales.

Douglas Kahn is Professor at the National Institute for Experimental Arts at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Noise Water Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (MIT Press) and Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts and coeditor of Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde (MIT Press).

B. Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in MIT's Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. She is Faculty Director of the C3 Game Culture and Mobile Media initiative.

Fragmento. © Reproducción autorizada. Todos los derechos reservados.

SOUND UNBOUND

The MIT Press

Contents

Foreword by Cory Doctorow.....................................................................................................................................ix1 An Introduction, or My (Ambiguous) Life with Technology Steve Reich........................................................................................12 In Through the Out Door: Sampling and the Creative Act Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid....................................................53 The Future of Language Saul Williams.......................................................................................................................214 The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism Mosaic Jonathan Lethem..............................................................................................255 "Roots and Wires" Remix: Polyrhythmic Tricks and the Black Electronic Erik Davis...........................................................................536 The Life and Death of Media Bruce Sterling.................................................................................................................737 Un-imagining Utopia Dick Hebdige...........................................................................................................................838 Freaking the Machine: A Discussion about Keith Obadike's Sexmachines Keith + Mendi Obadike.................................................................919 Freeze Frame: Audio, Aesthetics, Sampling, and Contemporary Multimedia Ken Jordan and Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid.....................9710 A Theater of Ideas: An Interview with Steve Reich and Beryl Korot on Three Tales David Allenby............................................................10911 Quantum Improvisation: The Cybernetic Presence Pauline Oliveros...........................................................................................11912 The Ghost Outside the Machine Scanner aka Robin Rimbaud...................................................................................................13113 The Musician as Thief: Digital Culture and Copyright Law Daphne Keller....................................................................................13514 Integrated Systems: Mobile Stealth Unit Beth Coleman and Howard Goldkrand.................................................................................15115 An Interview with Moby Lucy Walker........................................................................................................................15516 Zing! Went the Strings Joseph Lanza.......................................................................................................................16117 Renegade Academia Simon Reynolds..........................................................................................................................17118 The World of Sound: A Division of Raymond Scott Enterprises Jeff E. Winner................................................................................18119 From Hip-Hip to Flip-Flop: Black Noise in the Master-Slave Circuit Ron Eglash.............................................................................20320 South Africa's Rhythms of Resistance Lee Hirsch...........................................................................................................21521 The Virtual Breeding of Sound Manuel DeLanda..............................................................................................................21922 Zoom: Mining Acceleration Liminal Product: Frances Dyson and Douglas Kahn.................................................................................22723 An Interview with Alex Steinweiss Carlo McCormick.........................................................................................................23324 Stop. Hey. What's That Sound? Ken Jordan..................................................................................................................24525 Permuting Connections: Software for Dancers Scott deLahunta...............................................................................................26526 On Improvisation, Temporality, and Embodied Experience Vijay Iyer.........................................................................................27327 Spin the Painting: An Interview with Nadine Robinson Alondra Nelson.......................................................................................29328 Camera Lucida: Three-dimensional Sonochemical Observatory Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand.............................................................29929 Fear of a Muslim Planet: Hip-Hop's Hidden History Naeem Mohaiemen.........................................................................................31330 Three Pieces Chuck D......................................................................................................................................33731 Bells and Their History Brian Eno.........................................................................................................................34332 What One Must Do: Comments and Asides on Musical Philosophy Daniel Bernard Roumain (DBR)..................................................................35333 An Interview with Pierre Boulez Hans Ulrich Obrist and Philippe Parreno...................................................................................36134 Adh'an: The Sounds of an Islamized Orthodoxy Ibrahim Quraishi.............................................................................................37535 Theater of the Spirits: Joseph Cornell and Silence Catherine Corman.......................................................................................37736 Where Did the Music Go? Jaron Lanier......................................................................................................................385Audio CD Credits..............................................................................................................................................391Index.........................................................................................................................................................395

Chapter One

Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid

... free content fuels innovation ...

-Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World

Silence is one of contemporary info culture's rarest commodities. In a world where there are several thousand satellites in the sky constantly beaming down at us information, cell phone relays, GPS signals, and weather patterns, even the idea of light pollution takes on a more than metaphorical value. We see the lights in the sky, but we don't hear the frequencies beaming through every nook and cranny of a world put in parentheses by human-made objects in the sky. It's a different sentence, to say the least, when nature and nurture blur to the extent that they have over the last century, and we've created a new syntax of human culture, as our inability to find another "intelligent species" in the universe attests-we speak only to ourselves, so far-we're alone in the universe. That's the current info-culture scenario. We speak to ourselves because that's what lonely people do sometimes. If the metaphor of architecture and frozen music evokes structure, then I need to update the phrase, give it a spin, and see what pops out of the centrifuge-after all, if there's one thing Sound Unbound is about, it's the remix-it's a sampling machine where any sound can be you, and all text is only a tenuous claim to the idea of individual creativity. It's a plagiarist's club for the famished souls of a geography of now-here. Get my drift?

Buildings in architecture are nothing more than correspondences between relationships-presence and absence, form and formlessness-and these ideas are extracted from diagrams drawn and configured within an information environment-people working, living, and breathing together to create a structure. I bet the twenty-first-century remix of the idea of architecture will be an FTP server. Archive fever becomes the Napster impulse for the attention-deficit generation. FTP-File Transfer Protocol. It's a simple triad of words, but a good one to start a book about sound and multimedia. Think of the idea of the archive (same root word as architecture), and think of structure as exchange. Is there any way to think outside of the networks of exchange that pervade our lives from every angle-from the sky, from the fiber optic cables embedded in the earth beneath our feet, from the texts that ask us at every turn-"Who are you? Where are you going?" Search the FTP server for files ending in .mp3, .wma, .ogg, .wav, .mov, .mpg, etc., and you will find nothing that would precipitate this question. After all, it's all just data. Map one metaphor onto the other, remix, and press play. The sampling machine can handle any sound, and any expression. You just have to find the right edit points in the sound envelope-it's that structure thing come back as downloadable shareware for the informationally perplexed.

The metaphor proceeds: There's a famous story about the artist Marcel Duchamp. No one knows if it's really true, but that's how stories work. Sometime over a period of years in the mid-twentieth century, he decided to stop painting, saying he stopped simply because he had started to just "fill things in...." This is what's going on now. When I talk about the crowded spaces of info-modernity-I'm talking about a world filled with noise, and if there's one thing we learned from the twentieth century, it's this: noise is just another form of information. Duchamp's unwillingness to just "fill things in" has other parallels-it reminds us of Rauschenberg's collaboration with de Kooning, Erased de Kooning Drawing, back in the mid-twentieth century, and it recalls a scene from David Boyle's "The Storming of the Accountants": "it's like the 18th-century mathematical prodigy Jedediah Buxton, who, asked if he had enjoyed a performance of Richard III, could say only that the actors had spoken 12,445 words."

Stop. Think about it. Every sensation you have comes from one source: civilization. When you finish this paragraph, put down the book for a little while and look around you-check out your surroundings. What can you see, hear, smell, taste, that does not originate in or is not mediated by civilized people? Crickets chirping on a Sounds of the Environment CD doesn't count.

This is all very, very, very strange. Stranger still-and extraordinarily revealing of the degree to which we've not only accepted this artificially imposed situation, but have actually turned the process into a "perceived" good-is the way we've made a fetish and religion (and science, for that matter, and business) of attempting to define ourselves as separate from-even in opposition to-the rest of nature. The "nature versus nurture" argument has been thrown out of the metaphorical window, and on a planet put in parentheses by human-made objects in the sky, the songs we hear are stories we tell ourselves. Civilization isolates all of us, ideologically and physically, from the source of all life-nature. We don't believe that trees have anything to say to us: not stars, not wolves, not cats, not even our dreams. We've been convinced that the world is silent save for civilized human beings and the information we generate. Once again, that echo of form and function, fact and fiction: It was the often eccentric nineteenth-century architect Louis Sullivan who admonished that "form should follow function." But what happens when you have a situation that, like the Goethe and Schelling adage that "architecture is nothing but frozen music," becomes reverse engineered, remixed into a different scenario-and we thaw the process. Music becomes liquid architecture. Sound becomes unbound. Shortly after September 11, 2001, NPR's Lost and Found Sound, a program run by independent radio producers, new media producers, artists, historians, and listeners across the country, began to collect and preserve "sound memories" of the World Trade Center, its neighborhood, and the events of that day. The Sonic Memorial Phone Line was set up for people to leave their stories, recordings, and audio artifacts, both personal and historic as a kind of invisible monument to their lost loved ones. Hundreds of people called with their testimonies and remembrances, music, and small shards of sounds that they felt represented the Towers' presence in their daily reality. Those stories were woven together into radio broadcasts on NPR, and this memorial is now an online archive that can be found at http:// www.sonicmemorial.org/. Again-that echo of the FTP mindset-search the FTP server for files ending in .mp3, .wma, .ogg, .wav, .mov, .mpg, etc., and you'll find nothing that would precipitate this mourning, but that's the point. People had found new ways to express the grief of a mediated loss; the Towers were phantom limbs of a psychological landscape unprecedented in human history. Form and function, fact and fiction, art and architecture-all woven into a testimony of human reconstruction in media. Think about this for a moment, and pause.

Another scenario: consider the mysterious case of Netochka Nezvanova, a Web-based software agent for the art/multimedia collective NATO. Basically, Netochka is a video-remixing software that posts to mailing lists and sends really bitter email to anybody who crosses "her." Think of her as an update to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"-the remix is "persona in the age of mechanical reproduction" or even better-just plain "no one no where"-which is how the name "Nezvanova" translates. For someone who doesn't exist except as a series of angry emails that are posted on Nettime and on a couple of other list-servs, Netochka Nezvanova has a really hardcore reputation. She's a computer programmer. She's a polemicist. She doesn't like it when someone "talks" back to her. She's a performance artist. She's an attack journalist, like David Brock on steroids-a hyperpolemical critic of capitalism and fascism, as well as a capitalist and a marketeer. She markets software. She doesn't exist. But a lot of people know about her and use her products. Her software Nato.0+55 (made obsolete by a lot of developments in the video "VJ" software scene) was once one of the mainstays of the digital video scene: anyone who was cool used Nato to process and create a lot of the weird images you'd see when you went to some wild party downtown-it was used to manipulate video for live performance and installations. But Netochka herself is a work of art-a "person" made of text-an online fiction many years running that's one of the Net's great word-of-mouth stories.

Netochka is the humanized "version" of a software toolkit. She's basically an extension of an editing environment that's used to sample and morph digital video in real time. Netochka knows the media scene-she does interviews and even haunts the lecture circuit. She even appears at digital art and technology conferences to promote the software-except, like Warhol did so many years ago, when she shows up in person, she's frequently represented by different women. No one really knows if there's a "real" Netochka.

She explains-sort of-via email sent to Salon.com a while ago (http:// www.salon.com/tech/feature/2002/03/01/netochka/index.html): "NN's reputation is based on mouth 2 mouth adverti.cement. When something is very well konstruckted and designed with a degree of integrity it stands on its own.... All the cool girls wear NN."

Flip that same idea of "all the cool girls" into the remix scene and you get a mirror image of Nezvanova: Luther Blissett. Like Nezvanova, Blissett is a pusher of dematerialized merchandise-instead of software, "he" tells stories, and makes remixes of other people's music tracks online. In his own words, taken from http://www.altx.com/manifestos/blisset.html:

Luther Blissett is both the story-teller and the Mac Guffin of a board-game played on the stage of the world. It is essentially a grim theory of conspiracy which mostly makes use of techniques tested in the Mail Art (Ethe)real Network (MULTIPLE NAMES, "Add, Pass & Return" creations etc.) in order to manipulate and overturn the language of myths, the archetypes of the popular culture as well as the neo-pagan religious experience. It is a sort of lucid shamanism which does not belong to a pre-democratic and pre-individual view of the world (i.e. a claim to a totalitarian social unity); on the contrary it puts itself BEYOND democracy and the individuality, in the name of a free chaotic empathy between the creatures, as if we were charming Betazoids. Sometimes the links between the elements of the project happen to recall the most entangled detective stories (e.g. "The Long Goodbye" by Raymond Chandler or "White Jazz" by James Ellroy), or maybe "Paco Ignacio Taibo meets Paracelsus at an Illegal Rave."

This is the remix. Where Nezvanova is part and parcel of the mythology of the online software scene, Blissett is a process of osmosis-he takes what he can, flips it inside out, and then writes a manifesto about it. Think of him as the equivalent of DJ Kay Slay's mix tapes where Ja Rule, Eminem, Busta Rhymes, and 50 Cent battle it out over rhymes dispersed on mix tapes-that underground Samizdat scenario, and you get the idea. Triangulate between ghetto street stories, myths of people on the Web, the files that we use to process culture, and again-that echo-form and function, fact and fiction. The remix becomes "faction." Check the vibe at www.hotmixx.com.

Every software has a story. Every sound has an origin. I get asked what I think about sampling a lot, and I've always wanted to have a short term to describe the process. Stuff like "collective ownership," "systems of memory," and "database logics" never really seem to cut it on the lecture circuit, so I guess you can think of this introductory essay as a sound bite for the sonically perplexed. Sound Unbound is about volume-of content as sound bite, of attention with no definite deficit, of memory as a vast playhouse where any sound can be you. Press "play" and this anthology says "here goes":

Think. Search a moment in the everyday density of what's going on around you and look for blankness in the flow. Pull back from that thought and think of the exercise as a kind of mini-meditation on mediated life. Pause. Repeat. A word passes by to define the scenario. Your mind picks up on it, and places it in context. Next thought, next scenario-the same process happens over and over again, it's an internal process that doesn't even need to leave the comfortable confines of your mind. A poem of yourself written in synaptic reverie, a chemical soup filled with electric pulses, it loops around and brings a lot of baggage with it. At heart, the process is an abstract machine that searches for the right place for the right codes. The information in your mind looks for structures that give it context. The word you have thought about is only a placeholder for a larger system. It's a neural map unfolding in syntaxes linked right into electrochemical processes-it's the perceptual architecture that makes up not only what you can think, but how you can think. Inside, we use our minds for so many different things that we can only guess at how complex the process of thinking is. Outside, it's a different scenario. Each human act, each human expression, has to be translated into some kind of information for other people to understand it-some call it the "mind-brain" interface, and others, like Descartes, call it a kind of perceptual (and perpetual) illusion. In our day and age, the basic idea of how we create content in our minds is so conditioned by media that we are in a position that no other culture has ever been in human history. Today, that interior world expresses itself in a way that in the "real" world can be changed. When it's recorded, adapted, remixed, and uploaded, expression becomes a stream unit of value in a fixed and remixed currency of the ever-shifting currents of the streams of information running through the networks we use to talk with one another. It wasn't for nothing that Marx said so long ago that "all that is solid melts into air"-perhaps he was anticipating the economy of ideas that drives the network systems we live and breathe in. In different eras, an invocation of a deity, a prayer, a mantra-these were common forms, shared through cultural affinities and affirmed by people who spoke the code, the language of the people sharing the story.

Today, it's that gap between the interior and exterior perceptual world that entire media philosophies have been written about, filmed, shot, uploaded, resequenced, spliced, and diced-and within the context of that interstitial place where thoughts can be media, whether they are familiar to you or not, the "kinds" of thoughts don't necessarily matter. In this world, there is no taxonomy of the imagination. It's the structure of the perceptions, and the texts and memories that are conditioned by the thought process that will echo and configure the way texts you're familiar with rise into prominence when you think. We live in an era where quotation and sampling operate on such a deep level that the archaeology of what can be called "knowledge" floats in a murky realm between the real and unreal. Look at The Matrix as an updated version of Plato's cave, a parable piece in his Republic written more than two thousand years ago, but still resonant with the idea of living in a world of illusion. For that matter, look at the collaboration between standardization and the notion of rhythm. "Ratio," of course, being the root of "rationality," is the core angle on this scenario, and the longitudinal system-the global grid organizing experience in the world map-is a good metaphor for the way we systematize human experience. This excursion is meant to be a dialogue about different forms of sculpture-how physical objects "map" sound objects onto the kinds of metaphors we use to hold contemporary information culture together-think of it as hearing the sound of the world unfold in rhythm. The sound aspect of longitude was based on the Harrison clocks from the eighteenth century that King George III and British Parliament used to create the grid system that still guides navigation routes and configures our perception of "time zones" to this day. We have inherited the sounds of the H4 clock used by the British Admiralty in the eighteenth century to use as a global sculpture-a mix governing how we perceive the entire planet.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from SOUND UNBOUND Copyright © 2008 by Paul D. Miller. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.