To do: sow these at the back of the garden.
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jotter
Took some time today to install IA Writer on my laptop, and fix the other instances of it on phone and iPad, finally forcing it to connect to Dropbox. If I’m very lucky, then it also maintains a connection to WordPress. If all this works, I have a way to notebook much more easily, syncing between all three devices and the notebook itself. Because some things need to be put in a digital notebook, and sometimes, due to decades of muscle memory, I need to think by typing and I need that thinking in front of me and searchable. Part of the reconfiguration I want to do is about getting to this place more easily and effectively. It’s not a slick blog. Or even a janky blog. It’s just a notebook. Somehow that feels like a radical proposition these days.
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500g rhubarb – two big sticks. Chop into chunks no bigger than 5cm, stuff into mason jar. Pour in gin to cover. Throw in 50g sugar. Seal and put in cupboard. Shake once a day for three weeks. At three weeks, strain and bottle. It has been pronounced Very Good by partner, who is now drinking it with elderflower tonic. Success.
Comments closedI have rewritten, amended, generated from scratch and otherwise fiddled with what are now twenty-five pages of complete script since 11am and I want a drink
Comments closedWhat grabbed me here was the accidental voice reconstruction.
The project group used machine learning voice changing software, off the shelf, made for streamers.
The scratches and taps on the metal were transformed by the proto-AI into fragments of voice: burbles and syllables that sound something like a person speaking, but not quite. You strain to hear.
(I didn’t ask but I got the impression that the group didn’t originally intend for this to be part of their project, even though it was part of their demo by the time I spoke with them. That’s what you get from working directly with material.)
And this is something new:
Where does the voice come from?
Novelty in the signal.
This is essentially Electronic Voice Phenomenon.
Within ghost hunting and parapsychology, electronic voice phenomena (EVP) are sounds found on electronic recordings that are interpreted as spirit voices. Parapsychologist Konstantīns Raudive, who popularized the idea in the 1970s, described EVP as typically brief, usually the length of a word or short phrase.[1]
Enthusiasts consider EVP to be a form of paranormal phenomenon often found in recordings with static or other background noise. Scientists regard EVP as a form of auditory pareidolia (interpreting random sounds as voices in one’s own language) and a pseudoscience promulgated by popular culture.[2][3] Prosaic explanations for EVP include apophenia (perceiving patterns in random information), equipment artifacts, and hoaxes
Those babbling voices from the sheet metal are not noise in the signal. They’re the point. Sources of creation are rare and here’s a new one!
What would happen if we listened to the voices?
Old radio in new graveyards.
One CommentUnerring Pub Sense brings me to the platz at the top end of Karl Johans Gate, where I now have an outside table, cigarettes, and a glass of the local energy muck, Batteri. Cloudy and cool — a lot of people acting like it’s early summer. Folkie-hipster dude in an unfortunate hat is trying to sell a plastic-wrapped magazine to passersby. Quite a few tourists: Germans with insane moustaches, Danes in waterproofs, a shivering Japanese couple, an enormous black man in pink shirt and powder-blue tanktop photographing everything in the square. A phalanx of six women working the square with flowers, crooning ”Romani. Please give. Romani.” They have hard eyes, years past the point where you just resent people for having coins in their pocket. A lone military officer strides past, wearing one of those peculiar caps with the tassel hanging in front. The back of his shaven head prickles with the chill wind now driving into the square.
(originally written May 2008)
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Still editing and printing off my Kindle notes to paste into notebooks. Means I get to reflect on them later, I have a timestamp for when I finished my first reading of the book, and I have a hardcopy of the bits that mattered to me on first reading that won’t get lost in digital churn.
Comments closedSpirit tracks. Spirit roads. Ghost roads. Corpse roads. Lych ways. The Leichenflugbahn, which means, gorgeously, “corpse flightpath.”
Ghost roads appear, quite simply, to be the paths through which dead bodies were carried to cemeteries. But, even as digital cities will be built atop the base matter of the contemporary city, ghost roads were superimposed over old geographies. Corpse roads took the paths that ghosts and other numinous beings were already known to pass down. Spirit tracks, in German folklore, were imbued with “the magical characteristics of the dead.”
Spirit tracks. The roads of ghosts. Magical characteristics.
These haunted streets could be interrogated, too. Devereux writes of a crossroads in Iceland where the interested hauntologist could “summon the spirits of the dead from the church cemeteries and they would glide up the roads to the crossroads where the seer could divine information from them.”
He also notes my favourite, “stile divination”. In Cornwall, apparently, ghosts liked perching on country stiles in the path of spirit roads, and one could sit there and interrogate them as they go. A stile is an RFID reader for dead people.
Originally written May 2011
Comments closedWell, obviously I am online. But “being online” now seems to mean being on socially-networked platforms.
Don’t you think that the surface of the Internet feels super flat right now?
I don’t just mean the graphical qualities of software UX that feel flat and minimalist – although they do. But the whole internet. Over the last decade our online interactions have converged on a handful of portals. Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, Netflix, and YouTube or wherever you spend your time. Inside of each of these spaces content is served up with zero effort on your part. Displayed upon a flat surface of dark glass that you scroll or swipe at, like an infant batting away an aeroplane spoon. Much of whats surfaced feels shallow too.
What this says to me is that perhaps I crossed some rubicon a while back and didn’t notice. Because not only do I not use most of these sites, but also…
Well, look. Television is whatever you’re served up when you turn the box on. This is just what a broadcast medium looks like. It’s just that “the internet” started broadcasting stuff by unfunded hobbyists first. Like if tv had started with the equivalent of public access cable first, and monolithic networks arrived later. (I’m glossing a bit there, but it’s near enough) The internet grew up, got a job and started talking about mortgages at dinner parties while its old friends are still sitting in the pub wondering what the fuck happened to their mate.
Lots of people don’t watch broadcast tv. They buy obscure dvds (or even videotapes, Sarah), they read books, they go through archives, watch films at cinemas large and small, subscribe to magazines and podcasts (that you actually have to type the URL of into their podcatcher app) to keep them current.
Inanity of online culture? One of the most popular tv shows in Britain is a network television show about watching people watching network television shows.
Do we care? We do not. We don’t have to watch it, and we don’t.
And this is where the rubber meets the road in our present movement. If you dislike how things are unfolding with the platforms and social media. Or are sick of the all pervasive flatness that everything radiates. Or annoyed about the inanity of content and culture online. We need to move towards depth. We need to embrace hypertext and hypermedia.
Jay argues above for hypertext media as the thing forgotten, and summons up the CD-ROM as a deep stack of linked materials on a theme that asked for and rewarded exploration. I remember there were a bunch of apps that did the same thing – I vaguely remember once having a meeting with one of those information-app creators, and I at some point owned a huge iPad app about The Waste Land that was jammed with well-made video, audio and essays (that nonetheless did not make me love that poem more).
But using one of those requires time, focus and intent. And most people like Gogglebox. What’re you going to do?
Relax. You’ll tie yourself in knots about how bad and flat and plain mainstream media is.
There’s a term of privilege: the flaneur. Somewhat easier to be a flaneur on the internet than, say, as a Muslim woman on the streets of Paris. The flaneur is very much a monied white male thing. But you find this at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry for the word:
The flâneur concept is not limited to someone committing the physical act of a peripatetic stroll in the Baudelairian sense, but can also include a “complete philosophical way of living and thinking”, and a process of navigating erudition as described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb‘s essay “Why I Do All This Walking, or How Systems Become Fragile”.[31] Taleb further set this term with a positive connotation referring to anyone pursuing open, flexible plans, in opposition to the negative “touristification”, which he defines as the pursuit of an overly orderly plan.
This appeals to me precisely because it tends to affirm winging it, which is my default. Not a good planner. I find the best things when I’m off on a wander and I can’t see walls or hedges.
This was the actual title of a tv show from my childhood:
If you treat all those internet platforms as television, then you can turn them off and go for a walk on the internet instead. Structured hypertext products are still walled gardens, they’re just themed gardens, like a physic garden. The thing about walled gardens is that most people like them. They’re easy.
Jay has a point about the big platforms generally deprecating a lot of hypertext functions, as they lead people out of the walled gardens. But people like walled gardens. Even if they’re full of toxic plants, stinking blooms and corpse flowers. And besides: you have no more hope of imposing a new way of doing things on the internet than of preventing the BBC from commissioning any new programme with Michael McIntyre in it.
Leave ’em to it. Network tv isn’t all of broadcast culture, just as the big platforms aren’t all of internet culture, and all that shit is still hyperlinked. Leave the platforms to it. Go for a walk and report your notes.
(Not fully baked, possibly didn’t even have a point, working something out for myself)
There was one thing that no one at the institute wanted to miss: the arrival of the morning post. Letters from parents and friends were always welcome, but it was correspondence from far-flung colleagues and the journals that were seized upon for the latest breaking news from the frontiers of physics.
From QUANTUM by Manjit Kumar. In the above, he’s writing about the 1920s. Times long gone. Out here on the Thames Delta, we don’t even get the physical post in the morning any more. In the 1970s and 1980s, we had first post in the morning and second post in the afternoon. I remember having to wait in for second post when an expected letter (or an unemployment Giro) didn’t arrive in the first post.
Now we send email and texts that are rarely much longer than a telegram, and they get peppered across the full 24-hour spectrum. I like that. Imagine telling someone in 1924 that all their post and telegrams will be sent instantly to a piece of glass you keep in your pocket, powered by electrickery and radio (and costing the same as a house in London in 1924)? I am happy with this and look forward to the future.
That said: the pang I got when I read that paragraph the other night was real. The book is littered with extracts from long letters sent between peers in the emergent field of quantum physics, the last hurrah of the Republic Of Letters. The pang wasn’t necessarily nostalgia. I have never trusted nostalgia. Desiderium, maybe? But certainly also that I’m as bad as anyone else at writing letters. I remember long letters from and to peers, and I got out of the habit of writing them when email properly kicked in.
And the journals thing. I remember the rush and joy of the new magazines related to my work and interests arriving, when I was young (and I suspect that’s the defining thing here – both my youth and the slowness of information): a new Comics Journal, for example, a publication I owe a great deal to. I have, of late, been unsubscribing from newsletters. Not entirely of my own volition – I had a weird glitch with Substack and had to delete my account there, which meant losing a dozen newsletters. I’m in the process of adding those into my RSS feed instead. But the newsier stuff is getting dropped. It all tends to be a bit flat and a bit samey.
Some newsletters are good because they’re long letters from friends or peers, some are good because they bring knowledge and ideas like journals. But there aren’t enough of them, for me. I wonder today where I should be looking. I wonder if this is even a thing worth yearning for (yearning may be too strong a word, but clearly it’s been bugging me). But it’s an interesting thing to think about, for me.
(I also do a weekly newsletter, which is currently on pause til July 7 because of work and etc.)
Vaguely related, maybe: years and years ago, we used to have conversations about the social letterbox, part of which conversation turned into the Little Printer, which I still think was a brave thing. I distrust the social-network aspects of things like Substack. My letters do not need a public web-end comments section. Email should perhaps have been our social letterbox. Probably it once was. Maybe it can be again: I can spend a day hitting it with a couple of tools and end up with the sense that, when an email app does ping at me, there’s a better than fifty-percent chance that it’s something I want to read or need. And it will ping less. And most of the time I’ll be able to wait until I have the space to write a long reply, rather than just triage and tie something off fast.
Jotter notes are not fully baked.
Connected: