Radiohead's Data Melancholy

In case you missed it, Radiohead have gone all data-aesthetic with their latest video, House of Cards. What's more, it's fully zeitgeist-compliant, with open access and a call for re-visualisations of a quite massive dataset: hundreds of megabytes of spatial data gathered with various 3d laser-scanning rigs. If the download stats and early signs are anything to go on, we will be seeing much more of this dataset.

As well as being technically cool, the project is yet another sign of the increasing cultural prominence of data as both material and idea - in that sense, after Design and the Elastic Mind and Wired's "Petabyte Age", this is more of the same. But it's also something different, it seems to me. Like any other visualisation, House of Cards doesn't only use data, it presents a certain sense of what data is, means, and (crucially) feels like; and this is where it's different. The dominant narrative of data visualisation at the moment is informed by the networked optimism of web 2.0, where the social sphere, and increasingly the world as a whole, is unproblematically digitised; where more is more and truth, beauty, and commercial success all are immanent in the teeming datacloud.

House of Cards, by contrast, is a manifestation of data melancholy. Data here is low res, with a sketchy looseness of detail that evokes the gaps, the un-sampled points. This data is also abject or corrupt, the scanner intentionally jammed with reflective material, a bit like the metallic chaff used to confuse missile guidance systems. These glitches are familiar devices in electronic music and video, including Kid A-era Radiohead. However here the errors are very much in the data; they have migrated out of the music, which is human, organic and more or less intact here. This disjunction between failed data and the emotional, human domain is what characterises the data melancholy; it's illustrated beautifully at the end of House of Cards, with the "party scene" (one of Thom Yorke's ideas for the clip), a social scene decimated into abstract clouds of points. This theme also resonates across In Rainbows, especially in the closing track, Videotape: "this is one for the good days / and I have it all here, in red blue green." Here image data is again a sort of failed trace of an emotional reality, all that remains of "the most perfect day I've ever seen."


Yorke's other motif for House of Cards was "vaporisation," which is clear enough in the clip; I think its most effective in the final shots of the house; the earlier clips of Yorke disintegrating seem a bit langurous, with that undulating look of Perlin noise (is it, anyone?). The house shot in particular reminded me of Brandon Morse's Preparing for the Inevitable; Morse's work in general has a related feel about it, though the models seem to be synthesised rather than sampled. Again the poetics is one of cool, digital melancholy, where tragedy is stripped down to a set of vectors and forces (above: Collapse, from Flickr). Here though, rather than a failure of data (sampled representation) it's a failure of the procedural model, or perhaps failure with, or in, the model.

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Sound.Music.Design Symposium

A belated start to a busy new year... if you're still out there, thanks for hanging around. Last weekend I was in muggy, grimy Sydney for a symposium at UTS. Music.Sound.Design was a sort of transdisciplinary talkfest, loosely organised around the planning of a new sound/music/whatever degree. There were film sound guys, music educators, interaction designers, sonifiers, theorists, experimental musicians; and while the question of what a modern, interdisciplinary sound degree looks like remained elusive, some good stuff came out along the way.

My picks from the symposium included Darrin Verhagen's presentation on audiovisual relations, in particular how the power of the synchretic weld can link incongruous materials together, fooling our cognitive "zombie agents" into thinking that normal causality is operating, when in fact we're being carefully manipulated. Also on the AV line, artist and theorist Ian Andrews gave a detailed historical overview of the whole visual music / fused audiovisual tradition, emphasising structuralist or materialist film and the trajectory from the Russian avant garde, seeking to prepare our senses for the new post-Revolutionary world, to the Modernist trope of "mediumicity". In discussion Andrews shared an interesting point about his own AV practice and how it relates to this tradition; he disavowed anything like "expression" in his work; instead he described it as the exploration of a concrete and constrained field of possibilities. So the stripped-down "mediumicity" of this practice is not reductive or reflexive so much as generative - the medium proliferates, rather than being reduced to some essence.

On another topic altogether, Julian Knowles gave a passionate keynote on the state of tertiary music education in Australia; timely especially from where I'm sitting, as the Canberra School of Music faces up to possible extinction. He was preaching to the choir here, with the crowd well stacked with experimental musos, laptoppers and the like; so his quotes from local "heritage arts" crackpots got the laughter they deserved. But Knowles also deftly showed how every single assumption made in the classical conservatorium approach - such as valuing interpretation over creation, and demanding a specific technical skillset rather than adaptability and innovation - is contradicted in the living culture of contemporary music practice. You could design a pretty interesting curriculum, he suggested, by simply inverting all those assumptions.

It was great to see Tom Ellard - now vehemently ex-Severed Heads, but a hero of my youth nonetheless. He too was seeking to get a grip on a contemporary music industry in flux, wondering whether participatory virtual environments could be a new form of "album"; and thinking, like Kandinsky, about music as a model for all kinds of art practice and education. As Ellard demonstrated, VJ tools make visual composition and semiotics literally playable - more on his site. The thirty seconds of live AV scratch video that illustrated this point had me grinning all day.


I also made it to the final performance night of this event, which featured Robin Fox, Peter Blamey, Darrin Verhagen and Yasunao Tone, all playing a lovely eight-channel surround rig. The whole night was impressive, but special mention goes to my friend Peter Blamey's set. (Image above is by mr.snow, from back in 2002). Blamey plays a sort of "no input" mixer rig - an old Tascam four track with its ins and outs all tangled up. In this set he barely touched the mixer; he didn't need to, this network was delicately poised, putting out shuddering, accelerating ramps of static, ephemeral stereo crackles, and these superb, delicate chirps from somewhere in the feedback. But unlike other feedback-driven audio I've heard, there was a total absence of drone; Blamey's mixer is wracked with spasms, waves piling up, overloading then quickly dispersed. Never exactly repeating, but completely, organically self-consistent; like Ian Andrews' work, no sense of "expression", but for me that only heightens the poetry. More on/from Blamey here and here.

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From Scratch - A Conversation with Andrew Sorensen

Andrew Sorensen is an Australian musician and programmer, author of the Impromptu live coding environment as well as a live coding musician of note. I recently caught up with his latest work, documented as screencasts on his site. In A Study in Keith Sorensen builds a Keith Jarrett machine that juxtaposes two linked layers of performance - qwerty and (phantom) piano keyboard. Stained (below) is a striking twist on the "transparent" aesthetics of live coding, as Sorensen uses Impromptu to draw in, and manipulate, the code window, hooking the graphics into the musical algorithms. These works demonstrate (for me at least) how live coding can be honed to a fine point, as a performance form. They're improvised, but also controlled and restrained; they work well as music, but clearly the real performance here is also in the developing code structures. It's in the combination of those two structural levels - the emotional impact of tonal music and the abstract, formal domain of code - that these works are really strong. In this conversation Sorensen touches on the live coding scene, performance, craft and virtuosity, code as score, coding without computers and algorithm as thought


MW: I saw that you went to the LOSS livecode festival - how was that? What's that scene like?

AS: Actually LOSS was fantastic. I was a little concerned at first because the number of attendees was very low (20 ish) but this ended up being one of its real charms. It was a really on the ball crowd and so the general level of conversation during the 3 days was really excellent. It was great to see everyone perform, particularly SLUB, as it was Alex Mclean’s “Hacking Perl in Nightclubs” paper that initially caught my interest. I would have enjoyed seeing a few more from-scratch live coding performances. From memory there were only 3 of them - Fredrik Olofsson, Graham Coleman and myself. Most of the other performances used pre-programmed material - which I should emphasise is still perfectly valid but I was hoping to see more from-scratch work. I should also mention that Ross Bencina and Robert Atwood both performed from-scratch live patching works. (Ross in Audiomulch and Robert in Pd).

One of the great things about that scene though is the general competency, both artistic and technical. It’s hard to find people competent in both areas. I think one of the things that emphasises this for me is that most of these guys build their own environments. And these are good environments displaying strong technical competency. Yet almost none of these guys are working as professional programmers, choosing instead to concentrate on artistic and academic projects when they could all be out earning squillions as programmers. This focus on the creative and dynamic use of computation really shined through for me at LOSS. Of course the downside is that live coders are all broke... Of course there is a history of broke hackers but that's another story.

MW: I'm attracted to live coding for the same reason - a sense that these artists are something like virtuosi in their field. But then I'm very interested in what that means, to be a virtuoso live coder - and whether it means something different in a small, expert gathering such as LOSS, to what it might mean in a different context.

Good question. I think one thing worth thinking about though is that there are a lot of people in the world with some programming experience these days. Most of the time this is at a pretty basic level, some VB scripting in Excel for example but still the number is growing rapidly, especially with younger generations. I guess in short the number of people who have a basic conception of what's going on (even if they don't understand any of the specifics) is quite high and is growing rapidly. How many people at an Australian Chamber Orchestra concert have ever played the violin - still this doesn't stop them from being mightily impressed by Richard Tognetti. In this sense of course small expert gatherings are always going to be ... well ... small.

Another interesting aspect is the high level of domain knowledge required. Just as music domain experts may struggle with the code’s syntax, good programmers can become just as lost trying to understand the semantics of a musical live coding performance. A musically literate crowd can often pick up on things even though they have no programming experience. If I type for example (random ‘(I ii IV V vi)) a musical audience will automatically pick up on the chord association that a programmer may not. Of course this all comes back to the types of symbolism that you employ.

MW: You also mention that many of these artists (including yourself) have made their own coding environments: how important is that? It's an interesting contrast with other genres - imagine if the first task for every young new media artist or computer musician was to write their own authoring tool from scratch! On the other hand for many computer artists of an earlier generation, this was an everyday reality.

Yeah, this is a really interesting question, and as you say certainly a generation ago this was almost always the case. I should say that when I talk about environment I don't necessarily mean a whole environment like Impromptu. Most of the time the environments I'm talking about are built on top of something else (well of course everything is built on top of something else but you know what I mean). Many of the "environments" that were at LOSS were built in Supercollider for example. So I don't think I'm advocating building everything yourself. The most important thing is spending the time to know your environment well. For example, one Impromptu user has built his own bindings to CSound. Not something I would want to do in a million years but he loves it and he's really productive with it so there's an example of an environment built on an environment. And the end result is that his live coding looks very different from mine even though we both use Impromptu.

It's an issue of fluency for me. Of course I'm a big advocate of craft so you'd expect me to say that!

MW: LOSS billed you as "one of the masters of from-scratch coding." I used to do a lot of sound work using only live-sampled material, which was a challenge - but live coding from scratch is something else. What's your interest in this approach?


Well, I guess there are a few things here. The first is that I think from scratch is more flexible. You aren't as emotionally constrained as you are if you're working from prewritten code. By this I mean that if you have the code in front of you you're just not as likely to explore. Of course lots of people will say that everything is an abstraction and that you never really start from scratch, which is of course true, but I think this misses the point. The blank page has a unique and mystical quality of endless possibilities.

Secondly I think it makes the ideas more obvious to the audience. Strange as it may seem I think that this is even more important for a non-literate audience. They seem to understand that code is being constructed for them in real-time. If you start with a page full of code they're less sure what's going on. For me the code is an important ingredient of the performance. As you have said before - how it is done matters.

Thirdly, it's more fun because (a) it feels more spontaneous and hopefully the audience realizes that they're hearing something created in the moment, and (b) it's more dangerous. One of the things I love about live coding is the adrenaline rush! You kind of forget that when you stop performing. I think audiences also understand and enjoy the risk of failure.

Fourth, I honestly think the music can be better if you aren't too constrained. It's good to be as adaptable as possible - although this is a constant challenge.

MW: The idea of being more or less "emotionally constrained" when coding is striking. We don't tend to think of coding as an emotional experience - can you elaborate?

I was really just suggesting that people will use pre-written code if it's there. They are less likely to forge a new path if one is sitting right in front of them. It is this kind of emotional constraint that I was getting at.

Having said that, of course coding can be an emotional experience - it all depends on what you are coding. I don't get emotionally engaged when writing out a shopping list but I can well imagine that novelists become emotionally engaged when writing. I'm sure people have no difficulty imagining that coding can be frustrating when things are going badly and exhilarating when a difficult problem is overcome. Of course producing something aesthetic just adds to the range of emotional responses that coding can elicit (often accompanied by frustration and exhilaration). And of course there’s the music. If that’s not giving you some kind of emotional response then you’re just not working hard enough!


MW: I found your screencasts quite affecting, which surprised me - especially when in A Study for Keith (above), for example, there's nothing but code for the first minute or so. The music is emotive in its harmonic language but it wouldn't have the same impact without the code. There's a contrast in fact between the explicit, formal language of the code and the lyricism of the music. It's a sort of pathos that works because clearly these two things are tightly linked - the formal machinery of the code is generating the music.

Yes, this is true, but I also think it's worth remembering that this is not a new phenomenon. Composers have been using symbol systems to describe musical processes for a long time now. Of course programming languages have given us far more symbolic power but this does not deny the fact that composers have been working abstractly for a long time. I very much think of the program code as a "score", albeit a dynamic one. Of course this is one of the things that makes live coding fascinating - the audience actually gets to see the formal machinery that has really always been there.

Where live coding differs from the "score" metaphor is that it is also a performance practice. So there are two elements at work in the program code. Firstly the symbolic manipulation described above but secondly performative control. So in the context of an 18th century classical paradigm it is not enough to describe just the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic information, it is also necessary to describe the performance information (i.e. timbral/ gestural information over time). I think there is a very interesting mix of event based and signal based work in live coding which I think sets it apart as a platform for improvisation.

MW: The TOPLAP Manifesto is very interesting here. Its first line is "Give us access to the performer's mind, to the whole human instrument." Along similar lines it states that "Algorithms are thoughts." Do you agree?

This is a tough question. Is mathematics a creation of pure human thought, or does it have some platonic existence? Algorithms raise similar questions. But maybe this isn't the important question. Algorithms, whatever their true nature, can communicate a useful subset of thoughts - they are a shared vocabulary that we can use to communicate ideas. In this sense live coders communicate their ideas rather than share their thoughts.

MW: Though this is a distinct kind of idea; it's an idea for a procedure, an idea for action - and we perceive both the formal notation of the idea, and its action. And what's more we perceive the relation between those things - this is the program / process semantics idea that you pointed me to earlier.

Yes, exactly.

MW: I notice that Nick Collins has been exploring live coding without a computer - emphasising the idea that the "work" in live coding is an algorithm or procedure that can be implemented in different ways. What do you think of this move?

Does computation require a computer? Of course the answer to this is no it doesn’t. Is live coding about computation? I think the answer here is yes, although this is a bit weak given that we still don’t have any strong idea about exactly what computation is. So in short Nick's work is perfectly valid. However, my slightly longer response would be that I’m not sure of the point in doing live coding without the symbolic power of the computer/ programming language. I think my problem with non-formal live coding - live coding with humans for example - is that the process semantics become incredibly vague. Now of course this ambiguousness is something that some people love, but in terms of a new paradigm I’m not sure what is really different here from the conceptual art movement of the 60s? In contrast, I think the program and process semantics of formal live coding are something new. Maybe this all just comes back to my craft focus again and a bias for the art object. In my work I enjoy crafting the result in the task domain.

Something that does interest me though is working with acoustic performers. I've been thinking for some time about doing a live coding performance where Impromptu output standard musical notation to four LCD displays for a string quartet to perform from. The displays would update one bar at a time giving the musicians a small amount of look ahead. I’m also very interested in working with acoustic musicians in collaborative improvisational settings.

MW: In Stained you begin drawing graphics into the code window; I really enjoy the moment where we see you prepare the code for the graphics, only to have those forms overlay the code itself. This is a direct illustration of your point about code as both performance and notation - it literally flattens those two layers into the same visual space. Where is this visual side of your work heading?

AS : Well, I should start by saying that all my history is bound up in musical, not visual work - so I'm a complete visual novice. I think the easiest answer to your question is to say that I'm exploring the space at the moment. Just enjoying playing.

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Array Art (More Multiplicity)

Since that earlier post I've begun to notice another form of multiplicity. I'm seeing arrays everywhere, lately. Grids or articulated fields of points; substrates for transitory patterns and forms in light or sound. In United Visual Artists' recent Battles video, the band plays in a triangular grid of vertical LED strips. Patterns traverse the array, bathing the surrounding rocky landscape in flickering, articulated light. Of course UVA have got form with arrays; their 2006 Volume installation uses a similar configuration - and in a way there's a continuum between these grids and the more conventional (but equally effective) LED wall they used for the Massive Attack tour in 2003.

Edwin van de Heide's Pneumatic Sound Field - blogged earlier - echoes UVA's light arrays, but uses flickers of high-pressure air. There's another parallel here, in that the elements in the array - the "emitters" - are simple, physical things; points of energy. Other arrays I've noticed recently include Robert Henke and Christopher Bauder's Atom; a grid of LED-lit helium balloons that also move vertically under remote control. See also Artificiel's Condemned Bulbes (2003); and then it's a short hop to Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's recent Pulse Room at the Mexican pavilion in Venice. We could add a "mirror" sub-genre, with Aleph by Bengt Sjölén and Adam Somlai-Fischer and Daniel Lazin's beautiful articulated arrays. I'm sure there are many more.

UVA's body of work illustrates one of the reasons I'm interested in these arrays; they represent a kind of expansion, or explosion, of the screen. In part these arrays mimic everyone's favourite luminous grid, the digital display; but they literally take it apart; they expand it in size but also string it out through physical space. Instead of a vertical image (think cinema, painting, architecture, etc) we get an often horizontal array, a field to walk through. These arrays echo the display, especially its logics of modularity and generality - a logic shared by computational culture more broadly, where grids of uniform elements create wide spaces of potential. But these are not simply low-res displays. The visual unity of the screen is based on the merged imperceptibility of the pixel elements; by contrast these works expose those elements and emphasise their interrelations, making them available as kinesthetic as much as visual experience.

In "Notes on Sculpture 4: Beyond Objects" (1969) Robert Morris discusses the "anti-formal" move in sculpture of the time, where discrete geometric objects began to be replaced by wide, horizontal fields of undifferentiated stuff. He draws inspiration from Anton Ehrenzweig, a gestalt psychologist, and his notion of "synchretic" or "scanning" perception. This is an unconscious or "low level" mode of vision that Ehrenzweig claims provides access to richly detailed information in the perceptual field. To put it in modern (ie technological) perceptual terms, scanning occurs before recognition or gestalt formation, in the perceptual pipeline. As such, argues Ehrenzweig, scanning can easily accommodate "open structures" - complexity, contingency, chaos, the unformed or uncertain. Morris argues that the lateral, post-formal "fields" in sculpture of the time, build this mode of perception into their very structure; and ties this to a larger, McLuhan-like argument that "art itself is an activity of change ... of the willingness for confusion even in the service of discovering new perceptual modes."


Leaving the modernist declarations aside, there are some interesting links between this horizontality and the perceptual mode it demands, and the arrays of the works discussed here. Works such as Morris' 1968 Untitled (Threadwaste) (above - source) emphasise unformed materiality; in works like UVA's arrays or Lozano Hemmer's Pulse Room the material and the immaterial, or informational, play against each other in a very contemporary way. These explicit, low-res arrays reveal themselves as material structures (unlike the screen), but also as material substrates for dynamic, informational patterns and forms. The role of the light source is important here; in Condemned Bulbes and Pulse Room, archaic light technology is used for its material and sonic byproducts; the globe here isn't a pixel, it's a physical device, a buzzing, glowing object, a manifestation of electricity. Yet it's also a pixel, an abstract unit in a digital array; the two are complementary, co-constituents, rather than opposites.

Ehrenzweig's "scanning" perception also seems relevant all over again; it's exactly the mode of experience that a lot of data visualisation demands, and linked to what I've described as the "artist's squint" in data art. In a culture of digital multiplicity - where, as in these arrays, we are literally surrounded by digital grids - the gestalt or fixed image is impossible; "scanning" promises access to the pre-conscious information in these articulated masses. Sometimes these works offer a reassuring, unified image of the grid, where it's in sync, under control, centrally choreographed; but other times, especially in Lozano-Hemmer's work, it's a more complex, chaotic field.


What about the relation between this form of multiplicity and the generative variety? As well as an aesthetic interest in sheer "moreness" there's a conceptual connection. In a way these arrays are the inverse of generative multiplicities that sample wide spaces of potential. These grids partly act to manifest that space of potential explicitly; this is all there is, 64 balloons (as in Atom, above) or a few dozen LED strips. But what they reveal is how that explicit grid contains a far vaster, implicit space of potential, an unthinkable mass of relations, patterns and movements. So though the manifestation is very different they suggest the same dynamic - of the actual pointing to the virtual

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ACMC07 - Warren Burt and Sebastian Tomczak

This year's Australasian Computer Music Conference is here in Canberra, hosted by Alistair Riddell at the CNMA. Though ironically I could only get there for the first day, here are a couple of choice morsels.

The opening keynote by Warren Burt took on the conference theme - "trans" - and delivered a dense core sample of transdisciplinarity in music, from the ancient Greeks to the West Coast musical avant-garde of the 70s, through to the present. Many of Burt's projects look fresh all over again - he's been doing audiovisual synthesis, sonification of complex systems, and bio-collaboration since back in the day. He also made some great points about the role of the avant-garde in transforming cultural systems, rather than just "playing new music in the same old venue" (a mistake he attributed to Richard Wagner and the Sex Pistols, among others). During the 70s and 80s Burt was involved with the Clifton Hill Community Music Centre, an experiment in new social contexts for music, affordable technology and anarchic DIY.

Meanwhile back in the present, Alex Thorogood presented some nifty hardware hacks splicing an Arduino board with the innards of a cheap MP3 player, for his Chatter and Listening sound sculpture project. Hardware of the day though was Sebastian Tomczak's amazing Toriton Plus, a homebrew controller based on lasers, photocells and water. I'll spare you a lengthy description, except to say that it's much more beautiful in live performance - here's the video.

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Medi(t)ations - Schiemer's Mandala 4

Last week I was in Adelaide for Medi(t)ations, the conference of the Australasian Computer Music Association. There was quite a bit of good old "computer music" (as well as electroacoustic, acousmatic, musique concrete etc), also threads of electronica, laptop, improv, sound art, and intermedia / audiovisual work. The tension between these approaches was clear at times, and like previous conferences in this series it was (for me) the dominant dynamic.

One of the most impressive performances of the conference brought these approaches together - or maybe showed up the distinction as false. Greg Schiemer's Mandala 4 is a piece for four performers and four mobile phones; spread around a large hall, the performers trigger quiet, microtonal chords from their phones, then slip them into little pouches on the end of long strings... and swing them gently overhead, their chords doppler-shifting as the phones orbit each performer.

It was a striking piece of music/theater, especially preceded (in the performance I saw) by a long pause while Schiemer and the performers prepared, huddled over their phones in the center of the room. The piece is a beautiful appropriation of the mobile phone, but also ties (ha ha) a very "now" technology to a long avant-garde tradition. Mobile sound sources were part of the expanded field of 60s minimal and process music; see for example Terry Riley's music/sculpture/video collaborationMusic with Balls and Steve Reich's Pendulum Music. Schiemer's approach aligns him with David Tudor, the composer and instrument builder who treated electronics as musical score.

Schiemer's mobile phone project, the Pocket Gamelan, draws on his "Tupperware Gamelan" instruments of the 70s and 80s. The Tupperware Gamelan, a set of small custom-made electronic instruments, housed in plastic kitchenware, was designed for non-expert players and used in dance and performance. The Pocket Gamelan is partly an effort to migrate this fragile analog electronics into software, and uses Java-enabled phones as the hardware platform. The technical lynch pin here is software from Schiemer's group that ports Pd patches to phone-friendly Java. There's more on the technical side of the project in a paper from this year's New Interfaces for Musical Expression conference.

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