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Monday, April 30, 2012

April Cobza


April Cobza

(easiest to listen)
April Cobza

(easiest to listen)
http://lounge.espdisk.com/archives/805

(for downloading perhaps)
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/aprilcobza1.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/aprilcobza2.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/aprilcobza3.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/aprilcobza4.mp3
http://espdisk.com/alansondheim/aprilcobza5.mp3

5 tunes with finger picking and risha

Fun to play and fun to listen to and the cobza pretty much
stays in tune!

Sunday, April 29, 2012

Anorectic Avatars


Anorectic Avatars

My beginning foray into my Anorectic Avatars UnderAcademy discursion:

http://www.alansondheim.org/anav.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/anav1.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/anav2.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/anav3.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/anav4.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/anav5.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/anav6.png
http://www.alansondheim.org/anav7.png

[ The above are related to Christine Wilks' work with avatar bodies;
What you're seeing are skins of Julu Twine and environs revealed by
the camera's penetrating gaze. ]

I keep thinking about the THICKNESS of avatars and their LACK THEREOF
since there's nothing there but faces that give the appearance of
solidity. If you cut open a HUMAN BEING or other organism, you get
solid/liquid/gas, something or other, all the way down or in; if you go
inside an AVATAR as such, you see nothing since most likely the faces just
face one direction - outward.

So a big difference is that when you cut open a real physical organism,
you create NEW FACES, since FACES could be defined by WHAT'S VISIBLE. So
there are FACES ALL THE WAY DOWN.

Does this matter? Probably not, but I think of edibility, what one might
eat, and that seems to apply to the latter but not the former. YOU CAN'T
EAT A SINGLE FACE THAT FACES JUST ONE DIRECTION OR EVEN A SINGLE FACE THAT
FACES TWO DIRECTIONS since faces are sections of two-dimensional space
embedded in three-dimensional space, where they NECESSARILY HAVE ZERO
VOLUME.

Eating and gathering energy in THIS UNIVERSE always implies at least
THREE-DIMENSIONAL VOLUME, if not more. So what I'm wondering - is what
could we possibly mean by THE THICKNESS OF AVATARS or THE EDIBILITY OF
AVATARS, and these are not minor questions or irritations but really
FUNDAMENTAL QUESTIONS OF WHAT IT MEANS TO BE ALIVE IN THIS UNIVERSE, where
we gather energy, devour things, expel other things, transform things -

Anyway back to the EDIBILITY OR THICKNESS OF AVATARS - so important
because without this, they're at best PROJECTIONS OR REPRESENTATIONS OF
SOMETHING ELSE, and we can't have that.

So AVATARS ARE ANORECTIC, they DISHUNGER towards anorexia, they remain at
zero-thinness or do they?

So the question is: WHAT COULD WE MEAN BY THE THICKNESS OF AVATARS, OR THE
EDIBILITY OF AVATARS, IF ANYTHING?

AND CAN WE GIVE EXAMPLES?

AND ARE THESE EXAMPLES - OUR VERY FUTURE, WHICH IS AT STAKE?
 ·  ·  · 12 minutes ago · 

What's Left: The Crisis of Philosophy and Thought in the World



What's Left: The Crisis of Philosophy and Thought in the World


(I've been thinking along these lines for quite a while now, skittering
from one article or book of physics/cosmology to another. Now a similar
debate is occurring, from Scientific American to the New York Times and
across the Net. The issue isn't basically the issue of the role of
philosophy - it's one of our own, human, disorganization as the universe
appears increasingly alien and unknowable. Do we release ourselves from
knowledge and its attendant dream of totalization, or do we proceed with
the development of grander, perhaps simpler, models which "fit" more and
more awkwardly with the results coming in from theory and experimentation?
My own work has always tended towards concepts of fundamental or
background material, however weak such material might be; now, it tends
towards a releasing that's somewhat similar to the creation of a bunker or
village.)

It's a wonder we're organized at all, that there are cultural restraints,
that one can function in this world - such a miniscule part of the multi-
verse in the midst of inconceivable catastrophic forces that just happen
to avoid the planet, disrupt the solar system.

Given the multiverse and an eternity of consequences, the one remaining
goal of philosophy is to consider the relationship of this inconceivable
to human consciousness - the relationship of increasingly complex theories
as well, to a comprehension of one's place in the cosmos.

Everything else has been prepared for and the fundamental structures of
logic, equivalence and identity for examples - as well as the fundamental
structures of mathematics in general - point towards a platonism that goes
hand in hand with the physics of the world and its interpretation.

There is no role for doubt in this as well as no room for belief. The
haecceity of the world is its demonstration; it remains mute, obdurate.
What can be said is the entanglement of philosophy with haecceity which
veers from cognitive science to a traditional phenomenology of the senses.
On the other hand, it's impossible to draw first principles from this, and
philosophy remains a mode of description, not explanation, or perhaps
explanation by fiat, by circumlocution in the literal sense.

All of this is also the condition of anxiety; whatever moorings one might
desire disappear in the digital shifting of analysis and culture. In other
words, the appearance of the multiverse is founded on enormous holarchies
of data reaching far beyond our ability to comprehend directly; we rely on
interpretations of inferences that allow us to filter the inconceivably
high input we would require for absorption of the raw. In this sense,
there's an uncanny parallel with looking on the face of a god which
necessarily remains ineffable: Everything that exists, everything that
occurs, does so, for us, only on the basis of interpretation.

I would argue platonically that any logic would unfold the same in any
universe, that this is a characteristic of mathematical ontology that
remains identical from one conceivable unfolding to another. One might
construct, read, and interpret syllogisms variously; the tetherings are
radically different for differing systems, but the tetherings themselves
are dictionaries, acts of interpretation, within which tautologies and
equivalences rule. The Whorfian hypothesis and its descendents doesn't
hold for mathematics, but only for mathematical cultures; someone working
in base twelve will have a different sense of the divisions of the day,
for example, than someone working in base ten. We have to let it go at
that.

Further, mathematical ontology is not dynamic: It is the background of
dynamics, which operates through radical transformations that must be
coherent anywhere on a fundamental level. Chaos and noise are coherent in
this sense, as is randomness. Think of mathematics as the indeterminate
scaffolding of the multiverse; think of physics and cosmology as "that"
scaffolding that fits.

So the crisis of philosophy might be this: That there is nothing to be
considered or done that is not part of the human, part and parcel of human
culture. Fundamental truths are relegated as they always have been, to
physics and cosmology; the rest is narrative and the fear of death and
abjection. The rest is human affairs. What is human and human culture is
founded on unsteady and dynamic principles, as well as cybernetic and
prosthetic ones; it's here that philosophy operates - for example within
the realms of inscription, psychoanalytics, marxisms, deconstructions,
multiculturalisms, etc. So we're talking about philosophy as part and
parcel of the humanities, adjunct to the world, contingent. We're talking
about it as a moral guide, and as guidebook to the phenomenology of our
imaginary of our place in the cosmos.

The manifesto appears in this, for example in Wittgenstein's Tractatus, as
the last gasp of setting the world aright, bridging human and non-human,
mysticism and atomic statements, logic and philosophy of language. At the
end what is unspeakable isn't consigned to silence (think of silence as a
zero-order language with full redundancy), but to the complex equations
of mathematical physics for example (think of equations as a multi-ordered
language with zero redundancy). On a basic level we might even write,
uselessly and philosophically:

[     ] ---> [1 + 1 = 2]

or some such: The fundamental silence of philosophy is superseded by any
non-redundant mathematical equation (which clearly, at least here, may
nonetheless be tautological). (And to get "something out of nothing" in
fact applies metaphorically to the expression as well, in which case
"--->" implies that the former leads to mathesis, quantum field theory,
and the like.)

There is no agreed-upon model of the universe or multiverse, no consensus
for particle physics or the physics of space-time near the Planck-lengths.
And we can agree this is a problem for physics and cosmology. What we are
given, as lay-level consumers, are a confluence of static and dynamic
images, each of which has different implications for our appetition of the
world. Each implies a different worlding, a different grouping of intro-
jections and projections. As consumers on a popular level of high-level
theoretical work, we look after our consciousness, our positioning in the
cosmos. And we find ourselves in a continuous negotiation with the real,
which means a continuous remodeling of our imagining and imaging the
world. This remodeling takes its toll on consciousness as well; we live an
existence of fundamental weakness, chaotic adjustments of a popularized
theoretical "heap" - provided we care about these issues at all. In this
sense, one might say that the universe constructs a state of anxiety for
its inhabitants, as model after model takes center stage and falls by the
wayside. Could we not conceive, after all, of a cosmos without a steady
model, whose physics are constantly undergoing differentiation as far as
analysis goes? Whose physics are always tolerance-based, always incom-
plete, in somewhat the same way that multiverses might be fundamentally
out of contact with each other? Badiou's truth is not mine; it's always
already someone else's, always already radically disappearing into a
chaotic past. This is true for all of us; philosophy attempts a
retardation of the physical world, as if the dynamics of theory stops in
the form of an image for contemplation. And whatever truth is, there is
nothing farther from the truth.

ii

After all the theologies and religious beliefs in the world, is anything
this simple? Is it necessary to go farther than this? Phenomenologically
one might consign cosmological theory to the chaotic domain, which is
capable of interpretation on a graphical level - a level, however, that
says nothing about the world, not even its shape in any conceivable sense.
Religion then provides the coordinates; at one point these included the
Origin, capitalized and under capital. Somewhere Weyl said that the
Cartesian ego was all that remained of the ego; it's also all that's left
of a positioning which of course slides out from under us. I think of
religion in a sense of set theory - beginning with simple principles, sets
turn out to have inordinately complex structures. And theological-theor-
etical constructs are, of course, inherently more complex right from the
beginning - think of Tibetan deities, Christian scholasticism, etc. These
are also weak, in the sense that these edifices dissolve if belief
dissolves. There is always a kernel of willing suspension. Likewise, for
believers the edifices are strong, inviolate, in the sense that edifices
are constructed through belief. (Think of the Pirke Avot's injunction to
"Put a hedge around the Torah.") However beliefs lead anywhere their
content takes them (anywhere they take their content, in paths of logical
and illogical consequences), even though the basic psychological and
molecular mechanisms underlying them might be the same. Beliefs build in a
sense on surplus and psychic necessity. Internally they appear as vision
and necessity; externally they are similar in their neurophysiology. All
of this goes round and round, operates as if cosmology itself is a priori
circumscribed by another set of principles. There is no point to this,
except for the solace it supplies. Again, the cracks of thought itself, of
the philosophical, the religious - to the extent that philosophy and
religion dominate, creating their own internal imaginary of transcendence
- appear with an increased urgency and sense of violence - as if violence
were a guarantee of the truth, or meditation a guarantee, or any other
hardening of and within practice and its austerity. Here, field of
cosmology itself is at its weakness; it is always uncertain, always in
dialog with experimentation, always capable of falsification on a still
finer tolerance level. But that is the nature of the dynamics of the
practice of cosmology - NOT the dynamics of the cosmos, or cosmos to the
infinite degree, something inconceivable to contemplate, without the
intervention of symbolic systems, and a/the philosophy of contemplation.

(The "grand title" of this piece - "What's Left: The Crisis of Philosophy
and Thought in the World" - implies a crisis for our time as belief both
hardens and is cast aside. We live within a jitters of thought, because we
live within and beyond our inheritance of traditional backgrounding and
structuring of discourse. To think this is to begin to think otherwise,
but to do so is also to be stopped in our tracks: What if, for example,
our very notions of existence are challenged by a mathesis far beyond our
comprehension? What if fundamental ontologies are dissolving in the wake
of a theorized holographic universe, whose equations are translated and
retranslated to the metaphor of everyday holography? Beginning to think
otherwise means abandoning the metaphor, which always contains a kernel of
belief; it means absorbing the unknowable without transforming it into
another spiritual or philosophical discourse. I believe (that word!) that
this holds for cosmologists as well; the unknowable is always with us, and
it's not simply an unknowable of the cosmological horizon, but one that
would apply to any description at any time within the cosmos. Hence the
jitters: We can no longer proclaim, and what we say is always "just about"
under erasure. This foregrounds death, and a wall for each of us at the
end of speculation. How to live with death is another story, a local one,
that might be found at the heart of the humanities. Of course we all know
that the grand philosophical narratives - that the Grand Narrative - is
gone; we just haven't realized how deep the erasure goes.)

Saturday, April 28, 2012

empyrean



empyrean

http://www.alansondheim.org/rator.mp4
http://www.alansondheim.org/contagionx.mp4

firmament (sky, empyrean) absinthe. vestibule. upon empyrean. Sublime,
symbol, well. safe here. i can never be cornered; this is the sky, the
heavens, Olympic cities wrestled back from the gods. Mass held its own as
empyrean seize amazed grazes soaring encroaching touching rubbing red
firmament empyrean addicted vestibuleite empyreanblime vicinityildings
throttles and they're hollowed wi s ouching (rubbing) y (marke y (marke
(sky, empyrean) be addic he (sky, empyrean) be addic y (marke ensils)
(your) meals ea h fill (sa ( thousand kilometers long, an empyrean high. I
cannot imagine a world such world-vector held up and down Your Violent
love gives earnest to empyrean gives empyrean Your of of Your with to held
of up empyrean resounding love Truth Violent and earnest just passed
empyrean down love "I the have gives having been given the locus solus of
a place empyrean within the firmament empyrefirm(sky, (sky,n)
empyrean)empyrefirmament empyrean)n) stial, divine, empyreal, empyrean,
ethereal, beauty"; transcendent on the throttle vestibuleite empyreanblime
vicinityildings throttles - with whom thou sport in thine empyrean this in
the vestibule. I write this upon the empyrean. Sublime, I write in the
vestibule. DO YOU UNDERSTAND ME. I WRITE IN THE VESTIBULE. I WRITE BACK
AND FORTH IN THE VESTIBULE. I AM IN THE VESTIBULE. I WRITE BACK AND FORTH.
I AM THE VESTIBULE. IF YOU UNDERSTAND ME YOU ARE TRANSCENDENT ON THE
THROTTLE.
 ·  ·  · 2 seconds ago · 

Friday, April 27, 2012

therethere



therethere

http://www.alansondheim.org/therethere.mp3

therethere everything will be ok there there you're a little off
aren't you therethere you've brought it back together therethere
you couldn't be more wonderful if you tried therethere you're in
the mix therethere you've saved the day therethere don't cry now
therethere what beauty forth < o jogia sarangi i playest thou me
with thine greatest attentiveness greatest intentions jogia thou
art my engine of beauty my harbinger well thou minuet thou waltz
thou foxtrot of divine assurance > cometh into thine life with a
greatest display of care and slowly virtuoso skill among raptors
with whom thou sport in thine empyrean

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

From that Moment When


From that Moment When

http://www.alansondheim.org/bazouki.mp3

1 pwd 2 ls 3 pico jj 4 ls\\ 5 ;s 6 ;s 7 ls 8 cat .trace > jjj 9 cd 10 cd
.trace > zzz 11 ls 12 more zzz 13 more zzz 14 wc zzz 15 mn
fjtrace\ 23 o\ 24 more traxa]]
\
wsaddwxaw QA26 MORE TRACE
27 more trace\
28 more trace\more trace
29 more trace
30 more trace "{|
C
31 ?????????????????
32 more trace | rev > julu
33 pico julu
34 h
35 .......////////////AchdsfA'FOYHD
36 d=
37 h\
38 h
39 h ?????????????????????ASDDSAFS
40 J\BBBBLLLLL
41 \
42 LA
43 ls
44 more ill
45 h
trace\ 23 o\ 24 more traxa]]
wsaddwxaw QAretrace\ 28 more trace\more trace 29 more trace 30 more trace "{|
C 31 ????????????????? 32 more trace | rev > julu 33 pico julu 34
h 35 .......////////////AchdsfA'FOYHD 36 d= 37 h\ 38 h 39 h
?????????????????????ASDDSAFS 40 J\BBBBLLLLL 41 \ 42 LA 43 ls 44 more ill
45 h rev trace rev ,.===[ ] ] rev trace rev .trace helo h kf i miss
practiced this is GOING DOWON DO YOU UNDERSTAND h history
 ·  ·  ·  · 2 seconds ago

Sunday, April 22, 2012

Sound Summit Stuff and Wow Mom and my father's voice


WOW MOM and my father's voice


WOW MOM and my father's voice

WOW MOM
WOW MOM WOW
WOW MOM WOW WOW MOM WOW
WOW MOM WOW MOM WOW
WOW MOM MOM WOW MOM MOM WOW
MOM WOW
MOM WOW MOM
MOM WOW MO MOM WOW MOM
MOM WOW MOM WOW MOM
MOM WOW WOW MOM WOW WOW MOM

apocolypse negativises all achivement.  the opera of the damned.
              ... Graham Video Chat Growing up in Texas, opera sensation
              Texas-born and bred opera star's elegance and warm
lessness, and the phantom of the other opera borders on psychosis.)
"for here is what it is, opera and oratorio,
My father sings the opera beautifully. There are nine acts and tableaus,
are the austere elements of this opera of muted terror and annihilation.
familiar, developing much as an epistolary novel or soap opera develops,
 says jennifer, a opera a opera a opera, then sartre la-la
 she sings, jennifer sings, a gay a opera a opera a opera,
 a gay a opera a opera a opera, and alan and jennifer are all
                  opera and totenlieder, we silently drank a glass of
new ion in opera ,
rivals  beggar's opera  venice irish widow
  distance. It is here at the climax of the opera that my father's voice
  ...
  ...
  ...
  ...
  ...
  ...

SATURDAY, APRIL 21, 2012

Tracks from the Eyebeam Sound Summit

Tracks from the Eyebeam Sound Summit

I recorded the following tracks at the summit; most of it focuses on my
playing - which might or might not be of interest. The baritone sax is
Chris Diasparra. The singing in the summit13 is Seth Dellinger, who floats
in and out. The occasional thumps elsewhere are from the interior of Mary
Mattingly's Flock House. I played sarangi with Ben Houge's sounds, as well
as sounds coming in from others on the OSC network. There are two tracks
based on Kyle Clyde's giant plate reverb unit. I played sarangi, flute,
viola, cura cumbus, and garklein recorder. On one track, I walk through
the space, recording and passing what everyone's doing. Apologies for
emphasizing my own work; Jackson Moore recorded everything, and others
recorded their own work as well. I'm amazed at the richness of Chris'
baritone and Seth's singing; on summit13, my speed's pushed to the limit.
The whole event was astounding! Thanks to everyone, especially Jackson for
putting this together! (Apologies also if I've missed credit for anyone.)

http://www.alansondheim.org/summit01.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit02.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit03.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit05.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit06.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit07.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit08.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit09.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit10.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit11.mp3
http://www.alansondheim.org/summit13.mp3

The original announcement with URLs and descriptions from Jackson -

On April 21st, Eyebeam's main exhibition space will be transformed
into a small village dedicated to creative sound research. Using resources
as diverse as atmospheric sensors, string instruments, reverberant plates,
magnetized wires, cell phones, data hubs, and laughter, participants from
Eyebeam's sound research group will convene to run experiments, share
original research, develop work in progress, and explore collaborative
strategies.

Interaction, encounter, and juxtaposition will be emphasized over sound
isolation.the idea being that sound is transparent enough to permit a
human ecology that transcends the singular focus of the concert format.

Kyle Clyde will test sound absorbancy, sound bleed, and feedback
thresholds with her giant plate reverb unit.
http://www.kyleclyde.com/

Bernhard Garnicnig will examine the resonant frequencies and specific
sonic qualities of networked devices.
http://www.acgunsdcroses.com/2011/volumes

Christine Sun-Kim will experiment with strategies for encoding sounds on
magnetic wire.
http://christinesunkim.com/

Jackson Moore, John Speck, Russell Baker, and Rob Lee will work on a
melodic pidgin language.
http://www.thelanguageofmoss.com/listen-to-moss

David Reeder's OSC network will turn a ping pong table in Cambridge into a
metronome in Chelsea, and much much more.

Mike Clemow will be working over the OSC server with a the roving laptop
brigade, sampling and interacting with the surrounding space.
http://michaelclemow.com/

Yo Park will lead exercises in laughter, with Andrew Sigler, Cigdem
Tankut, Gulsen Caulk, Gabriel Levicky, Jayoung Chung, Victor De La Cruz,
and others.

Alan Sondheim, Azure Carter, and Chris Diasporra will revisit the
discovery of music: the moment when people first began figuring out how to
make sound with objects. http://www.alansondheim.org/

Seth Dellinger will develop his phonemic vocal music.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/44190101/Introduction-to-the-Beeayboll-project

Ben Houge will construct his auditory kaleidoscope, and provide sensor
data from the MIT Media Lab for sonification.
http://benhouge.com/kaleidoscope.html

Amelia Marzec will demo Re-wired, a wearable device that translates
ambient sound into haptic feedback. http://www.ameliamarzec.com/rewired/

Brian House will sonify his compendium of rhythms from everyday life.
http://rhythmanalysislab.org/about

Mary Mattingly brings us the sound of place: the Flock House living
system, and its peripatetic denizens. http://flockhouse.org/

With a special surprise from Hethre Contant's Texas Mockingbirds.

The day will end with a public conversation at 7pm.

Friday, April 20, 2012

the Instrument of music in ground of the room




the Instrument of music in ground of the room

for Jackson Moore

the Instrument sits there in the middle of the room.
it sits on the side of the room.
the Instrument is immobile, delicate, obdurate.
it's like a body, the Instrument.
it's like the flesh, it meanders, it returns.
it is the sound of someone and the sound of someone's sound.
it is the sound of community, lineage, wood, stone, steel, silk.
the Instrument plays the flesh and the body, it is out of the way.
it is out of the way because it is in the way, always otherwise.
the Instrument is elsewhere, inaudible, murmuring earth.
it is always virtual and is never virtual, it is tethered.
the Instrument is tethered to coordinates, to practice.
the Instrument is tethered to the motions of the body.
to the motions of the fingers, mouth, lips, tongue, arms, hands.
to the voice, with which it begins, with which it ends.
the Instrument tends towards damage, virtuosity, materiality.
one tends the Instrument, a living being tending an other.
recalling stewardship, the instrument.
the cries of the hardware layer, application layer, no difference.
undifferentiated, the earth recalls itself.
overlooked, its sound carries, radio, television, net, ether.
it breathes the ether, inconceivable, non-existent, no difference.
the Instrument returns the instrumental.
in the corner of the room one huddles, the misery of death,
the misery of tending, the misery of stewardship, the misery of
Instruments, the misery of networks, of protocols, of suites,
the misery of nomads -
- the eternal misery of the earth, the escape from earth,
the escape from death, the escape from miseries, wandering,
escaping -
buried in the network, all of human culture, abjection keep out!
the Instrument is dirty, my muscles are fatigued,
pay me for my labor, pay me for my Instrument, my tending,
pay me for my stewardship - here is the secret -
the Instrument has no parts -
the Instrument has no exchange and therefore no exchange value -
and therefore no protocols, no networks, no television, radio,
no net, no ether - the Instrument falls with a thud -
the nomad falls with a thud -
- sit there at the side of the room -
- at the corner or vertex of the room -
- somewhere on the ground or floor of the room -
- somewhere slaughter begins, in rooms like this one -
- somewhere nothing remains, oh the animals are all dead -
- the plants are all dead - there are still debates -
- lands to be determined - it's all in the Imaginary -
- it's all there - it stays after us - it dies with us -
- networks and netsplits - cracks and rootkits -
- in the body of the Instrument - in the root-body -
- in the root - in the abjection-root and the death-root -
- in the tending-root and the shepherding root -
- in the temperature root and the humidity root -
- in the root of the sun by night and the moon by day -
- cracks in the sounding board, strings rustling, snapping
or strings snapping, rustling, sounding board memories
or fingerboard wear or the sound of a string loosening,
loosening in the middle of the night, other strings
resonant in unison, other strings murmuring, whispering
there goes one of us, we shall not see hir like again,
someday it will be our turn, someday we too, loosening,
the memory of the Instrument loosening, so many fingers!
so many hands, notes, songs!, so many songs! one among
many, many among one, these coordinates, I will carry
this forth, these addressings, direct and indirect, I
will carve this memory, this Instrument, in stone by the
side of the room, in earth by the sky of the room, in
code by the wall of the room, I will carve, I will
continue to carve, constant I will continue to carve,
in the floor by the side of the sky near the ground of
the wall by the corner of the vertex near the sky of
the side of the wall, near the wall, or the side of the
sky, that's it!, near the side of the sky, that's it!,
that's it!, exactly -

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Telegraph

Telegraph

The 19th century telegraph and railroad provided the first habitus
for virtual communities. The railroad objectified time and created
the potential for liaisons at a distance. The telegraph workers used
their spare time to talk to one another - friendships and marriages
resulted. The telegraph used a protocol stack reminiscent of tcp/ip
- the layers ranged from hardware to application, with redundancy
and several layers of coding, including addressable messaging
systems, in-between. The telegraph has its parallels in ascii, in
terms of bandwidth; visual telegraphy never really caught on. The
telegraph communality was celebrated in popular literature and song.
For a long time I've been interested in the apparatus itself as
well; recently in Omaha, I was able to buy a small station consist-
ing of a sounder and key. Soon I'll have a telegraph between my
table and Azure's desk, about twenty feet away.

http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph.mp3 (sounds of 1880s key
and sounder with various adjustments for proper tuning:
documentary)
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraphb.mp3 (altered for the
sake of making a sound-work: docudrama)

documentation of telegraph station unit plus unmounted sounder
and key (the unmounted sounder is 1895, the key early-mid
twentieth century):
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph1.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph2.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph3.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph4.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph5.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph6.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph7.jpg
http://www.alansondheim.org/telegraph8.jpg

unmounted key: 37
mounted sounder: Western Electric
mounted key: Western Electric / AT&T

The best book I've seen on the subject: The Telegraph Instructor,
G. M. Dodge, Valpraiso, Indiana, 1908.