D.O.A.

Last month Jay-Z proclaimed the death of autotune, a digital effect with it's roots in analog vocoders developed early in the 20th century.



Originally developed with the telecommunications industry in mind, the technology was eventually discovered by musicians who began to incorperate it into compositions as a novelty.



The Sonovox


Here's a clip of Alvino Rey whose 'singing guitar' used technology that would eventually become the Talkbox.

Along with the vocoder, the talkbox was frequently dismissed as a gimmick.
Nonetheless these devices that electronically merge the voice with instrumentation found their way onto a huge number of records, across genres and across decades throughout the 20th century.



Around The World Daft Punk, directed by Michel Gondry (not)



Battlecat using a Talkbox.



Mack Maine with Lil Wayne on autotune


Autotune, B.o.B.

Christy Karacas on Youtube

via selfademus

After like 20 seconds into this cartoon I was thinking 'this reminds me of Superjail'.

I looked up the names in the links, and found out that this is beacuse Christy Karacas worked on both of them. True story.

Taste The Waters Of Freedom

narrated by Orson Welles

Hi 'n' Lo,

A new Ruben Ortiz Torres video just showed up on youtube.
It's described by it's author as:

"The missing link between Brancusi, constructivism and the low rider pick up movement of the late eighties and early nineties."

I think you could also add Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, and Fernand Leger to that list.








Last up, is the first work by Ruben Ortiz Torres I ever saw. I guess it's his most famous.

It still looks and sounds good after all these years, especially on youtube.

It belongs mixed in-between a whole list of low bit rate rips of constructivist/futurist films and 3gp's of radical beds and hydraulic hops.

Charles and Ray Eames On Youtube

Here are some corporate commissions by the husband and wife design team Charles and Ray Eames.

The concluding statement in the commercial for the polaroid SX 70 by Phillip Morrison manages to summarize the ideals that inform all the Eames' design work. It stresses an optimistic and humane take on modernism, in which technology is seen as the ultimate creative enterprise.

I find this attitude especially moving since it comes from a era reeling from the recent discovery of the destructive power of atomic weapons, and a technophobic skepticism of applied science could be so easily justified.

I'm definitely looking forward to visiting the Eames Office, and some of their buildings when I'm in LA.

Journey Plays Softball

really really nice and really fresh and comfortable.

Space Ish

Jean Rouch on Youtube

The Mad Masters, documents a 1954 Hauka ritual in Accra, Ghana.

Hauka was developed by migrants of rural west African communities as they settled in larger urban areas. The migrants with different cultural and religious backgrounds found common ground in their shared possession cult traditions, and created new rituals based on their new experiences in urban colonial Africa.

While in a trance state, the participants literally exorcise the psychic demons of state control, intentionally breaking taboos and allowing themselves to become living effigies of the occupying military force.

When the ritual is over the participants get into taxis and go to their regular jobs the next day.

I've only seen this before on 16mm really with distorted sound,and no subtitles.
It was pretty rare for awhile, now there's a few of Rouch's anthropological films on youtube, there must be a dvd box set somewhere...

news to me

Today Wednesday, October 29, 2008,
is the Day of Prayer for the World’s Economies
Here's a picture of the prayer taking place on wall st.





Here's a painting by Nicholas Poussin based on some passages from Exodus,

It's a painting about the sin of idolatry, prohibited by the second commandment. This is the scene right before Moses returns from the mountain and smashes the stone tablets in fury.

and I'm in a weird mood because all I've done today is read NRO with a silver mount zion playing in the background.

Marlin Watson on Youtube

http://www.archinect.com/
TheMarlin

Belly Of The Beast

Killer Mike Feat. Charles Manson

Martin Arnold on youtube

There's suddenly a bunch of Martin Arnold clips on youtube now....







here's one more that has ebedding disabled

The company that put the DVD out is called Index their catalog is pretty excellent, their website is worth checking out

Double Plus Good

NPR are releasing George Orwell's previously unpublished diaries in the form of a daily blog starting tomorrow.

Resistance To Witchcraft

Scenes From Blue Acid City

Blackness, sound of bong rip, fade in:

Stoned Woman in Red) Do you think Baudelaire ever wrote about extra terrestrials?

Stoned Woman in White ) (annoyed) Charles Baudelaire didn’t write about aliens.

Stoned Woman in Red) I know, but he smoked hash, I think he should have tried smoking through an Alien Bong,

Stoned Woman Behind Couch)I guess………maybe…….

maybe he might not have found hashish as ‘troubling’.

or such a ‘chaotic demon’ if he had smoked it through an alien bong.
(get's up and goes to window...continues talking)

I think that by placing an absolutely alien object at the center…

where you actually consume the hash….

That would have tempered the suspension of his smoking and knowing subject.


Stoned Woman in Red) His alienated self would have a external substitute … in his field of vision.

Stoned Woman in White) (annoyed) well I don't know..... I never had that problem.

Nathalie Djurberg!

This is some installation video of Nathalie Djurberg 's new show at Fondazione Prada, which I guess just opened.

The first time I saw her stuff was a couple years ago now. I was pretty spun.

After my friends and me did a puppet show for this one gallery, I got stoned at the afterparty, then got ushered through a series of increasingly psycho techno parties, and we all had to take e to stay awake.

As I was leaving the last party one of the people I was with, ran into her friend on the way to the Berlin Bienalle, so we tagged along and I had the benefit of being shown around the place by a gentle, sober, serious-artist type.

I saw an animation called Tiger Licking Girl's Butt by Nathalie Djurberg and have always wanted see some more.

Now my favorite tech/design/fashion art blog we make money, not art has a piece on her.

I'm not really into tech, design, fashion or art which is why I think this blog is so rad.

It was started by Regine Debatty and for a long time she was the only one writing it. She has so much enthusiasm, insight, and writing skill that often I suddenly start caring about stuff I didn't think I cared about.

I saw lots of totally excellent work at that Bienalle and unusually for big shows like it,
I can remember it all, I credit the drugs.

Dark Star

Here's a scene from John Carpenter's Dark Star where a crew member defuses a bomb using phenomenology.

Phenomenology as defined by Edmund Husserl is 'the reflective study of the essence of consciousness as experienced from the first-person point of view.'
But, I think the clip from dark star sums it up much better.

It was explored with increasing intensity by thinkers of the twentieth century, I think partly because of development of photography, sound recording and cinema, which are all types of disembodied sensory data.

Anybody who's thinking about being in my movie(you know who you are) this scene is kind of what I'm going for.

Super Mario Bros. Movie

Cory Arcangel and paper rad 2005




Cory Arcangel re-works entertainment technology

I saw a couple of his hacked NES consoles in Zurich last February.

If you still have an NES console, a copy of this is available on a Nintendo cartridge from his website

You're Wasting Tape