So last night, I linked to the Vigilant Citizen’s hilarious Fergie/Transhumanism/Eugenics/Satanism mashup, and apparently some Grinders followed the discussion over there with less than spectacular results. I would like to remind folks, that while our “friends” over at the Citizen sometimes do have a sharp eye for symbolism and are always good for a laugh, they are still a Christian-themed media-paranoia conspiracy site and thus are probably not really open for strenuous intellectual testing of their theories.
To you who posted over there (or tried and got deleted or locked out) in order to conter-act some of the scary or weird disinformation, I say good job. But alas, anything you say, it seems, will be brushed off as coming from an agent of the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY. For those of you who got the brush off AND were threatened with an INTERPOL investigation or the threat of an anti-peadophile investigation or were all accused of being the same person – well give yourselves an extra 300xp and head over to Khannea Suntzu’s blog.
Suntzu takes apart the Citizen rant with a patience that borders on saintlike (or machinelike… muwhahaha…) with a rant of hir own – addressing the malicious fallacies contained in the original on a point-by-point basis. It’s the perfect antidote to your daily dose of crazed conspiratorial nonsense. And if you still have rage in your heart after that, remember that as a member of the SATANIC GLOBAL TRANSHUMANIST CONSPIRACY you get to go home to your house full of MK ULTRA brainwashed sex slaves and count the piles of money that your evil overlords gave you to post on the internet about H+.
Which is all to say: mea maxima culpa if I accidentally led any of you to where the internet sidewalk ends.
As a part-time occultist with a love of pop culture, one of my guilty pleasures is The Vigilant Citizen. The author of the blog in question has a keen eye for occult symbolisim and a mind that connects the dots on an not-so-invisible conspiracy within the music and other media industries in a way that sometimes rests firmly in the grey area between conspiracy theory and media studies. Seriously, how can you not like a blog featuring the tagline: “Symbols Rule the World, Not Rules Nor Laws?”
“Who was naked in the living room, tripping balls on Ayahuasca and praying for the divine light of Lucifer to pierce their soul, last weekend?”
“<mutter>”
“Right. Which means, you are BY DEFINITION, a Lucifer Worshiping Transhumanist.”
“Whatever. That’s totally not true. I’m really barely a Transhumanist at all.”
***
Admittedly, I’m pretty sure the Peas are using psychological warfare in their albums – that’s the only rational explanation for why I suffer nosebleeds and start quoting “Catcher in the Rye” compulsively after hearing only thirty-seconds of “My Humps” but our friends at the Citizen have a more nuanced theory of the Psyops that the Peas are bringing to bear in the name of a crypto-fascist, Satan-powered, H+ driven future.
One day, a spectacular picture popped up in my brain. It was an image of abandoned electrical appliances being played as musical instruments on a street in a town. Using this image as a starting point, I set up the same number of tube televisions and PC-controlled video decks correspond to the number of notes in a musical scale to create a set of gamelan percussion instruments. Tapping TV tubes produces primitive and cosmic electrical music.
You can play music videos, access information on the artist, song, album, etcetera, and using such information control the flow of the songs. Meta data like popularity and genres control the way the music is displayed, with popular songs in the center, rarer songs emanating outward.
Activating one song or video will reveal a list of possible paths you might take toward other recommended songs, and then there’s the objects.
The objects are what control the music and video. The circle pieces are the speakers (really nice speakers it seems from the video) – wherever you place them on the board, that’s what song plays.
The Rectangle with antenna are the ones that activate the music videos. You can place them both, or just one at a time. There’s a plus object that shows textual information, and a dome that controls the view of the whole situation, allowing you to zoom in or out.
Oh my goodness this is cute. The design you’re about to experience is called “Original Sound Track” and it’s basically a sound box flipped inside out and turned into a train on tracks. Set up your tracks, which have pins in them in just the right places, wind up your train car and set it on the tracks, and wowie! You’ve got your own little sound compilation! Made for kids, but who am I to say you adult figures can’t have one for yourself.
When this train makes it to production, it will come with 10 pieces of track which can be arranged in any number of different ways, allowing for the kid who runs it to make lots of different fresh songs! Then, just like any good modern toy, this train has song tracks you can buy separately. I’ll be in line the day they release the Chemical Brothers tracks! Or the Kraftwerk tracks – how awesome would that be?
This toy is basically GOING to inspire creativity and growth in cognitive ability in any child that uses it. Arranging music is intense – this is by far the simplest way to get a child excited about creating real amazing songs. Who DOESNT want their kid to become a composer!?
After weeks of speculation, the Eigenharp is live! This crazy instrument is part woodwind, part drum, and part piano. You can blow it, tap it, and stroke it to make music and it includes a case and strap. It costs $5,800 dollars and is customizable at the new product page.
Interestingly, they also released the Eigenharp Pico for about $500. It’s more like a recorder (a simple flute) and has 18 keys and one slider.
A colorful and delicately woven tapestry is transformed into a poetic, almost surreal, musical instrument by artists Myrto Karanika and Jeremy Keenan.
Strings 2009 is a novel musical interface that combines rather disparate arts: the traditional craft of weaving, printmaking and embroidery with electronic music.
As is the case with any other musical instrument, the experience, for performer and audience alike, is visceral.
But unlike most other musical instruments, the interface is soft, supple and certainly unfamiliar. Gesture is key in creating sound at specific “touch nodes” creating with woven and embroidered conductive thread.
His Ghost Detector is a musical instrument built by ‘hacking’ any electronic device that generates sound. Random lengths of wire are connected to randomly chosen places on its circuit board. The wires receive radiation of all kinds, and the results are translated into sound. The device becomes a “synthesizer”. It is unstable, responsive to slight influences and what it synthesizes can therefore not be controlled. A larger Ghost Detector randomly interconnects several such individual devices. Positioned all over a wall at HMKV, the network of “ghost detectors” read the “auras” of the audience. Rumour has it that the bodies or even the moods of visitors walking around the installation might affect the sonic output.
“The instrument is based on a translucent and luminous round table, and by putting these pucks on the Reactable surface, by turning them and connecting them to each other, performers can combine different elements like synthesizers, effects, sample loops or control elements in order to create a unique and flexible composition.”
Lights On is an audio visual performance created for the Ars Electronica museum in Linz, Austria, which has a facade that contains 1085 LED controllable windows. The windows’ colors are changed in realtime with music that’s broadcasted on speakers surrounding the building.
Visuals coded in openFrameworks by Zachary Lieberman, Joel Gethin Lewis and Damian Stewart (yesyesno). music by Daito Manabe, with support from Taeji Sawai and Kyoko Koyama. We made this in three days :)
This is an edited performance, link via makezine.com.
Haile is a robotic percussionist that can listen to live players, analyze their music in real-time, and use the product of this analysis to play back in an improvisational manner.
I found a connection between graffiti and pirate radio.
Both of these art expressions hack into public facilities. In the case of graffiti, the hacker uses the wall. In case of pirate radio, the hacker uses public radio waves illegally. It can be said that pirate radio is sound graffiti and I would like to propose to combine these two methods of graffiti; The artist can spray a QR code (two-dimensional bar-code) in the street with a stencil. Then when people who find the graffiti take a snapshot of the code with a mobile phone they can find the radio station through the internet.
Oh, and as always: Hail Satan… ROBOT SATAN.
