RE: Rhythm Science

To the remixologist, ideas and theories are latent in their creation and creations. They’re there if you want to look for them. A poem I write might have as much to do with my daily routine as it does the movie I watched last week, the vidya I played the evening prior, and Baudrillard. Paul Miller’s book Rhythm Science is a physical object that expresses this philosophy. In other words, Rhythm Science is both a manifesto on the state and ideology of modern remixologists and a naturally occurring phenomenon. Break it down: rhythm science is as much a manifesto as it is a necessary and inevitable byproduct of technology and postmodernism coming together in sort of harmonic, remixed synthesis. Take it further: the internet has become a giant repository of music, images, words, and miscellany that can be sampled and sprinkled into anyone’s art (or thoughts, or dreams, etc.).

Inherent in Miller’s manifesto/essay/autobiography is the idea that there is no originality. There is innovation and hybridization. Re-appropriation is as difficult as being original (or it would be, if there was anything that could be referred to as “pure” and “original”). This is as much a vindication of rhythm science as it is a byproduct of postmodernism. Already, the reader should be aware that Miller’s book is as a much a practice of rhythm science as his own description of rhythm science. Need proof? Ralph Waldo Emerson’s more than willing to vindicate this sentiment: old and new make the warp and woof of every moment.

Take this as an example: there is no originality, just endless (not random, but recombinant) hybridizations of ideas. These hybrid ideas are, for all intents and purposes, “new,” but are inextricably linked to their origin. In many ways, then, rhythm science/Rhythm Science is an extension of Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex; the rhythm scientist outlines, emphasizes, and distorts memories, semantic-links, old theoretical texts, “found sounds,” etc. Like Bush’s concept of the Memex, the technology (i.e. in this metaphor, texts from the past, memories, imagination, etc.—Thoughtware, Wetware) is there and it is up to the user to dictate how they will flow and combine; the user orchestrates the way information—be it emotional, visceral, intellectual, sonic—will be stored. The DJ does this each and ever time they craft a song, just as I am doing right now in making this piece simultaneously convoluted and clear. Rhythm science/Rhythm Science relies on this play (as Derrida would say) and is this play.

Most interesting in rhythm science/Rhythm Science is what you’re experiencing right now. A subject-in-synchronization state that occurs when a reader/listener/subject experiences a text/mix/work. Miller argues that the concept of subject-object relation (between a person and an object/idea/theme) is no longer relevant; it is an anachronism and it is false. Rather, our postmodern world has created (or perhaps it has always been latent) a style of experiencing art that is a synchronization with the art (or any stimulus, really) and not a subject position. In Miller’s non-verbatim words, the cross-cutting and culling of different samples, themes, and ideas allows the viewer/listener/person to experience the world through the viewfinder of the creator; they synchronize with the work. Extrapolate that further: in a subject-in-synchronization relationship, your own synchronization (personalized and individually influenced as it is) is its own mix. What you take from this is your own, but it’s influenced by these words. Is there a better way to demonstrate the pseudo-thesis of Rhythm Science than to make the text a meta-reflection of this? After all, does this blog tell you more about Rhythm Science or my own active-remixing of my experience with Rhythm Science?

P.S. All this and we’ve not even touched on the C-Side or the Internet. The ever-present outline of Side-C is cast on every forward-facing page of Rhythm Science. The C-Side is itself—like the book—both thesis and practice. It shows rhythm science at its best and it features MC slots from some of the most intelligent and experimental remixologists of the past century.

RE: Talan Memmott

It’s something about the discordant piano, the horror-movie background noise (a sort of red-death waltz chamber in a vacuum), the face looking like Scrooge’s dead friend Jacob Marley, and the ghostly text—popping up across the screen at a rate that seems faster than it actually is—that has me trying to remember is Hugo Ball ever seemed this strange when I read his work years ago. Wait. Go back.

I’m researching Talan Memmott, internet artist and creator of “The Hugo Ball,” a piece of flash animation that combines all of the words from Ball’s sound poem Gadji Beri Bimba in a random remix. For those who don’t know, Hugo Ball was a Dadaist artist and poet. If you don’t know what Dadaism is, you’re hopeless. Seriously, though, you ought to know. Back to the subject at hand. Hugo Ball achieved poetic fame for writing a series of “sound poems,” poems that featured made up words and no discernible grammar. As such, these poems relied upon performance and interpretation (i.e. creative liberty with regard to inflection and speech).

Playing off of some of the tenets of Dadaism, Memmott’s piece relies on collage. The Hugo Ball reconfigures the words of Gadji Beri Bimba into new structures, juxtaposing words off of one another and injecting pauses at random. The pace of the speaker (as stated above, a sort of Jacob Marley stuck in a mirror/crystal ball) is feverish and quick. The pauses are most certainly random. The speaker’s face contorts rapidly, most likely assigned a different posture for each word or each syllable. The piece, then, is truly a collage of what it is to perform something like a sound poem.

My initial reaction to the piece is one of puzzlement. The theme the piece evokes is a hard-to-place brooding and haunting. The piece haunts you, but I can’t help but feel that it misses the point. Wait. I’m uncertain because the piece so deftly distills Ball’s conception of the collage into a piece of net art, but it subverts this by having the same exact performance of each “sound word” every time. In other words, the configuration of the poem itself is different each and every time, but the way they’re pronounced remains the same, simultaneously injecting spontaneity into the piece while negating it. One must, of course, entertain the idea that Memmott simply did not have the tools at his disposal to create several individual pronunciations of each word, in which case the aforementioned complaint would be null.

In some ways, I can’t help but feel that Memmott’s piece mocks the originator. Dadaists attempted to reject form in place of spontaneity, yet Ball’s Gadji Beri Bimba rests on the page in a static position and Memmott’s random generator, The Hugo Ball, both calls attention to its static source text while commodifying (i.e. ROLL OVER TO HEAR A PERSONAL RECITATION OF GADJI BERI BIMBA) the one element (the performance) that made/makes each version of Gadji Beri Bimba unique. Regardless, Memmott’s piece only mocks Ball slightly. One could make the case that it actually picks up where Ball left off; it further subverts any sort of stylistic “form” by creating a random arrangement of Gadji Beri Bimba and thus implements technology in a way that reinvigorates some of the loftier ideals (i.e. elimination of form, pure spontaneity, pure chance) of the Dadaists from a technological approach.

Anyway, this has been one of the most scatter-shot blogs I’ve written all semester. I’ll continue to mull this piece over and come back and edit or refine some of the musings that you’ve stumbled upon.

For those only (for now) casually interested in The Hugo Ball, here are some caps to whet your interest:

RE: net.art

So, there are a million things that can be said about net.art, but for the sake of expediency, let’s start with answering some questions with regard to the net.art. The first question that we’ll consider is seemingly simple: what is net.art? I think a simple definition (one that will undoubtedly be subjected to my own scrutiny and revision as the semester goes on) is a piece of work developed with the intention of dissemination and placement in the context of the Internet. As such, net.art relies entirely upon the Internet as a medium to exist. Therefore, a photograph of the Mona Lisa is not net.art, but is, rather, art on the net. Also, the art itself may deal with themes that are both web-bound and non-web-bound.

That said, the two questions that were asked after this first question become slightly irrelevant. If the net.art fulfills the criteria I’ve stated, it can still be displayed in a museum—though, the net.art manifesto might disapprove of this—the Internet or anywhere else that is possible. As such, the places where one can find net.art are similarly only limited by publicity, placement in places such as museums (or not), and other social factors. It seems, though, that the most natural place for a piece of net.art would be on the Internet where individuals using a home/work/whatever computer can access it.

On to the introduction to net.art reading. Some sections seem incredibly ambitious and others seem very prophetic. The first quote that I’ll pull from the introduction lists this as a specific feature of net.art:

Vanishing boundaries between public and private.

This seems very true and is currently being grappled with by artists from media not exclusive to net.art. Net artists, however, do have an obligation to consider whether their art ought to be made public or private. This facet raises some interesting questions about the very nature of net.art. If a work of net.art is made private (i.e. shown only in a gallery, despite existing at an undisclosed location on the web), is it still net.art? Does net.art depend upon a “public” level of accessibility? I would think this violates my criteria for what net.art is and would, therefore, still be considered net.art. However, this would violate one of the tenets of this introduction to net.art, so this was, at least, being considered and interrogated from the very conception of net.art.

The second quote, which I’ve pulled from the introduction, lists this as a specific feature of net.art:

[The] disintegration and mutation of artist, curator, pen-pal, audience, gallery, theorist, art-collector, and museum.

As we know, this hasn’t happened—at least not to my knowledge. There exists still in net.art the desire to have works recognized, written about (theoretically or otherwise), and it appears that distinguished digital-art websites (i.e. Rhizome, Turbulence) have taken the place of the museum with regard to net.art. So, disintegration no; mutation, yes.

Finally, let’s take a look at some questions raised by my tooling around with some early (and not-so-early) works of net.art. The first question that came to my mind while I was perusing these old “galleries” was: What happens to the art when the link no longer works? It seems as if the writers of the net.art manifesto foresaw the role things like bandwidth would play with regard to distribution and publicity, but it also seems as though they didn’t adequately prepare for the repercussions of things like broken links, a lack of server space, and improperly backed-up data. Coming across a repository of user-generated anecdotes and stories relating to “happier days,” I was saddened to see that the data was lost somewhere. Other times, the “art” (be it algorithm based or otherwise) would yield things like this:




Or this, the dreaded “404”:




One of the pieces that interested me most was a newly begun piece called “FUJI” (from the Turbulence website). It was of particular interest to me because of the break it signified between older, Web 1.0 works of net.art, and newer Web 2.0 works of art. Whereas the latter seemed entrenched in asking questions like, “what is the self in the digital realm? what is being in the digital realm? etc.” the newer works of net.art I encountered were more interested in playing with and investigating artifacts of the Internet age. Thus, FUJI is a project that melds a year’s worth of webcam images of Mount Fuji (culled from several webcams) together to create a sort of time-lapse.

This, however, by no means de-values the earlier works of net.art, but merely places them in their historical context. And, if anything, it validates the earlier works of net.art by signifying that, perhaps, those works elucidated the sorts of philosophic themes they were plumbing. And, of course, this is only based on a very brief, cursory survey of early net.art., so I am no doubt making broad generalizations.

Here are some pictures of FUJI: