/dilettante

The new blog is live!

In this quick week at home between vacations, I’ve thrown together the start of my new sound theory blog, with the idea that it’s better to just start writing than to get finicky over every little detail (see: this blog). The new blog is going to be a mix of short-form media link posts, tumblr-style (with a little commentary sometimes), and longer-form sound theory stuff on historical examples and contemporary things. I’m going to use it to try out ideas for the thesis, and hopefully it will be interesting even to those who aren’t into sound theory per se.

I’m going to try to keep metablogging to a minimum over there, so I have to focus on content (for another example of me messing that up, see this blog again). So, go visit www.noiseforairports.com, comment, and subscribe to a new RSS feed!

The last post on this blog is from January. Basically, a blog that was set up for me to just talk about myself was never going to get a whole lot of action when it had to compete with my twitter and tumblr accounts. Those services make it much easier to fill up part of the internet with solipsistic crap.

I’m not necessarily ending this blog; I’ll keep it on life support in case I can use its organs some day (or some other terrible metaphor). I am, however, moving on to yet another blog. It’s not entirely set up yet, and may not be until the end of June (I’ll be traveling for a while and still need to figure out how to make my website style into a legitimate Movable Type style).

The new blog is going to focus not on me, but on the sound-related stuff I am encountering in the course of researching for my thesis. It turns out that people are often curious about this stuff, and I want to be able to share it. For all my searching, I haven’t been able to find a blog that addresses experimental music/noise/indeterminacy/etc. from my perspective (or at all), and it seems like this might actually be useful not only for collecting things for my thesis, but for sharing them with the anonymous smiling faces of the internet.

So just a teaser for now. New blog coming. Will be about sound and so on. But probably not until the end of June.

Part of the research I’m working on is figuring out what research I’m going to be working on. As part of that, I’ve been on the lookout for compelling artistic practices, cultural objects, social constructions, and other sorts of media studies-related hoo hah.

For a class last term, I found an artistic practice that played with what I called “the aesthetics of disintegration,” but might better be called “recursive remediation,” or something along those lines. For the benefit of the Internet (and mostly me), I’ve collected a bunch of examples of this kind of work, and interspersed my own comments on why I think they’re interesting. (RSS folks may have to click through for the second part until I get my full feed set up.)

I may have fixed my RSS feed, if you can read this!

I finally got around to uploading the Processing project I completed a while ago in my Workshop class. My project goal was to create a navigable landscape, randomizing as many parameters as possible. You can play with the interactive version here.