Hauntology (continued)

"The concept of hauntology however tends to be more loosely deployed, and in particular to music that employs samples and especially dub reggae techniques that reanimate styles and sounds that hover, suggestively, around the edges of the day to day. Such techniques foreground the 're' in recorded music and evoke the Janus-like status of music as recorded artifact, facing both backwards and forwards simultaneously, an inscripted trace that is neither presence nor absence but a spectral apparation that both referencesand eludes such binary oppositional catagories..."

From 'John Doe', at Dissensus.com [following its referencing of Jacques Derrida]

Sharing, Physicality, Mixtapes and Newspapers

By: Russell Davies
From: http://russelldavies.typepad.com/
Date: 23/06/10

My talk at Lift seemed to go down quite well but I remember leaving the stage thinking of all the things I'd meant to say; my own fault for trying to cram an hour of stuff into 20 minutes. So I thought I'd try and elaborate on some of it here. This post is what I meant to say while standing in front of this picture of one of Roo and Leila's tapes.

Earlier in the year I'd heard Clay Shirky talk at SXSW - it was an incredibly helpful set of thoughts and had me thinking about sharing and physical stuff in a way that hadn't occurred to me before.

He referred to Why We Cooperate and talked about three modes of sharing and why they're different.

Sharing Goods - the hardest to do, because if you give a physical good you no longer have it, you're deprived of it.

Sharing Services - like giving helping someone across the road - you don't lose out on physical stuff but it's an inconvenience.

Sharing Information - like giving someone directions - you don't lose stuff, it doesn't take much time, no inconvenience.

And, crucially, he points out, we're taught all the time that sharing is good. We get hits of pleasure when we share things with people. It's neurological and social. We like to share.

So when Napster came along and changed music sharing from a Sharing Goods process to a Sharing Information process we didn't all suddenly develop criminal tendencies. It's just that sharing, which we're inclined to do, suddenly became way more convenient. And as he said and someone twittered "We have a word for not sharing if there’s no cost to you: that word is ‘spiteful.'" The music industry is not battling against a generation of digital criminals, it's fighting a bunch of kids doing what their parents have been telling them since they were two - sharing nicely.

That, to me, was a hugely helpful and accurate framing of what's going on with sharing on the internet.

But it also got me thinking along a tangent.

While talking about Sharing Services Mr Shirky mentioned mixtapes - a way of sharing your music without giving away your records, but not very convenient to make, a sort of intermediate step on the way to Napster. But having just seen Shift Run Stop's tapes of their episodes (so, I guess, not strictly mixtapes) I immediately started thinking not about the inconvenience of a tape, but about their embedded value.

A mixtape is more valuable gift than a spotify playlist because of that embedded value, because everyone knows how much work they are, of the care you have to take, because there is only one. If it gets lost it's lost. Sharing physical goods is psychically harder than sharing information because goods are more valuable. And, therefore, presumably, the satisfactions of sharing them are greater. I bet there's some sort of neurological/evolutionary trick in there, physical things will always feel more valuable to us because that's what we're used to, that's what engages our senses. Even though ebooks are massively more convenient, usable and useful than paper ones, that lack of embodiedness nags away at us - telling us that this thing's not real, not proper, not of value. (And maybe we don't have the same effect with music because we're less used to having music engage so many of our senses. It's pretty unemboddied anyway.)

And that made me wonder if that's why people are liking Newspaper Club so much? Are we getting close to some sweet spot where you get the satisfactions of sharing a physical thing but with the convenience of sharing information. Is that what you can get when you add Digital Sharing Technologies to Physical Manifesting Technologies?

We're not there yet. We're probably only at Sharing Goods like Sharing Services but even that seems like a step forward. Maybe that's why making your own book feels so right, maybe that's where we need to go next with DataDecs, maybe that's what Shapeways and Ponoko will enable, but I think there's something in this.

Potential ideas to explore

This change of direction for this final major project has meant that I've not had the luxury of time to allow a lengthy experimental stage. With previous projects, I've tended to see what comes out of various processes to inform some kind of deliverable. With just over a month to complete this, I need to be at a stage where I'm ready to move into a more considered approach to the output to maintain a certain amount of freedom to fully explore the potential aesthetic solutions.

So right now I'm considering a number of different directions. All of which are the result of the rationale I've been refining.

One is to argue the relevance of format to music in the digital age with a series of 'unplayable' music forms. As with the Matthew Dear 'Totem', the format itself is simply a collectable visual object with the audio content via streaming or download. The use of unplayable media is, for me, a logical conclusion for where music retail is going and is seemingly a more potent yet actually quite abstract piece of ephemera that might question the current music buying habits within this particular era. I can already see a number of interesting routes for this and have a selection of associated visual references that I'll post as soon as I have chance.

A second option is a series of print-based items that exalts digital media by exposing how traditional music formats have been wrongly defined as the actual music. I knocked up the quick image below as a marker for this approach although I'd suggest a broader interpretation of the concept. I also need to check on the availability of various print facilities before going too far down a particular route.

The third was an idea that looks to exploit the fetishism for music formats in a visually communicative way. To highlight how vinyl hunger in particular verges on the pornographic. This is the one that I'm less sure about although I was thinking it could be a fairly tongue-in-cheek series that looks to play on that desire.

There's a fourth option which would be to use all of these in some way and build something approaching a campaign that uses the various elements to contribute to a dialogue about the concepts of music, formats and meaning.

Frank Bretschneider - EXP

From the Raster-Noton label [although maybe more relevant to the previous project]:

EXP is a music-visual work based on the idea that fine art should attain the abstract purity of music. an attempt to assimilate the qualities found in music – including movement, rhythm, tempo, mood, intensity and compositional structure – within visual phenomena. the music for the project was composed of specifi c generated and selected waveforms, feedbacks, impulses, clicks, the sound of mechanics, electricity, magnetism, light and other radiation. in addition and since the animation is mainly driven by sound frequency and intensity, the sonic quality of these sounds makes it possible to obtain an optimal effect on the graphics motion. in combination with several other ways of controlling the animation – from midi programming to applying motion curves – the visualization represents an exact reproduction of the audible occurrences. as a consequence the computed images often attain anunexpected beauty, from simple geometrical patterns to extraordinarily complex forms.

The 'totem'

When I blogged the Matthew Dear 'totem' format earlier, I didn't immediately make the connection between it and the totems used in the film Inception. The latter are devices that the characters use to help determine the difference between dream states and consciousness and include the pictured spinning top that behaves in a specific way that helps clarify what is and isn't reality. [I'm trying not to post anything that might be considered a 'spoiler'.]

This and Dear's totem perhaps generates a whole dialogue about how we attach meaning to objects. Getting deeper into that discussion, it might be off-putting should it verge on the quasi-religious yet ultimately we are actually talking about a question of faith. Belief allows for the perception of items as having deeper symbolic meaning: most often associated with decorative artefacts with examples dating back to the Stone Age. Yet functional products can take on significance outside of their primary purpose. The research that I've undertaken over the past couple of weeks increasingly supports the idea that music formats do this: transmitting information aside from the audio and visual material that they carry. This cultural theory aspect is possibly something I need to consider further to refine my rationale. Maybe while noting its relationship to Benjamin's "aura" and Baudrillard's "simulacrum".