There was a time (likely just before my college years) when I distinctly remember thinking “you know, the music I’m into now, I could just listen to nothing but this for the rest of my life, I mean, it’s that good.” (it was high school) No doubt I wasn’t the first to pledge such lifelong musical satisfaction. And not unlike myself, the musically-satisfied lives of my predecessors probably lasted like… what? A couple months?
Or maybe not. Maybe everyone is still listening to the same crap (excuse me, I mean music) they listened to in high school or college or whatever (I’m sure it’s still very good and not dated at all). And maybe I was the very first to anull my I-never-need-to-listen-to-new-music-again vows, because, like, the next day the Internet started getting really good at dumping piles of the stuff on my head. And then computers started getting really good at helping people make even more music and, hell, now there’s an awful lot of it.
Just starting to dig a deeper into the cultural impact of exhaustive recording – part emerging technology, part byproduct of ubiquitous computing. The question is simple: What changes when everything is recorded? What new consumption and production practices emerge in such a future? I don’t mean to imply there will ever be a time when everything is recorded, but the trends I’m seeing are definitely, um, trending in that direction…
Last Sunday’s New York Times ran a story on a company called Replay Solutions. They record computing:
For software developers, the flaws that cause crashes rank among their biggest problems, especially the ones that can’t be reproduced, like the proverbial noise in the car engine that disappears when you visit the mechanic.
Mr. Lindo says he and Mr. Daudel found themselves overwhelmed by bugs they couldn’t find while working together at an Internet start-up in 2002. “We were spending almost all of our time not fixing the issues, but trying to get to the point where we could just see the issue, and we said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could just TiVo this and replay it?”’ Mr. Lindo recalls.
Been trying to learn about capital-P-Property and how its use as an economic & legal framework for information production has left us wading through a hazy muck of copyright and intellectual property law. Ew. My oversimplified understanding of the problem is this: you can’t a have a system of ownership for infinitely reproducible digital information and expect to reap the privileges of ownership exercised with physical goods. Put another way, in the digital world, ownership and possession are no longer synonymous. That is, one simply needs to possess information to reproduce it (see file sharing) – ownership is irrelevant. In Bill Moggridge’s Designing Interactions, Durrell Bishop explores this rift by giving digital information a physical container…
Nothing terribly profound there, but I found the thought experiment valuable in furthering my understanding of these concepts. Bishop is basically trying to reintroduce opportunities to possess digital information in a physical way that imparts some amount of ownership. He’s backtracking through the technological advances that eliminated the need for things like compact discs. And as the RIAA and MPAA know all to well, once a physical object isn’t required to access digital information, protecting copyright on that information becomes basically impossible. continue reading »
A couple months ago I read a story in the NYTimes about a device called the Boomerang developed by BBN Technologies. The Boomerang, which looks a bit like an over-sized cat toy, is attached to military vehicles to determine the direction of incoming enemy fire. It does this by recording the sound of the bullets with multiple microphones and then triangulating their source and trajectory based on the differences between the recordings – a process called acoustic triangulation.
In my post on Recording Reality, I mentioned two basic approaches to compiling a single recording of everything: things observe other things and things observe themselves. What’s fascinating about the Boomerang is it’s a hybrid of these two approaches – a sort of machine sousveillance. That is, by observing it’s environment (other things), it “observes” itself. Since it can track the trajectory of incoming bullets, it can effectively determine when the vehicle’s been hit by one. The Boomerang is a sensory prosthetic for Humvees.
The video above, of Daft Punk’s summer performance at Brooklyn’s Keyspan Park, is compiled entirely from footage shot by approximately 250 audience members. When I first saw it, I assumed the constituent videos had naturally emerged from the event and appeared online. I was mistaken, the assembled footage is the product of a coordinated effort, organized by Olivier Gondry (Michel Gondry’s brother) and commissioned by Daft Punk themselves. That’s not to imply something similar couldn’t occur organically. It certainly did when the Boredoms performed 77 BOA DRUM this summer in Brooklyn Bridge Park. [As it turns out, Gondry's video is in fact inspired by the Beastie Boy's movie, Awesome: I Fuckin' Shot That] Regardless, the idea of scraping the internet for documentation of an event and compiling it into some sort of collective memory is entirely brilliant. continue reading »
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