Conference: netaudio Berlin 2009

After the great discussion rounds at RAW Tempel in 2007, the netaudio Conference is back in Berlin. This time, both lecture and party sessions are located at Maria, right on the river. The night line-up is massive, with two floors hosting live acts and DJ sets by some of the finest netlabel artists, all neatly organized by styles and genres – whether that makes much sense remains to be seen, of course. The daily lectures and discussion rounds promise to be extremely interesting as well.
Conference website

Detecting Upcoming Tipping Points?

Wired Magazine has a story on an intriguing advancement in natural sciences: The possibility that research may be drawing closer to an understanding of critical thresholds, so-called tipping points, that seem like part of a continuum in passing, yet with hindsight can be identified as key indicators of the starting of a new direction for a process. Examples include dramatic climate changes after longer, steady developments, as well as index behaviors in stock markets. With Heinz von Foerster, it could be speculated that these critical thresholds mark the overtaking of a process by a new “Eigen-Value”, a distinctive value determining the development of the process. If indeed such Eigen-Values exist for a number of very different processes, then could it be possible that new Eigen-Values are foreseeable by recognizable changes in patterns within the process, as Steve Carpenter and his team at the University of Wisconsin suspect?
Full article

Conference: HyperKult 18

This year’s HyperKult Conference at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg focuses on “The Cloud”. As more and more data gets stored and processed on non-local storage and computing systems, conventions of usage and strategies for cultural practice are set to change dramatically. The conference aims to shed a light on very different practices that are affected by this development. Fields as diverse as artistic work and geological surveys are represented with presentations and papers.
Conference Website (in German)

21st Century Economy: Socialism Revisited?

Wired Magazine’s latest cover story “The New New Economy” includes an article “Socialism Revisited” by author Kevin Kelly that outlines online collaborative work and creative commons licensing as comparable, though not identical, to socialism as political/economical idea. The descriptions in the article hint at a detached economy that has reached a certain mass to become important even in the work market of the networked society.

However, this description of a no-state, detached, grass-rootsy economy leaves room for doubt in two areas. First of all, at least in Europe, many of those careers take place in a state of precariousness that is only possible because of a state subsidies for start-ups in what’s still being referred to as “New Economy”, as well as subsidies for the arts, grants for research projects etc. This would still account for a significant attachment to the existing political structures.

Secondly, the question whether or not this “New New Economy” does indeed have the chance to overcome the era of industrialization has not been decided yet. After all, the technological basis for this economy – network servers, routers, mobile computers, cell phones, digital cameras, etc. – is being produced in economies of scale in countries that are just entering the age of industrialization. Without China’s low-wage, low-standard workforce, there would be no $300 netbooks.

In the end, even the whole idea of socialism as a role model for the next New Economy is questionable. So far, the economical ideas are not creating an egalitarian mass, but an audience that knows what to pick for which purpose and that requires diversity, at least in content. Socialism as an image to reach beyond industrialization seems improbable at this point in time.
Full article

21st Century Economy: DIY Licensing

Internet activist Cory Doctorow has published an idea on how Creative Commons licenses could be amended to account for actual license fees the moment the original work is used commercially. A simple addition to the CC license text could ask a certain percentage out of the revenue generated by a product based on the original creative work that was released under this license. This approach would leave the benefits of CC licenses – free distribution, unlimited noncommercial use – untouched, and could therefore leverage the potential of a product that people can try out and use (noncommercially) freely without any limitations. Just when they start to generate money for themselves do they have to actually pay for the material they use.

The downside of this idea is of course that it depends on people’s willingness to obey the license, as they don’t gain anything from paying for the product and/or material at the time they’re required to pay. Enforcement of the license is expensive, and depends on whether or not the user can be dragged into a court at all. On the other hand, it certainly would not hurt to add license fees for commercial use to the license text itself, therefore making the terms clear on which people can work with the material.
Full Article at Internetevolution.com

EU Parliament acknowledges internet access as fundamental right

The European Parliament has re-adopted a part of a law that describes having access to the internet a fundamental right. Thereby, the representatives have voted against approaches that are known as “Three Strikes” legislation, where anybody caught three times conducting illegal acts such as sharing copyrighted content would essentially be thrown off the grid by authorities and their ISPs. French President Sarkozy is one of the primary advocates of such legislation.

The vote of the European Parliament is not legally binding, but the acknowledgement at least strengthens the position that internet access is not some negotiable “nice to have” matter, but should indeed be seen as a basic right for everyone, completely independent of questions on how to police law infringements.
Full article at La Quadrature du Net 

Evolving Multitouch I

All currently available multitouch technology relies on hand-eye coordination to interact with objects on the screen. For this reason, real-world applications are limited to gadgety interactions, e.g. on the iPhone. In such situations, the user generally wants to see what is happening graphically on the screen.

In other applications, the setup looks quite different. In a music performance, staring at the screen while manipulating parameters is not the best way to appear in front of an audience. Here, tactile control has to work without always having an eye for the on-screen object, because the eye tends to be needed for the crowd.

For this reason, the good old-fashioned machine-control paradigm still dominates the interface market for music applications. Knobs, buttons, and faders are still the mainstay on today’s stages for electronic music. But the versatility of multitouch screens is no less desirable in music equipment design. Attemps to match the benefits of both approaches are scarce. Just recently, though, a new and promising approach has surfaced, as published in MIT’s Technology Review.

This technological concept uses a latex screen with multitouch capability and a set of pneumatic pumps able to create small air pockets underneath the screen. These dynamic buttons can be either positive or negative, and the pressure when pushing them can be recorded as well. This looks very interesting for dynamically changing music composition and improvisation systems, although the proof-of-concept implementations are mostly about telecommunication.
Full article
Video

Germany’s top blog on strike against online censorship legislation

Supporters of the strike on a map of Germany

Germany’s #1 blog Spreeblick has entered a demonstrative strike against the online censorship legislation that was just passed by the federal government. Notably, the strike is not against the cause, which is to prevent people from entering child pornography websites, but rather against the amateurish belief that a simple list with URLs and IPs to be blocked will actually prevent the proliferation of such abominable content, and also against the very real possibility that the small effect such a blockade might have will be used politically in the future. Here is the original statement from Spreeblick:

Spreeblick.com, a german weblog, is on a demonstrative strike today.

The reason: Today, the german federal cabinet passed a new law to filter websites based on a secret list compiled by the Federal Criminal Police Office. The Federal Ministry for Family Affairs communicates the law as a remedy for the prevention of child pornography. While we strongly support any attempt to stop the abuse of humans and children in particular, we doubt that this is the real reason for the law.

For months, experts of all fields have impeached the facts and figures that were communicated by the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs as well as the technical implementation of the filtering process. We mistrust the planned non-transparent process, we regard it as ineffective and amateurish and we believe it is counterproductive and a possible thread to democracy.

Since illegal sites on a list must be known beforehand, we urge the government to shut those sites down and prosecute the operators of those sites.

In times of a nationwide election campaign, we regard political populism as highly inappropriate when it should be about the fight against the abuse of minors.

Time Magazine has an article about a similar approach that backfired on the Australian Government a few months ago.

Distant Shore – The Anti-Facebook

Video courtesy The Blimp Pilots

With the arrival of distant shore for the iPhone, there’s finally a distinct alternative to the Facebook style of this secong-gen web of our lives. While Facebook tries to achieve full inclusion of its users under their real names, Distant Shore’s design is just as utopian, but takes an entirely different route. There, the high-profile, involved communication scheme of mixed up privacy and business agency, here the ultimate laissez-faire of an empty beach. In an endless summer, you walk the endless shores, collecting shells and the occasional message in a bottle from the sand. Messages do not contain any information about their sender, and one’s answer is transmitted in the same anonymity. Five collected sea shells earn one sending of a message by throwing a bottle into the water. But it is still a web, for answers will indeed reach the correct recipient.

Distant shore is an experience of complexity, stripped down to a relaxing core. You can ask everyday or philosophical questions, without involvement and virtually “no strings attached”. The form of communication offered by Distant Shore might just be the right way to spend a mellow night after a long hard day over at Facebook.
Distant Shore

Interview: Takeshi Nishimoto

I recently had the opportunity to interview Takeshi Nishimoto, a great musician and good friend, here in Berlin. His specialty is the seven-string guitar, which he plays with mastery both in the context of electronic projects such as I’m Not A Gun (with John Tejada), as well as with his solo setup.
Full interview

Free pays off for Nine Inch Nails

 

Image courtesy Nine Inch Nails

Nine Inch Nails’ four-part album “Ghosts I-IV” took the crown in Amazon’s 2008 sales ranking for mp3 albums. Taking into account that Amazon’s mp3 store positioned itself against iTunes in terms of revenue, this placement would mean a considerable earning on the band’s side. What makes this interesting is the fact that the very same album was released for free under a Creative Commons license directly from the band’s website. However, people chose to pay for this album. This may seem special, but considering basically all music is still available for free illegally, the same could be said for almost every sale of an mp3 album. People choose to pay because they value the artistic work and the convenience offered by second-generation online stores like Amazon and Beatport. DRM-free offerings may play a significant role in this.

Nine Inch Nails apparently understood this and took the straight approach: Don’t make free downloads illegal; those downloaders are still your fans, and they may well pay for a concert. Maybe because they were given the free option, so many people felt enticed to pay for the download in the end.
Via Chris Anderson’s Long Tail Blog

2009: The Year of Music Releases in App Stores?

As the “music only release” business model becomes more and more unattractive, especially when a physical medium is involved, the year 2009 may bring a lot of success stories around interactive releases that are not seen as mere “records”, but rather as games or applications. There are two main reasons why such concepts may play a bigger role in the future of releasing music:

- New distribution concepts for regular album releases are great if you already have a big name. Then, you can custom-tailor your release strategy to fit the needs of your project and your fans, while receiving a lot of attention from the public and press on the way. This worked well for Radiohead and Nine Inch Nails, but would probably not help an unknown producer in Kreuzberg get her name out.

- The app store concept goes hand in hand with the proliferation of ever more powerful, yet more or less closed systems. The ways to get new software onto any regular PC are so diversified, an app store for Windows Vista or Mac OS probably doesn’t have much impact in terms of revenue. However, on platforms that are either closed entirely, like most game consoles or an un-jailbroken iPhone, or that focus on convenience in getting new software onto the device, app stores will likely be the main portals you turn to for new software. And on these platforms, consumers are used to paying money for products. That’s one of the main reasons why they’re so attractive for music releases. Here, control is possible and its exertion doesn’t even bother the end consumers.

There are two sides to this story, really. On the one hand, any system that will help musicians pay their rent (not get insanely rich) with their artistic work should be welcomed, especially in these recessionary times. At the same time, though, we should worry when whole new macro-economies build around a technological platform that is controlled by one company – such as Apple, Sony, RIM, and Nokia, to name only a few. The way to go would be an open standard, a cross-platform application format that would be accepted in the app stores for mobile phones, game consoles, and netbooks alike.

Conference: Modernity 2.0

Photo by Zyance, CC Share Alike

June 29 – July 3, Urbino, Italy. This is the 9th International Conference on Sociocybernetics, themed “Modernity 2.0: Emerging Social Media Technologies and Their Impacts”. From the Call for Papers:

In recent years, the Internet and other information and communication technologies have had great impacts on almost all aspects of human life, locally and globally. The extant of these impacts can be seen in the ubiquity of the use of the prefix ‘e-’, as in e-commerce, e-business, e-government, e-democracy, e-science, e-learning, e-entertainment and so on. Thanks to the cheaper prices and ease of use of these technologies, more and more people are able to access digital contents, as part of a mass audience, and more and more people are able to create and publish content off their own initiative. The Web has moved from being a one-way communication channel extending traditional media, to a complex “peer-to-peer” communication space with a blurred author/audience distinction and new ways to create, share and use knowledge in a social way. This establishes new global fora, started by a few, and sustained by millions of local acts. This change of paradigm is currently profoundly transforming most areas of our lives: our interactions with other people, our relationships, ways of gathering, creating and disseminating information, ways of developing social norms, opinions, attitudes and even legal aspects as well as ways of working and doing business. It also raises a strong need for theoretical, empirical and applied studies related to how people may interact on the Web, how they actually do so and what new possibilities and challenges are emerging in the individual, business and technology dimensions. It is not the first time in the history of social media that a new technology becomes suddenly available to a wider group of people due to a specific social, economical and historical context.

Possible topics should include, but are not limited to:

* Local issues with respect to a particular geographical region, political entity or cultural or ethnic group;
* Global issues affecting all mankind in the 21st century;
* Emerging technologies and the link between the micro and macro levels of individual actors and social institutions, respectively;
* Social systems and economic models of the web;
* Y Generation and participation on the web (politics, business and entertainment);
* Culture, knowledge and social impact of the Semantic web;
* e-Social Science;
* Cyberculture, knowledge and local communities;
* Teaching the digital natives in networked space;
* The public/private distinction on the Internet;
* Cybernetics and Web Science;
* Social capital in social network sites (SNSs).

This should bring together some highly interesting contributions, and the location is perfect for extensive work on the narrative of modernity in the computer network age.
Conference website

The Eastern Spree Banks: A Berlin Heterotopy II

Photo by Bar 25

The banks of the river Spree in the Eastern part of Berlin are home to a diversity of clubs, music venues, art projects, and cultural practice in general. The activity in this area contributed a lot to equip Berlin with the identity it now enjoys as a global hotspot for new developments in electronic music and contemporary art.

Come 2009, the grounding for all this is in danger of being erased as the major development plan called “Mediaspree” will be enforced. Bulldozers will tear down locations like the world-famous Bar 25 if nothing happens. And a lot has already happened. A referendum was held in the districts affected by the development plan, and the vast majority cast their vote renouncing the execution of the plan. However, this did not have any legal implications for the Berlin Senate, and they are determined to go ahead with the destruction of this cultural heterotopy in the middle of Germany’s capital.

There is another online petition to save Bar 25, but there’s no reason to believe this will have a bigger impact on the decision makers than the huge public referendum.

Ironically, Berlin’s apparent attractiveness to investors in the media business is largely owed to the work that was done and the things that happened in the very area now bound to be torn down.
Check out and/or sign the petition here

The Creative “Pro”

In software for creative media production, a re-definition process is gaining momentum that was originally started by Apple’s consolidation of their top-line creative software as the “Pro” line. But what does “Pro” stand for in an economy that is on the way of making the old definition of professionalism obsolete. Professional instruments are traditionally those you can bet your life on. Transferred to the creative media industry, that makes professional instruments those that one uses to earn a living. But there’s no clear divide any more, as electronic musicians use products that used to be considered as un-professional to make a (good) living with music, while an army of amateurs invests in “Pro” products, thus funding their development in the first place.

So, as the hard, essential definition of professionalism doesn’t seem to hold in this realm, the “Pro” in so many software products seems to signify something else: The image of the straightforward, no-frills professional, the one that “gets things done” with just the right tools for the job. With an abundance of complex creative tools at hand, a demand is created for straightening out the creative process, for something to help actually finish a project – just like the glorified “professional”. Maybe that dream is what so many of us buy in a “Pro” product.

Finally: Build standalone applications in Pd

At last, a long-awaited feature surfaced in the latest releases of the ‘extended’ version of Pure Data (Pd), the open source programming environment that’s a close cousin of Max/MSP: Exporting patches as standalone applications.

Sure, this was possible before if you knew how to compile the necessary files and write your own scripts, but now, at least on Mac OS, it’s as easy as the push of a button. And I’m sure that will make a big, big difference for a lot of Pd builders. Hopefully, we’re going to see more and more Pd-based applications appear, that people without any experience in Pd can use straight out of the box.

It’s unclear when this feature will be available in the Linux and Windows versions of Pd, but if you’re on a Mac, just download the latest Pd autobuild.

Quantizing MySpace: The Online Musician’s Currency

Whenever certain qualitative criteria for the assessment of a product or a service are not enough to justify (or determine) its value, generalizations occur. This becomes blatantly clear in the way numbers on MySpace pages are being observed. Right now, MySpace is the most important source of information among industry artist managers, bookers, and music journalists. There are essentially three important numbers these people look for, and their meaning has become very powerful. But what can they really tell us, taking into consideration how easy it is to manipulate any quantitative measure on the internet.

The first number one looks at when checking out a MySpace page is typically the count of Profile Views. Up until now, this has established itself as the single most important measure when it comes to getting something via a musician’s MySpace presence. This seems to link directly to the attention an artist is able to generate, and thus can be used to determine their value for a company or an event. It’s a generalized measure like a currency, because no qualitative assessments of the musician’s artistic qualities have to be taken into account in order to determine this very abstract “value”.

The state of this currency in the Indie scene at the moment: Everything less than 10,000 Profile Views: not worth bothering. Between 10k and 20k Profile Views: still poor, but may have the chance to grow. 20k – 40k Profile Views: the broad midrange. 40k – 60k: the upper midrange. 60k – 100k: pretty good for Indie measures. 100k – 200k: really good for non-mainstream. Above 200k: Already a big name.

These numbers and categories evolve, of course. Older profiles have an advantage simply because they’ve had more time to accumulate Profile Views. Therefore, it can pay to keep an eye on the development of Profile View numbers. A musician with 10,000 views getting 500 new people per day interested in his music may be more worthwhile to work with for a company than an artist in the 40k-60k range attracting only 15 new views per day. 

Thus, it’s also very interesting to see how often a new song the artist put on his MySpace page gets played right after deployment. But be careful: There are tools out there to manipulate this number. So don’t take it too seriously. Likewise, the number of friends (third number) an artist has are more a measure of his or her activity on MySpace than a real account of popularity. This is because many people don’t even check who exactly wants to be added as their friend, and again there are software tools out there that can automatically generate lists of people on MySpace you may want to add as friends, and you can then send them a mass mailing with an add request. Although not as manipulatable as the number of plays of a song, this does make it possible to have a huge number of “friends” on a profile that may have never heard the music. 

It is going to be interesting to see where MySpace is heading in the near future. If it wants to build on its status as a keeper of the Online Musician’s Currency, it will have to take measures against inflation – and deflation, of course, which may come with a lack of attention for the platform as a whole. Although this may not be about the music directly, generating generalized “value” doesn’t have to be a bad thing, even for an Indie musician. It allows to reach across artistic and cultural borders, and find out what’s “out there” that might be worthwhile to get in touch with.

GSB Script updated

In Coding Projects, I have published a link to the updated version 0.6.2 of the GSB Script. Standalone versions will run without installation on Mac OS (Intel/PPC) and Windows. This update adds a new method of building up form arrangements: Simply start the dialog and answer the questions regarding what you want where in the form. As soon as you have the arrangement, it can easily be saved as a script file for later editing. Any feedback on this is much appreciated!

Exhibition: Notation

September 20 – November 16 at the Akademie der Künste, Berlin; February 14 – July 29 at the ZKM, Karlsruhe. 

Can you really exhibit notation? Is not the “exhibitionist” notion one of creating a work, a piece, an artefact, something for others to look at that is complete as an example of art? If so, then notation is limited to providing a process to create art, but never to be art. Interestingly enough, artists of many times have felt the need to incorporate their creative process into the final pieces. This is one of the main aspects I see in the current exhibition at the AdK. However, this poses a new question: If notation is indeed not limited to providing a process without ever being art itself, then how do we separate notation and final piece? Do we have to?

Apparently the answer is yes, otherwise nobody would come up with an exhibition about notation. So do we see notation in art not as art but as something outside of art entering into the realm of art (but retaining its distinctive difference)? Although this exhibition certainly did not give me the definition of what notation is, it did help reformulating those questions.
More information

Quantitative Assessment of Qualitative Problems

As we apply qualitative assessments in our descriptions of our roles in relationships and organizations, how much do we know about where those categories we apply stem from? What brings definitions of good and bad or efficient and unefficient into being? In an organization that tries to survive in the marketplace, the answer is likely quantitative. Concrete numbers will work as measures that can be tested against goals, and the evaluation of a situation will often use actual measurements to gain a qualitative outcome.

But what if the goals are not so easily identifiable as mere numeric values? What if they are of qualitative nature themselves? And, couldn’t we also identify a qualitative goal behind every desired quantitative outcome? Maybe it could be helpful to try to actually count situations that seem to lead towards a certain goal – qualitative or quantitative as it may be – and from there derive a strictly qualitative assessment of the general proposition towards this outcome. In a way, the counting of micro-situations could lead to a grounded assessment of the macro-situation with regard to a certain direction in which it is desired to develop.

This brings up questions about how we want to deal with those numbers. Where do the values we use as thresholds to gain qualitative statements (such as good or bad) come from? Are we at the beginning of the loop again? Quite the opposite, I would assert, as we now have gained access to a valuation order on another level, a level we would normally not be able to observe. And that is a qualitative value in itself.

Conference: Relational Sociology

September 25-26, 2008, Humboldt University Berlin. Starting tomorrow, the Humboldt University will host a conference centered around the relational approach to sociology as developed by Harrison C. White. The conference will offer an interesting mixture of papers, providing links to Systems Theory and other ideas in network theory. All abstracts are online.
Conference website 

Interview/Feature: Radiohead

When Radiohead stopped by in Berlin on their world tour, I had the great opportunity to get up close and personal with their stage setup. Their really nice keyboard tech Russ Russell showed me around all the details, including the cleverly devised backline (with lots of Native Instruments software) and the astonishingly experimental Max/MSP / synthesizer station at the stage center. One other aspect I wish I would have had the time to check out in detail is the light system. It’s built using the most advanced LED technology, and it runs entirely off a battery they keep in a truck behind the stage. According to the technicians, this is the most energy-efficient way to run a stadium-sized lighting system so far, and they plan to proliferate the technology to other eco-conscious bands as well.
Full interview
More information on the lighting system

New coding project: GSB Script

On the coding page, a new project written in Max/MSP is now online. It is designed to make the work with concatenated distinctions as described in George Spencer Brown’s “Laws of Form” more convenient by automatically generating visual arrangements from a simple script. The program is available as standalone application for both Windows and Mac OS platforms.

New Abstract: Re-Synthesizing Theory

The program of the conference “The Methodologies of the System” is now online at the homepage of the Arbeitskreis Funktionale Analyse. I will present some ideas on empirical research methodologies using a mixture of network representations and Spencer Brown expressions. The full abstract for my contribution is on the “Articles” page.

Share a book: Reading experience on Scribd

Reading a document inside the frame of a website may seem redundant, but an elegant implementation can give back some of the gratification we find in experiencing a book in our hands. A good example, at least as far as technical realization is concerned, is Scribd.com and their incredibly slick iPaper viewer. This takes in all types of documents we deal with in our software offices all day, and transforms them into an interactive flash movie. Now, the frame inside the frame turns into a full-fledged playground in its own right as the viewer allows for fullscreen display, text search, and a zooming and scrolling behavior that feels much more rounded off than my desktop pdf reader. So this is immersion at its best on the web: The inner frame seems to escape its framing website, the captured document feels more flexible than its original version. But not all is good in Scribd-land, as the company exhibits its corporate nature via control efforts against too much liberty in dealing with documents. For example, outbound links are no longer allowed inside the viewer. Well, with this in mind, let’s turn to one of my favorite finds: The Tibetan Language for Beginners

Update: As Jared from Scribd has pointed out in his comment to this post, outbound links are once again allowed in iPaper, but there seem to be technical difficulties in the Pdf conversion that sometimes still prevent links from showing up correctly.

Interview: Vince Clarke

Photo courtesy Vince Clarke

As founding member of Depeche Mode, Yazoo, and Erasure, Vince Clarke has left a distinctive mark in the history of synth-made pop music. In the interview, he explains his take on songwriting, and why self-restraint is important when you have one of the largest collections of analog synthesizers at your disposal. What really got me hooked was his use of the early computer-based UMI sequencer (running on an educational computer designed by the BBC) well through the nineties, then immediately switching to Max/MSP and Reaktor.
Full interview

Michel Waisvisz 1949-2008

It filled me with great sadness today to learn of the death of Michel Waisvisz, the long-time director and inspirational head of STEIM. Though not unexpected, his death leaves a void that hurts just as much. My thoughts are with his family.

Michel was a rare encounter, incredibly inspirational in a very encouraging way. He chose to work as a sound artist, but his ideas could have filled book after book just as well. I feel lucky to have crossed his path, and I know many (including myself) who will keep his thoughts and ideas alive in their work. Rest in peace, Michel.

STEIM condolence page | Crackle.org

M_nus Sunday Adventure Club: A Berlin Heterotopy

Richie Hawtin’s M_nus label are usually wizards when it comes to the creation of a coherent identity for an event or any other type of activity. This is mostly achieved through a good communications concept and brilliant web design. Thus, it came as no surprise that the website for yesterday’s Sunday Adventure Club was rich with signifyers towards the intended identity: A pirate’s bay of minimal techno, with Berlin as its island base and other parts of Europe as free-floating islands in a sea of irrelevant rurality. Globalized local identities at their best.

With this in my head, I was stunned to see the venue mostly undecorated and without obvious connections to the symbolic language of the corresponding website. Instead, the Berlin-identity was back in the driver seat, with its diverse train system rolling right past the crowd, which itself was stuck in a recess between the tracks and an old-Berlin style clay wall. No, this was no island at all. Instead, what I saw and felt was a heterotopy, a venue separated from the regular Berlin, but deeply rooted in its symbolic topos. This was enriched and transformed by the international crowd and the improbability to see a Richie Hawtin set in (almost) full daylight. So, the best communications concept for the creation of an event’s identity is worth nothing after all, if it is not executed all the way through to the venue, where people would couple this identity with social inter(!)action. A great party nonetheless, this event did not convey the coherence I had expected from a brand as successful as M_nus.

Save STEIM

STEIM, the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music in Amsterdam, is in immediate danger of losing its governmental funding. The bottom line of the negative advise from the reviewers is that STEIM doesn’t appeal enough to the mainstream pop-music audience. Chasing ghosts of mass-media hype, the Dutch government is on the verge of shutting down an unparalleled institution for creative support, where I had the privilege to work on the projects “fello” and “noiseroom”, as well as to teach two Pd workshops with wonderful and inspiring participants.

For all the details on the current developments, please head over to STEIM’s website. Although time is running out, there’s still the possibility to send a letter of support.

Here’s an excerpt from my letter:

Both artistic work and technological research conducted at STEIM have influenced and benefited a large number of projects in a diversity of fields, such as academic and popular music, interactive media art, modern dance, instrument and performance theory, and the visual arts. Many of these projects have brought together participants from different countries and cultures, thanks to STEIM‘s unique ability to provide lodging, without which many projects could not have happened. Providing such support and thereby drawing in advanced projects from all over the world, STEIM serves as a beacon in the heart of Europe, bearing testimony to the open-mindedness and support of plurality that the Dutch culture is known for internationally.

Today more than ever, STEIM brings together artists from different fields and connects them with a global network of creative productivity. In the Open Studios at STEIM as well as in the guesthouse, both artistic and social exchange have found a safe haven that should be of high value to the Dutch people. STEIM is a place where well-known artists engage in experimental projects to advance their creative scope and broaden their technological as well as artistic repertoire. From my point of view as a German resident, the existence and the acceptance of STEIM, rooted in Amsterdam‘s local culture but decidedly international in its scope, is nothing but admirable.

STEIM homepage / Related posting on Createdigitalmusic.com

How long will quantitative assessment hold its lead in the marketing world?

As more and more people turn to online resources for everything from news to product reviews of all sorts, fresh marketing money pours into the realm of web-based publications. Although the absolute size of most budgets may not grow, but rather shrink (at least in the world’s benchmark market, the US), manufacturers of goods start to realize that the consumers aren’t necessarily where their ad money is. So they want to change the balance between online and offline spending. Problem is, how do they know where to go? In the society of the printing press, circulation numbers used to be the holy grail of marketing assessment. With magazines giving away more than half of their print run and two thirds of their paper paved with advertisement, the suspicion arose that quantitative data may not really have so much to say anymore.

In the online world, reader attention can theoretically be measured with great accuracy. Unique visits can be counted, and it is even possible to determine how long readers stayed on certain websites. Mighty tools such as compete.com and websitegrader.com do induce a feeling of power. However, it can only be a good sign that even these services warn you not to blindly trust their data. Combining data sources with qualitative research is what’s called for. The mere time a website is open in a browser window doesn’t tell you very much about the communication going on. The number of hits on a website can only vaguely hint at its relevance for certain target groups.

With this post, I want to kick off a series talking about possibilities to create a methodology for the integration of qualitative and quantitative analysis that could help find ways for better assessments while raising awareness for the complexity of the matter.

Conference: The Methodologies of the System

September 4-6, 2008, at the University of Hohenheim. The main focus will be on the combination of empirical research methods and the evolution of sociological systems theory. From the Call for Papers:

“It has been researched about most social phenomena as well as they have been described from the perspective of systems theory – and yet those two areas of sociology, systems theory and empirical research remained mainly ignorant towards each other. General reproaches of theoretical or empirical blindness too often collide. This leaves important potentials unused. The theory-based development of empirical methods as well as the empirical richness of social theory – especially this of systems theory – and thus the contribution of sociology to current problems of society have to rely on the bridge of methodology. Therefore the conference aims at pushing forward the dialogue between systems theoretical conception and empirical observation by broadening and deepening it.”

So, the University of Hohenheim sounds like an interesting place to be in the first week of September. Find out more at the Study Group Functional Analysis.
Download the Call for Papers

Pd & GEM workshop: blog online

A separate blog dedicated to the Pd&GEM workshop at STEIM/Amsterdam is now online. I will use it to distribute class material and document what’s going on. Stay tuned for sounds & pictures!
Go to mypdclass.wordpress.com

Interview: Speedy J

Image courtesy Umfeld

Besides producing and performing music for dancefloors all over Europe, Speedy J also likes to cross over into more abstract realms of multimedia art. His recent project Umfeld.TV is a great example of the creative possibilities of up-to-date musique concrète and surround composition after the novelty factor of the technology has worn out. On his website, the full DVD image is freely downloadable under CC license.
Full interview

Conference: Hyperkult 17

July 3-5, 2008. Annual workshop “The Computer as Medium”. This year, the focus will be on the new orders of knowledge that emerge as computers permeate cultural practice. What is the meaning of order today (security?), and who can control it? What are the new rules and structures of knowledge brought to order? Discuss!
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Publication: ZKM next_generation 2007

ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe) has published the full proceedings of this year’s next_generation conference, titled “Musik im Raum”. My contribution on spatial configurations of media music has been available in this Journal before, but now you can get it with the full context of other interesting articles.
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Pingipung counts down to Christmas

The good folks over at Pingipung Records have a nice Christmas calendar countdown-website this year. In association with Halle für Kunst, Lüneburg, they gathered 24 of their artists (including yours truly) to produce short pieces of music for the days before Christmas. Many of these miniatures turned out to be quite usable as ringtones. If you’re not down with the regular bells and whistles of Christmas sounds, this might just be your type of carol!
The calendar

Workshop: Pure Data & GEM

From April 7 – 10, 2008, I will give a workshop on Pure Data and the GEM extension library for visualization at STEIM in Amsterdam. The workshop will cover aspects of instrument design for composition and live performance as well as the creation of custom visual user interfaces.
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Interview: Von Südenfed

I recently had the opportunity to interview Jan St. Werner of Mouse On Mars and Von Südenfed (the collaboration with The Falls’s Mark E. Smith). The result is a comprehensive insight into Jan’s working strategies and an interesting view on his music and his concept of musical instruments.
Full interview

New Article: Networked Organizations of Music Cultures

The written version of my lecture at this year’s Netaudio Festival in Berlin is now available for download in the Articles & Lectures section. A podcast version of all lectures will be available on the festival’s homepage soon.

Interview: Bugz In The Attic

I recently got to interview Daz-I-Kue, founding member of London’s Bugz In The Attic crew. Although I woke him up for the chat, Daz was happy to share his personal history in music and his views on sound generators and creative collaboration.
Full interview

New Article: Musical Interfaces

In the Articles & Lectures section, I have posted a documentation of 10 student projects from the FH Potsdam college. All interface-design majors, they investigate innovative ways to exert musical control. Some of the projects are shown at this year’s Ars Electronica Campus.

The magic 10

Whatever it was with this year 1997, something must have been special about it. Not in world politics, but in the homey world of the German Electronica (as it was still called then) scene. Somehow, social dynamics must have reached a point in 1997 that drove many of its protagonists to turn institutional. First shouts go out to De-Bug Magazine, of course. They are joined in their celebration by labels Sonig, Karaoke Kalk, Shitkatapult, and Sonar Kollektiv, to name a few. Coincidentally (??), two of my institutional backgrounds were founded around that time as well, with Native Instruments already having celebrated their 10th anniversary in 2006. But the Project ((audio)) at the University of Lueneburg can also claim the magic 1997 as its founding year. A great example of social dynamics – involving technology such as mp3 – building up to a point where an institutionalized organization of cultural practice “suddenly” seems to make perfect sense.

Interview: Placebo

On behalf of Native Instruments, the major German manufacturer of software musical instruments, I get to interview artists about how they use the computer to pursue their form of cultural practice. Recently, I interviewed Bill Lloyd, live band member and sound designer of Placebo.
Full interview

Album: Laura Palmer – Background

The good folks over at the netlabel Thinner have a great new release. Laura Palmer’s “Background” exemplifies what the overused term ambient house can still signify today. The background is indeed the key in this album. It holds all the minimal microrhythms which essentially make the bassdrum feel refreshingly unessential. Download the album here.

Conference: netaudio Berlin 2007

October 5-7, 2007. The yearly netaudio festival has been established as a focus point for the international online music scene. The gathering combines performances with discussions and lectures. This year, the festival comes to Berlin, home to many netlabels and a hub for international online music infrastructure. My contribution will be a lecture on networked organizational strategies in an environment as uncertain as today’s music cultures.
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Microeconomy, Berlin-style

In a microeconomic experiment, unemployed inhabitants of the area around Kottbusser Tor, Berlin, were given the chance to develop concepts for unused decks of a massive parking garage. The top deck was used for agriculture, while the deck below it had a mixture of grocery vendors and small repair shops. A group of illustrators creating custom comic strips on demand seemed to draw the most customers. All in all, the atmosphere was not much different from a pre-Christmas bazar in any given old-folks home, though. Good will was showing, but there was no emergence of new socio-economic practice in the air. The problem with such microeconomic experiments: If you still use money as medium of success, you reference the entire socio-economic complexity of today’s society. Not a good start for an escapist experiment. Read more on the project page (in German language).

Computers and music culture: last.fm’s local strategy

The grassroots approach of last.fm already proves extremely powerful in regulating our access to music at our desk. But one more important connection has been made in last.fm: The pooling of global links with local interaction. Based on your taste profile, you get recommendations for concerts in your neighborhood. Thus, last.fm provides a viable structure, making links in communication between global and local possible that used to require complex promotion embedded in the roots of the local music scene. The selection appears as contingency, but is that really true for everyone? Make no mistake: Last.fm may look grassrootsy, but it is already an institution of social power.

Conference: Hyperkult 16 at University of Lüneburg

July 12-14, 2007. Annual workshop “The Computer as a Medium”. This year’s focus is on the histories, visions, and phantasms of computers in the society.
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