2003.10.04
Geek Conceptual Art of the Moment
So Slashdot had a story about this program called Baudio (originally "Ka-Blamo") that trivially turns any file into a sound file. The point is, I guess there's some forms of legal protection that apply only to music...so with pieces like John Cage's 4'33" (four minutes and thirty three seconds of silence, or that long of ambient concert hall noise when performed live) out there in the canon, can now any random computer file get the same protection supposedly reserved for music, just by running it through this program? Anyway, Baudio's homepage has three examples of what it sounds like. (They aren't too bad but you may want to turn your speakers down just a tad.) The GIF is too short and staticy, the Photoshop PSD starts the same but gets cool in the end, but the BMP version sounds awesome. (It all has to do with how repetitive the images are internally, how they store the same data. GIF ties it up into as neat a bundle as possible, but with BMP you can practically feel each line as it comes up.)
Incidentally, there's been a similar technique used for a while by Atari programmers...there was this add-on for the Atari called a "Supercharger" that could load games from cassette tape, and there's a way of converting an Atari program into sound in a way that the Supercharger can understand it. Here's the file in the mp3 form, but it's really screechy and annoying. (And for the Atari Supercharger to 'hear' it through it's little wire, you have to turn up the volume...I hate it when forget to switch the wiring and it comes blasting out of my speakers...)
Subculture of the Moment
Wiggaz; white kids gone gangsta. With commentary along side.
Kiss of a Previous Moment
I was kind of wanting to see that infamous "open mouthed kiss" between Madonna (butch) and Britney Spears (fem) at the MTV Music Awards, forgot about it, but then found this page with the clip. Maybe I've seen too much stuff on the Internet and become a bit jaded, but I thought it was actually really boring.