Archive of 2006 July All

Bruno Latour interviewing Michel Serres

Submitted by nknouf on 26 July 2006 - 6:27am

M. Serres. Conversations on science, culture, and time / Michel Serres with Bruno Latour. University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Serres, in his discussions with Latour, uses sound, music, and musical instruments quite often to illustrate his points:

And something that’s even more interesting: Hermes is the one who invented the nine-stringed lyre. What is a musical instrument, if not a table on which one can compose a thousand languages, and as many melodies and chants? Its invention opens the way for an infinite number of inventions.

Narrative Intelligence Reading Group (1990-1996)

Submitted by nknouf on 22 July 2006 - 11:55pm

As I begin (along with Aaron Zinman) to create the framework for a new reading group at the Lab (tentatively titled In Situ ) that will offer cross-, multi-, and inter-disciplinary analysis of technology, I’m encouraged by a previous experience of this sort over 16 years ago entitled the “Narrative Intelligence Reading Group”. An account of their experiences was presented in a paper in 1999: A Brief Overview of the Narrative Intelligence Reading Group :

bq.

midiRecord: record an incoming MIDI stream to disk

Submitted by nknouf on 21 July 2006 - 3:06pm

I’ve had a relatively cheap Korg synthesizer sitting in my room for about a year now. Regularly I’ve thought about using it and its MIDI capabilities to explore various musical ideas by recording what I do to a MIDI file for later perusal or transcription. All I wanted to do was something simple: save the MIDI data that enter my iBook through my MIDI-USB cable to a MIDI file. No routing, no use of software synths, nothing like that: just save the data that I’m playing.

Media Commons: the impossibility of translation, among other things

Submitted by nknouf on 20 July 2006 - 2:44am

Via purse lip square jaw :

The Institute for the Future of the Book just launched a new project entitled Media Commons, an attempt to bring scholarly discourse into a “scholarly network” through development of new means for creating and reading scholarly works.

While I agree in principle with the desire to revamp the means of academic production, I have a number of worries, highlighted below.

bq.

beware the decibel...

Submitted by nknouf on 12 July 2006 - 8:05pm

(I posted the following to the microsound mailing list. I wish I could point you to the relevant thread, but the archives seem to stop around April of this year.)

... is how a public service announcement at my radio station begins.

(What follows is a rant/polemic; feel free to move on if not interested in those sorts of things. This is entirely separate from the recent myspace talk.

The Non-Mutability of Contracts

Submitted by nknouf on 5 July 2006 - 11:44pm

I’ve recently moved to a new location near Davis Square in Somerville, quite close to a number of my favourite haunts (Diesel Cafe (flash warning), Someday Cafe, and McIntyre and Moore (another flash warning, and for the main navigation as well!)). My new place apartment didn’t have network access, and for the first day or so it was okay, as there was an open wireless spot nearby.

Reading <em>Revolt, She Said</em>

Submitted by nknouf on 3 July 2006 - 4:41pm

It seems to be a commonplace these days that we self-consciously watch what we say, what we read, what we do when in public. A phrase that is innocuous in the company of our like-minded friends becomes potential jail fodder at an airport. Such was my perhaps-unwarranted concern when, during my extended travails in airports and airplanes across America last weekend, I was reading a book entitled Revolt, She Said , a collection of interviews with the critical theorist slash psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva.