which has turned out not to be very brief, so...
The thought started with a lot of trouble. I switched from writing a program (that wasn't working) to a poem (that wasn't working) to relief when Peter said "I kind of like how they did this." He then described a study in which researchers experiment with various ways of describing browser security risks to students who get fake points for fake trips to the Bahamas for doing well on fake tests at the university trying this out. (Thinking about it now, you really had to be there/here @ 4:30 AM...)
"This reminds me, Peter, passwords, I've been thinking about passwords, open-source passwords." (This by the way, is not the thought.)
Peter replied, "If you have open source passwords that sort of eliminates the need for passwords. I mean, having passwords implies that you are keeping something from someone." He then mentioned the sites that have keygens or lists of passwords for software. I happen to have been to those sites many times out of purely academic interest.
But what I was thinking about was more like communities formed by people who are simply stuck together with the same password, something like Survivor in cyberspace. They will trace out each other's lives through these portals. Reality internet. Please don't stop reading. He had a really good point, though, about limiting access to the password before it lost all semblance of password-idity. After all I think the idea of gaining access to a "password" or a string of them associated with a specific person is going to be a major draw to these communities.
The main reason I was thinking about this was the type-in-a-word-and-pictures-from-amazon-form-it website that came up in the last class. I find the site rather inspiring and it gave me the urge to throw open the doors... not just to some new funky combination, but to a kind wild intelligence that seemed to be crying out to me from the page. Just to make sure I wasn't hearing things, I showed the page to Rares Trocan.... we tend have similar reactions on when it comes to creativity and we happily watched various words form on the screen for a while. BTW I consider this highly productive. We both agreed there was something buried in this that is far too rare. Which is why I started thinking about passwords as symbols of the digital era yet also a real pain to keep track of when any form of storage is inherently counterproductive i.e. insecure. So, my thought was to embrace the counter productivity, make it art, make it alive... hence open source community passwords... (this is also not the thought, though at the time I thought it could be.)
The following page or so is from Peter... there large parts of what he wrote that surprised me, because it's not what I thought we were talking about. Then again that does jive with my idea about emerging global blogsciousness in which meaning is produced by streams of information as opposed to determined by them.... that I think pops up here at some point.....
"Mysteriously enough, we went to behaviors and podcasting. Here was my idea. Since ancient times, historians have had more and more sources they can work with. In ancient and medieval times, the only historical documents were produced by wealthy people (who had nothing else to do, so they could learn how to read and write), most often from the court of the current ruler or dominant people (because the whole writing process was incredibly slow and expensive and needed a patron). With time, historians had access to more and more documents until, in the last two centuries, they even use interviews with common people as historical documents to study patterns in local communities, etc.
So, how about a podcast? Could a podcast one day be used as a historical document? Hm...I guess only the future will tell us that.
Another interesting aspect of podcasting -- how far can it go? Hugh is recording his own voice, so that he can capture and share ideas that come and go through his mind. People make blogs so they can record places they have been and things they have seen (and can never just seem to find afterwards).
How about behavior? Can you podcast behavior? Let"s say I find a person that I really like and have common ideas with. Can I view his browsing history, or at least a part of it that he has agreed to share with similarly-thinking people"
This is where Chris' idea about open-source passwords and virtual communities kicks in. Let"s say that I am willing to give access to some of my "behavior patterns" (e.g. browsing behavior) to people who think the same way that I do. What do I do to give them access to these "behavior records." How" I have an open-source password. (Shared password is really the better word to use here, I think)
So what kinds of behavior can I share with other people" Well, let's say there is a program that takes a screenshot of your monitor every half a second, builds an animation and then shares this animation as a podcast. This could have very practical purposes actually. I want to find out how to draw a simple line in Adobe Photoshop (which turns out to be more complicated than it sounds). I go online, open a pod cast of somebody working in Photoshop and there it is! This also has many less practical purposes " for example, to reflect the general behavior of somebody. The more time people are spending online these days, the more there behavior shows in the way they spend their time online.
Also, let's imagine there was a way to capture the process of music making in an image/sound representation. In a way, you capture and share with other people your own creative processes. They can observe these creative processes and maybe build on them. You can have a "podcast", which shows how you made a piece of music. Somebody else can take this podcast, repeat the same things and modify any steps that he thinks he can do in another way. By sharing our creative processes and getting feedback, can we improve them by incorporating other people's ideas?
Going back to the idea of the podcast as a historical document. Could the future historians use all these "behavior records" as yet additional types of historical documents available to them" If behavior and creativity can develop and change, should we keep a history of them?
Me again. "I wish we had a microphone so we could record this and send it to Hugh." Peter had just delivered an incredibly lucid expose of "my" idea of reality composed of streams of information as opposed to nodes of information. Now it turns out he thought it was something else. Oddly, or maybe not, my next consideration about encapsulating creativity still hooks up to this.
"I'm a lot more open in this course than I am in other classes." Usually I carry on my private debates, but I don't air them for various reasons. This class is at least one layer closer to what's really going on. So while... "It's an incredible thought that you could convey pure medium-free creativity through a web-medium, there are things in my life, and in everyone's, about which you could write pages and not have said anything, because it's simply experiential."
"What's strange is that we are always trying to deliver experience in the form of books or whatever and we see creativity as some ephemeral quality. Ultimately pure experience may be more difficult to transmit that creativity unless you're in the Matrix and "know kung-fu."
We said the last part of that sentence more or less together.
What does this have to do with music? Well, a bit later on Peter and I both start thinking about creativity and risk and opportunity... in music, so hold that though. In a more direct sense, I was prompted to think about this mass because of Hugh's request for a "What is it all about" response and being automatically disgusted with anything I came up with and wanting to be more like the person who designed the amazon-word-search site.
Even if I do come up with something as cool as that for a final project or a response, on some level at least the didactic point behind the question is to show how much you don't know, how little you can say. Which is itself an excellent bit of knowledge, but a little too cute when I do really want an answer. So I thought I could examine the underlying process of creation as it extends to music (communities/life) that come out of specific traditions (passwords) with a certain tool: this thing, this record of our conversation. Guess what?
I don't know. That is the thought.
At least it's a bit more legitimate now, not just a vacuous reply. My attempt to address the thought is the thing we've typed here, that might be a kind of self-descriptive backbone. Remix of a remix, now history of a history of the future. Hence the honest wandering style. I have to write this way if there's even a chance for an answer. Someone may follow our path and find music or laugh at us, or never get this far. It doesn't matter. We are the stream. Just talked to Peter: "Nobody is going to read this except Hugh." C: "It's okay, I'm not even writing it for him." We are what music is all about. Music is not about a whole bunch of things. It's about where individual people(s) go, in our minds and our hearts and our persons. It's me hauling around speakers. And just because I've given a definition that's too general and too specific doesn't mean I claim to know what music is all about. Okay, I should stop and ask Peter what he thinks of this. And while he was typing, I was thinking about what the journey I mentioned actually is. The journey is uncertain. On this journey music is the steady creak -- the one that I can never fix -- that my foot taps out on the treadle of my potter's wheel, which marks off each wobbling or splattered or sacrificed or beautiful creation or me when I'm lost in the task.
Someone in the future, someone who knows what music is, reads this and shakes their head. And moves on.
Funny, even what was going to be the last line of this piece (above) came from somewhere specific, with a whole history behind it, now that I think about it... and so it's not the last word, it never stops, if you could ever really wish for that. Perhaps it is better to remain uncertain with this haunting piece/peace of music in my ears. I do not know.
PS This posting is officially copy down.
"And a few more word from me now. What is it all about indeed? Well, let me complete A loop (A loop as opposed to THE loop) and go back to the beginning of this class: we are the music that we are listening to. Chris says: "music is all about us." And we are all about music.
Keeping my habit of intertwining things to infinity, let me tie this back to the previous idea of historical documents and creativity. Music is obviously a creative work. What"s more, we can view music as a HISTORICAL DOCUMENT OF CREATIVITY. Centuries ago somebody was creative enough to use a different instrument or a different technique. How do we keep history about that" We preserve the music, preserve the music traditions, build upon that piece of creativity in order to see it from multiple aspects...
Music is indeed a phenomena " it carries traditions and past creativity, but it is also found in a very complex web of cultures and ethnicities. Music never seems to stop evolving. The Yoshida Brothers" wandering into styles like hip-hop and Caribbean music with an instrument as traditional as the shamisen confirmed that yet one more time. Music is all about both continuity and change at the same time " just what our own human nature seems to be a lot about. After all, we and our musics very similar in a lot of aspects.
Posted by gaiteric at March 28, 2005 07:26 AM