So, here’s mNotation™, the new Flash version of my ancient, beautifully irrelevant random music notation generator (the former Miss Web Symphony™).

You’re welcome to use it in your next show, with just an obligatory shout-out to its author (i.e., . . . how about a direct link to meme™ on iTunes?). And mNotation™ plays well with others!

The Bad Mind Time™ Digital Symphonies are now out there, in the ether.

What it is: a 12+ hour archive of digital music and audio experiments I made between 1991 and 2005. What it is not: probably, uhm, listenable. But maybe there’s material there for those who speculate in theories and meanings, and the parsing of popular and arcane aspects of digital sound organized under the big circus tent of improvisation and experiment.

Like the audio version of watching sausage being made, or witnessing a car crash, it’s both revolting and compelling. And now it’s out there, released into the world! Yikes!

It’s time for another gig by meme™—media experimental ensemble. Join us at the next Auteur Explosion, at Cinema Paradiso in Ft. Lauderdale, on 21 November, 2009. meme™ takes the stage around 11:45 (bands, a play, and a bellydancer before; local films after).

What’s new this time is that you can buy the official meme™ t-shirt. Wear it proudly!

Finally finished my little paper Experimental Media: Subversive and Syncretic Practices (2009) (in a neat .pdf version designed by Graphic artist and designer Asma Nazim, or as a boring Word document version) (yes, I know, it has that ivory-towery ring to it) for the ICERI Conference, in Madrid, which I won’t be attending (that’s why it’s a ‘virtual presentation’). Boo hoo. And while the paper will not go down in history, at least I was able to, uhm, finish it on time. And catch most of the typos (tricky, because the conference template had some un-doable Spanish spellchecker in it, so most of my English was flagged red).

OK, so once in a while I put something out there just to see if anybody’s out there. Here it is:

So, the question is, is anyone out there? Don’t bother commenting, I know that’s too much work. Just hit this page. Yay!

OK, and while you’re at it, you might as well dive into the bottomless pit which is SkyRon™’s dreemwerld™, in an interactive form, here.

And yes, once in a while one gets the response from the ether that makes it all worthwhile:

“skyron is the shit how do i git trans mishunz when where an how i want it, and uprite citizen an dang skyron u be makin to much music cant even keep up AWESOME SHIT u da man” – - digs89.

Here we go, folks:  the latest incarnation of the (post-) Post Modern Choir* whooping it up in a YouTube video wall, and also appearing in Jennifer Jacob’s lovely YouDisco video ball. Big thanks to the fine batch of students from this summer’s Practicum and DIS  courses who participated!

And here’s one trick for turning a consumer/pop culture artifact (like YouTube or an iPod) into an avant-garde platform is harnessing the power of multiple channels: upload a lot of individual videos where only one thing (or one note) happens, then find your own way of mixing everything together. But you gotta break things down by function, or else the end result will be . . . boring. More on this a little later—it’s a little too book-premise-y for a blog.

You might also think of this piece as a mash-up between a Warhol-esque screen test and a Ligeti-inspired pitch cluster. That particular realization came after I finished it, though.

OK, now you can go to iTunes and get some of the tracks from the first meme™ show—sorta. You’ll need to go to FAU iTunesU (which is not yet a searchable part of iTunes proper), and scroll down to the bottom. 

It’s rather sparse right now, with only two short video segments and two long audio tracks (the EarFilms—which I invite you to use as soundtracks for viewing your life as cinema, with apologies to Ken Nordine’s Word Jazz—but if you know what that is you’ve gotta be in your late 40s). Anyway, enjoy!

Thunder, Perfect Mind.

It was 1984, and Mr. Jackson (requiescat in pace) was selling 28 million records and enthralling the world. Me? I was working on a completely unperformable and mostly forgettable chamber opera (sound chaser/soul chaser), which at least had one shiny moment: the final part, a nine-minute piece for 15 performers bowing 3 grand pianos in Thunder, Perfect Mind.

Sure, the technique had been around since Curtis Curtis-Smith, and Stephen Scott had recently resurrected the idea and formed an ensemble around it. So, I joined in the fray with this work. The score is above, and here’s an mp3 of the performance, (from the only live performance of the chamber opera, at University of Wisconsin, February 14, 1986) and an ancient newspaper article. Excerpts from the video are on the Bad Mind Time™ Ultra DVD. And, amazingly, that excerpt will be included in the 2009 Brainwash Film Festival (July 31- Aug. 1, Oakland, CA).

And the title? The most fantastic title there ever has been, but it’s not mine, originally. It’s from a 3rd century Coptic poem by the same name, a litany of contradictory attributes spoken by a female diety (this from the Nag Hamadi Codex).

My most recent gig as visualist—appearing with my students under the name meme™ (media experimental ensemble)—raises this question for me: Is the visualist creating the literature of visualism?

My immediate response is, no, I don’t seem to see much of this craft being written down, or transcribed, or notated. There are, of course, performances captured on video, so there is certainly that record. But like performance art of the 1980’s, visualism is being practiced, but perhaps not always documented through notation, and a part of this emerging symbolic form will be lost, or —more to the point— not be saved in a form that invites future visualists to recreate it.

There is value to creating a notation system. Sure, music notation has served the Western world for a bit more than a thousand years (with a number of important modifications along the way, of course). Dance notation has been less pervasive—Laban method notation is taught at many universities, but most choreographers rely on a video record for preserving the basic steps and the nuance of their dance.

If much visualism is improvisatory, then, like jazz (remember that?), we might use notation on a need-to-know basis, sketching out the vocabulary, and the parameters within which they can be tweaked. Important structural elements—and what’s structurally important might vary from artist to artist—are less maleable, perhaps, than ornamental, embellishing elements.

Maybe all this is too precious or too fussy. Maybe all we need to do is zip up our clips and soundtrack, add a few cryptic directions in the ‘Read Me’ file, upload it to a Creative-Commons-friendly repository like Archive.org, and say, ‘Have at it!’. After all, this might be a post-notation age (I recently played a video of Cage’s Third Construction for my students, who were amazed that every note was written down, because it sounded so improvised to them.). Still, wouldn’t you be interested to see what visualists fifty years from now will do with your material? 

- – - – - 

OK, so for my initial attempt at visualist notation, I’m borrowing from the long history of graphic notation via conceptual and experimental music. There may be an introductory page of instructions, plus a key or legend to translate the notation elements. The notation itself is just a set of visual references to the succession of events, mapped to a timeline.

One conceit I use, which might be the first thing to go once other visualists start investigating this, is an attempt to mimic the controller (the NuVJ), with two video banks on either side of the page, with effects and other global settings or instructions in the middle. The timeline becomes vertical, not horizontal, which I’m not too thrilled with, but again, I’m open to suggestions.

Download all my work files (in Adobe Illustrator and InDesign) here.

So, any thoughts on this?

meme™—mEDIA eXPERImENTAL eNSEMBLE—has its first gig, April 11, 2009, at Cinema Paradiso, Ft. Lauderdale, FL at 11:30 pm. The ensemble will showcase the talents of students from the FAU Advanced Interactive Multimedia Class, mixing live video, Quicktime clips, and Flash to a soundtrack that examines current events (human trafficking, Soldja Girl), dream imagery, and glossolalia. Videojams by Nina O, Masta Mia, and Frantz DeoFils.