Jai Paul

Over the weekend brown alts, brown twitter, everyone, converged on a single bandcamp. Jai Paul released his long awaited album, inexplicably for ₤7. The Likes were torrential – we wanted our devotion to his entirely unintentional promise of desipolitanism recognized, and in many ways rewarded. Best New Music! To the South Asian diaspora! [holi.gif]

Except he didn't. I think. It's hard to tell after Death Grips. I imagine it's a strange time for the public relations team at XL Records. 

To confirm: demos on bandcamp were not uploaded by me, this is not my debut album. Please don't buy. Statement to follow later. Thanks, Jai

— Jai Paul (@jai_paul) April 15, 2013

XXX

On occasion this blog is less a platform for well-constructed thoughts (lmaooo) and more a personal locker, a document of profound things I'd like to keep close-by. This is one of those times. As Anupa Mistry said the other day, it's hard to not make this personal.

Against The Waves

At the behest of a close friend, I got to visit BioShock Infinite over the weekend. He has a habit of adjusting all graphics to blast, and I have something worse, I think – the thirst for new worlds rendered in Ultra. (W/e you call the local maxima of visual fidelity.) In all, not a bad Sunday.

By conventional standards of beauty the game looks good – bloom, god rays, all the things we've come to expect in 2013 are neatly checked off. But this image is what I remember the most, a moment captured before setting foot on the fictional city of Columbia, before the game even begins.

No airships, no murder of crows, just a derelict boat rattling against the waves. (Click for the best.)

You Have Many Notes

“What becomes of art when the majority of those interacting with it don’t recognize it as such? What happens “after art”?”

— The Accidental Audience

This is the question Brad Troemel pursues in an essay for The New Inquiry: where does art go after its been reblogged to oblivion, that is, stripped of all context and origin, of provenance?  

So, tumblr.

“Reblogging thus has similarities to what sociologists call prosumption, the act of consuming and producing at the same time. For some, prosumption constitutes part of their artistic practice, though most typify this relationship with content as a way of curating.”

— The Accidental Audience

Using his own tumblr experiment as a case study – Jogging, a collective where googled images are assembled into works like WORLD BANK AND COPYRIGHT SYMBOLS APPEAR IN POTATO, 2012, because that's exactly what it is – Brad explains how art, albeit a specific kind, can thrive outside the physical gallery space.

“The difference between the Sunday museum tourist and the Tumblr user who sees an 11th generation reblog of an anonymized art image is a matter of intentionality: Despite the Sunday tourists’ so-called lack of rigorous intellectual engagement with the contemporary art show, they did intend to see some kind of art, and the museum guaranteed for them that that was what they were doing. The Tumblr viewer who sees an art-image-gone-viral on his friend’s kawaii-themed Tumblr may not be in the pursuit of art at all. Instead he is pursuing relevant content in the broadest possible sense, looking to reblog images he wants to associate himself with, and “like” content he finds somewhat less interesting.”

— The Accidental Audience

What's alarming is how his observations seem to comment on my own movements on the social network. Strategic reblogs, the generative art I’ve posted, and on that tip, the sliver of time I shot nudes that screamed off the tarmac towards reblogs unknown; to understand the accidental audience is to realize we're all exceptionally good at decoding modern images and positioning ourselves accordingly. This goes beyond pattern recognition, which we have on lock, and towards a kind of aesthetic computation of stock photography, blingee, and branded content, what Brad calls "the retinal jam" we expose ourselves to every day. 

I know the uncanny. You should know that I know.

grip tape HERB HOLDER, 2013 by Brad Troemel

On Immersion (Again)

My previous jab about immersion doesn't come lightly. This video essay by 10rdben87 – longtime readers might remember it from v1 of this blog – builds on a talk Uncharted developer Richard Lemarchand gave about the problematic qualities of the word. Ban immersion. Fire it towards the Sun.

Cosmology

I’ve been thinking about the words that bind my waking hours to video games. Immersion, interactivity, narrative logic – words that attempt to contain and perhaps give form to the sum of experiences found in a game. These words can be traps, as is the case with 'immersion' – how do you measure such a thing anyway? Often they're ill-equipped to capture what’s really at stake: We’re not trying to define how we feel when playing a game, but asking ourselves, our peers, how we should feel. 

Writing for Nightmare Mode, Line Hollis sharply unpacks how two games, Dear Esther and The Stanley Parable, address that question in terms of an entirely different lexicon – of cosmologies and nondeterministic universes and even (wait for it) fate.

“One of the ways people use the term “interactive” as in “more or less interactive” is to say: do my actions feel meaningful? Do they seem to determine outcomes in a way I can predict in advance and/or explain in retrospect? Esther doesn’t feel interactive to some players because actions don’t seem to do anything. A branching narrative like Stanley’s automatically feels more like “I’m doing something” just because the path can be traced backwards: I did this, then this happened, then I did this… and so on. Stanley’s use of clear thresholds, like doorways, stairs, and elevators, further marks its pieces of narrative as branching points. You cross a threshold, the rules change: this is a familiar metaphor. A game where those chains aren’t so easy to trace feels more like it’s pulling you along, which is part of the emotional arc of Esther. Out in the open space of the island, thresholds are harder to see and expect. Esther playthroughs technically exist in a bigger possibility space than Stanley’s, but it doesn’t feel that way for many players”

— Esther and Stanley and Fate

Kimchi & Kingfisher

This month on The Ethnic Aisle, Hazlitt columnist Navneet Alang and I try to imagine a truly multicultural bar. 

“Is the ideal multi-culti bar the absence of all ethnic signifiers, or something more gonzo? We were reminded of one Ethiopian social club in Bloorcourt. Its window display populated by exactly two things: a bike… and a plaque-mounted poster of The Fellowship of the Rings. Outside, men traded insults in their own language. ”

— What is a Multicultural Bar?

The rest of the Booze Issue is well worth your time as well. Go, go, go.

Gas Giants

(Proof I'm actually doing things with Processing.)

Two new works heavily influenced by Adam Ferris and Sir Anthony Hoare's partition-exchanging algorithm – the Quicksort. The 'divide and conquer' algorithm was invented by Hoare back in the 1960s, during his research into faster machine translation techniques for the Soviet Union.

“In those days, the dictionary, in which you had to look up in order to translate from Russian to English, was stored on a long magnetic tape, and it took several minutes for the tape to be read from the beginning to the end. Well, this dictionary was stored in alphabetical order, starting with A and ending with Z in English, and therefore it paid to sort the words of the sentence into the same alphabetical order before consulting the dictionary so that you could look up all the words in the sentence on a single pass of the magnetic tape.”

— The Computer History Museum: Oral History of Sir Antony Hoare

The quicksort attempts to reorder a large set of randomized values – numbers, word fragments, colour data – by dividing it into smaller subsets arranged from low to high, with each subset recursively divided and reordered into smaller and smaller pieces. In this case, I'm asking it to make sense of the random pixels that make up your average .jpg.

I admit, I'm glossing over much of the algorithm's beauty – dip your beak into the wiki for a better explanation. 

Gas Giant I (above) comes courtesy of the European Southern Observatory. Gas Giant II (below) is my favourite, inexplicably vaginal (?), piece of late and works well enough to be the new site banner. I think. As always, click for the best resolution. 

Gas Giant II, 2013

Mutability

Data is fragile, fragile, fragile – ask someone after a catastrophic HD crash and preferably from a distance. In the context of generative art, that same fragility is a feature, not a bug. A quality to activate using whatever's at hand. For example, one of the simplest ways to datamosh is to open an image in Audacity, a free sound editor. In a way, every file is a series of potential works.

I wanted to explore that mutable quality of data with one of my favourite vimeos.

I used Slitscanner.js on the highly, highly relevant Shannon and the Clams' "Hunk Hunt". I then modified an algorithm developed by Nathan Robinson to render a three-dimensional grid out of the RGB values of each pixel of the slitscan. Yeah.

3D Grid of a Slitscan of Shannon and the Clams’ “Hunk Hunt” II, 2013

3D Grid of a Slitscan of Shannon and the Clams’ “Hunk Hunt” III, 2013

3D Grid of a Slitscan of Shannon and the Clams’ “Hunk Hunt” IV, 2013

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Proteus

You find yourself hovering in the middle of an ocean, a vast one perhaps, as there's no way to measure such things – the blue expanse below mirrors the one above.

In the distance, an island awaits.

Since its January launch, Proteus has gained the distinction of being difficult. Difficult to talk about, difficult to recommend. (Outside the enthusiast press.) Difficult, difficult, difficult. Detractors argue the game fails to meet the requirements of some vague, formalist definition of video gaming. Others hedge their bets, mumbling how hard it is to put into words the sensation of playing a game with no discernible goal. Elsewhere, the .exe remains bought and unplayed.

I don't know where my experience fits in. Proteus was an hour (if that); a Sunday of couches; a macbook flanked by my girlfriend's thighs; her voice curling behind me, suggesting new paths to take; our slow attenuation to a foreign land.

Proteus was one of the most important co-op games of the last few years.

In a recent article for Gamasutra, Ian Bogost, a professor of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology offered not one but three interpretations of Proteus. It's mandatory reading, all three reviews – look, a section on everything – but as a sound designer at heart, what spoke to me was his final proposal: Proteus as habitat modulation.

“A radio station transmits on a carrier frequency, and a radio tunes it in by converting that signal for demodulation. Proteus is transmitter and receiver in one, the simulated world doing the transmission and the player’s position within it acting the indicator on the broadcast band. But unlike a radio frequency receiver, which hides all the alternatives via filtering, Proteus has no fixed stations, no clearer or weaker signals. Any position on the habitat modulation band might be equally desirable, depending on the circumstances. A world radio without static, generating bandwidth forever.”

— Proteus: A Trio of Artisanal Game Reviews

It's a glorious idea, and one I've returned to frequently since that Sunday on the couch above a quadrilateral sea. I've yet to travel (Berlin) with my girlfriend (Berlin), to decipher (Berlin) a strange new world (Berlin) together (Berlin). Experience a space not as a network of familiar nodes but a terrain abstracted down to its ambient qualities. Data that couldn't be caught with Instagram.

But in a sense, as we roamed the low-res hills of Proteus together, taking in new vistas, chasing after flocks of notes, squabbling, we did just that and more – we tuned into each other. 

 

POSTSCRIPT

Alison. So. Berlin?

Our Points of Reference

Toronto Island with Alison. (Clickthrough for best.)

Code help from Nathan Robinson, source photo from Mark Cluett.

Things

• The lerpColor() function is handy.
• The collaborative nature of processing sort of demands a colophon with each work, IDK.