Judaism and Japan: Looking for ASCII art theory

I’ve worked a lot with text-based works lately. There is surprisingly little research on ASCII art and related things. That’s why, together with A Bill Miller, I’ve written an academic article on ASCII art which will hopefully be published after the summer. It’s also quite difficult to find good archives or exhibitions. So me and Raquel Meyers started a tumblr at text-mode.tumblr.com where we select some of the best works in teletext, ASCII, Shift_JIS, RTTY, Petscii, etc.

ASCII art, text-mode art, unicode graff or whatever you want to call it, is still quite an open field (atleast over here in alphabet-land). And, I might be wrong, but I can see an increased interest for it; after pixel art romantics and after the language-mania of social/humanistic science. Objects, biology and realism are becoming relevant again. So it’s time to see what happens with text when it’s used and understood as objects rather than symbols.

One important precursor that is rarely discussed is micrography, which shares some traits with contemporary digital text art. It is a Jewish form of calligram where graphics are built up from hebrew text characters. It came from the biblical hate towards images. In short: text is the only way, and images are not allowed. Doesn’t leave much choice for a visual artist. Great!

Israel’s ASCII art moneyz

It is not only an old and obscure rule. Israel’s bills are still made in accordance with this, as shown in the picture above (zoomed in here). So then the images are actually not images. There are several modern examples of micrography, which often overlaps visual poetry, concrete poetry, etc.

Unlike artists of the early 20th century who used text (Picasso, dadaists), micrography was basically a functional necessity. In that way it is similar to a lot of modern text art, that uses text-based media (Twitter, SMS, textboards). Another similarity is that the symbolic meaning of the letters are irrelevant in micrography (so in that sense it’s actually not a form of calligram). The text characters are selected for their appearance, not for what they represent. This is why, in 2SLEEP1, music was credited as instructions and graphics as objects.

CTRL+C & CTRL+V: SUH-UH-SUH-UH, SUH, UH-A-UH-A-UH-A-SUH-A-SUH-A-SUH-UH-UCK-UCKA, SUH-UH-A-UCKA DICK, A-DICK-DICK

Working with our text-mode tumblr over the past months, I’ve come to realise that a lot of the best text art is from Asia, mostly Japan. One explanation is that Japanese and Chinese are more popular than English online, so it’s a matter of quantity. Another explanation is that text-based media, like 2channel are extremely popular in Japan. It creates memes and characters that appear also in mainstream media. Perhaps a text-based medium can become more popular in Japan because there are more nice-looking and useful characters, but probably also because Japanese writing/reading works differently than here. Is Japan a more “text-based” culture, maybe?

I’ll leave you with an example of Shift_JIS ANSI, which is rather new to me. Colours and Shift_JIS characters ftw! Eat cheese, please!

By Gatchaman

White Bit vs Afrofuturism

There’s not enough Africa in computers, Brian Eno once said. And the same could probably be said about computer users, especially those who claim to work with obsolete technologies. It seems like a quite, uhm, white subculture. Perhaps even the “total white music” like Burzum supposdely said. Urgh.

A few months ago I went to a shop in Stockholm that sells African art. There were chairs made from tyers, bowls made of telephone wires and other so-called appropriations of technologies. To make some conversation with the shop keeper, I said “it’s good to see that they’re re-using the materials around them”. But then I felt so white that I probably became red.

Because what’s the difference, really, between using wood or wires or bits? What’s the difference if it’s 5, 50 or 5000 years old? You take stuff and turn it into other stuff. Assemble it with other things, tweak it, bend it. There’s nothing new with that. We do it with complex digital and analogue technologies now. So what? It seems a bit arrogant to put more value into something simply because it’s a manipulation of a commercial product. The historiography of this needs to look further back than circuit bending in the 1960′s.

Dweller’s Amiga disk backup in Lego.

It is of course an understandable starting point for those who are focused on breaking free from a commodity culture:  a world where all of our tools are built with a consumerist logic. Perfect presets, intuitive interfaces, constant updates: the product is the medium. If you want to be an autonomous individual, you’ll probably get sucked into discourses like noise, indeterminism, retromania and appropriation. These so-called critical tactics seem to be just as normalized as many other counter-cultural ideas of the 1960′s. But maybe it’s time to move on? That’s what I feel. All that criticism is like 100 years old so its ideological base is sort of ideologically obsolete. :)

We’ve become rather similar to a cargo cult. We build strange myths and rituals around objects that we don’t understand. There’s all kinds of weird shit being thrown at us and we don’t really know why we’re getting them and what to do with it. Some people say that it’s part of a military conspiracy, others that it’s a democratic saviour. But we all use it.

There is a similar problem with art that criticizes copyright, patents and all that. It’s considered to be subversive to use copyrighted material (less everyday, but still). In the documentary Sonic Outlaws (1995), Negativland does this. They portray themselves almost as freedom fighters (which reminds me of Punishment Park). But in the same film, Tape Beatles don’t explain their methods as a problem. It’s just a common sense thing to do. Pracitical and fun. There’s nothing to it. Of course it depends on what context you are working in and so on. But the point is: there is a risk that these methods only reinforce the thing that you want to change.

Okay okay, but where do we go from here? Afrofuturism is an interesting field to draw from. Although I just started reading about, it seems to have very useful ideas about hacking, sci-fi (not just for the future) and the relationship between humans and machines. Afrika Bambaataa, listed as a musicin in afrofuturism, was very inspired by Kraftwerk. In all their robotnik romantikz he saw an understanding of themselves as already having been robots, argues Tricia Rose and continues:

Adopting ‘the robot’ reflected a response to an existing condition: namely, that  they were labor for capitalism, that they had very little value as people in this society. So it was a way to play with the idea of robots, but also to put on an armour against manipulation which Rammelzee (below) did so well with his low-tech body suit.

The armour is a good metaphor. Good things need to be protected. Turntablism and techno built a sort of armour around political struggle and highly competent techno-skills, by camouflaging it as dance music. People were dancing to the beat of resistance without even knowing it. There was no need for outspoken counter-cultural poetry, since it was all about the music and the machines. Frequencies.

Consider how pioneers like Kool Herc and Grandmaster Flash were working with new technological methods. Perhaps there was not much politics in the resulting music, but as a new form of assemblage of man-music-technologies-entertainment it certainly had political relevance. Now compare that to what Reed Ghazala did with his circuit bending. He seems to be aiming more for art and democracy. Bending becomes something for high-brow shoegazing, stoners and communist librarians who want to teach kids how to reclaim the commodities. /me ducks and covers

But isn’t it more relevant to be able to program than make noise? I’d say it is. Maybe because I’m not a programmer :). For some it comes more natural to simply use what’s available, and make stuff with it. And if it’s not such an introvert process, perhaps something more useful than counter-culture comes out of it. Sometimes, it’s because there’s no other way: acute solutions to a flood, lights without electricity and sometimes it’s just quick n’ dirty trixxx.

Actually, I think this is what many artists are doing. It’s just that they are using the discourse of obsolete hacking in order to make a living from it (or sth). That’s great and I don’t blame them for it. We all make compromises, I guess. But what are they going to do when the hype is over?

Towards a Genre Materiality

This is a somewhat theoretical post meant to underpin future posts about something I call genre materiality atm. The point is to describe how screens have gone from passive transporters to active participants. Their qualities play an important role in media literacy and human taste. Screens are a good example of genre materiality, since they are still considered to be quite neutral whereas most other media are under the scrutiny of constructivism. It’s not as obvious as e.g sound storage media, or computers.

The screen used to be a syringe. Before the age of TV, academics thought that media consumers were injected with the message of the sender. Humans were seen as passive receivers, and the screens were like passive relays.

Fast-forwarding to the 1980’s, most things in the world was described as social constructions. Technology was considered to be shaped by culture and controlled by humans. Afaik, this perspective was applied much to screens (although the McLuhanites probably wrote something?). Even in the height of postmodern SCOT, screens were somehow able to be left out of the constructivism. And they still are. Screens are just, you know, showing what we feed them with. They don’t really affect the content.

But if you’ve ever been involved with printing, you know that screens are manipulative little bastards. People tend to blame the printers, but screens are calibrated differently and therefore the printers seem to print it wrong. There are professional calibrators out there, who come to calibrate your screen-printer-lifestyle. Then it’s smooth sailing from there.

Moving on to here and now, screen qualities have become crucial parts not only for hipster literacy and nerd aesthetics, but for pop culture at large. We interpret images differently due to the artefacts of the screen. It doesn’t take long for us to understand how old something is (supposed to look). We can feel a difference between CRT-screens and plasma screens. Right? Obviously, it’s easier to see the difference with production and storage technologies (VHS-camcorder versus 16mm film), but it’s there with screens too.

For example – modern TVs have a mode that doubles the framerate. It makes for a good sales pitch, since you can show soccer games to old men and demonstrate how smooth and clear the game is. But if you watch a movie in this enhanced mode, it totally destroys the atmosphere of the movie (atleast until you get used to it). The cheap interpolation algorithms used to create the new frames can make any movie look like a cheap camcorder class reunion party. I suppose that there are good aspects of it too, like the ability to make faster pans and tilts without revealing the framerate. After all, cinema has a pretty low frame rate, which likely has affected the genre of film.

So the screen becomes an active participant in the experience. Just like media consumers have gone from being (considered as) passive to active, so has the media themselves.

Some screen qualities can also be important for genres. In some cases, you can’t even use modern screens. If you create media-specific visuals and/or use machines that have an odd output signal (like a PAL C64 running in 50.125 Hz) you are likely to run into problems with modern screens or beamers, as I’ve written about before. More importantly though - you lose the qualities of the screen. Ian Bogost talks about e.g texture, noise and color bleed as important parts of the experience. This results in a very different experience from watching it in, for example, laser. Still, it is not all clear which is the most accurate representation: clear non-emulated pixels on a modern screen, or CRT-mangled images on a TV.

Even music could, with some effort, be connected to the screen. For platforms where the whole system is connected to the framerate of the screen, you would get a different tempo and tone with PAL and NTSC respectively. The music is tied to the raster beam of the CRT screen.

I will return to this in the future, and make something out of it. For now I have to go to a farm, and I’m also working on two texts that’ll hopefully be published later this year. Cowabunga, chipsters!

 

New Bruce Sterling According to Aesthetics

I read something that Bruce Sterling wrote about New Aesthtics. It seems to be rougly an aesthetics that occurs inbetween man and machine. Lots of infographics, glitches, cybernetics, physical computing and all that.

I wasn’t aware that this was a thing. I’ve been following the Tumblr ever since it featured 2SLEEP1, which I made with Raquel Meyers. I don’t know, but perhaps what I do has something to do with new aesthetics?

Reading his text was quite interesting, to start with. I think he’s managed to pin down some rather ‘contemporary things’. But when he dissed 8-bit aesthetics he lost me. Of course. Sterling writes that retro ’80s graphics are sentimental fluff for modern adults who grew up in front of 1980s game-console machines.

Yes, sometimes it is. Probably most of the time. Just like almost anything else can be dissed as being ‘nostalgic’. It’s too easy to disregard ’8bit’ as anything with large pixels. That’s not really the point. Not to me anyway. I’ve become accustomed to this style of expression, just like he is accustomed to books, magazines, records, or whatever he’s into. Most 8-bit graphics are pretty boring, just like most books are. But I wouldn’t diss books as being nostalgic fluff, would I?

For me, his primary mistake is to try to separate man from machine, culture and nature, object and subject. New aesthetics is about exploring the exact opposite to that, I thought? When it all comes together. When irrogation creates patterns that look like text art from space. Or when your own camera has a better view of a concert than yourself. Also, I’m not sure why aesthetics has to be only about images. If anything, it should include sounds too?

Sterling writes that machines are not our friends or art critics. At the risk of sounding naive — I’d say that they’re getting pretty close. If all your Facebook-friends were bots, would you know the difference? If the plays, likes and downloads of your works were all performed by bots – would it make you sad?

Sterling says that machines lack cognition, ethics and taste. I say: how would he know, and even if it’s true, who cares? For me that’s irrelevant. It seems a lot more interesting to explore the area inbetween human concepts and machinic concepts (whatever that would be).

I guess Sterling is responding to some sort of debate that I’ve completely missed. Also I admit that I haven’t read much of his texts at all, so perhaps I’m ignorant of the context. Anyway. I do agree with some of the things he says, such as:

An intellectually honest New Aesthetic would have wider horizons than a glitch-hunt. It would manifest a friendlier attitude toward non-artistic creatives and their works. It would be kinder with non-artists, at ease with them, helpful to them, inclusive of them, of service to them. It’s not enough to adopt a grabbier attitude toward the inanimate products of their engineering.

Engineers are great. But not even them can predict what a machine will be able to do in the future. With some good feedback from humans, they can do some fuuuckkedd uppp shiiit maaaan.

PS. My own works are heavily based on manual work. Just listen to 2SLEEp1. I’m perhaps more interested in the human craft side of new aesthetics. Still, I find Sterling’s humanism pretty retro-nostalgic.

Progress – Are You With It or Against It?

Technological progress has become second nature. It’s generally assumed that technology becomes better all the time. It used to mean that more quantity led to higher quality (more pixels, bytes, options, etc). Nowadays it’s often the opposite. Quality comes from stripped down interfaces, curated collections, filters, etc.

While this techno-progressivism grew alongside consumerism, there was an opposing idea within art and academia. They opposed this development, usually from the perspectives of critical theory. There was already a long history of anti-modernism anyway.

Today it’s still popular to talk about critical uses of media. I’m not sure what it means, but it usually implies a better use of technology. It can be smarter (hacking) or more stupid (dadaist circuit-shocking) or even mainstream (spectacle subversion). And it’s been like that for atleast 50 years?

They are two sides of the same coin. They need eachother to survive and they sustain eachother. The expression “creating something new with the old” is one example. This is relevant to say because of the wide-spread misconception that cutting edge ideas require new technologies. But they don’t. The retrofuturistic hauntology – going back and exploring forgotten paths – is another example. These paths are not old. They are new!

The argumentation here is far from solid. It’s a bit explorative. So I appreciate comments. But it feels like these things somehow confirm techno-progress as second nature. It takes it for granted and makes it stronger. But is it possible to avoid that? Is it something to strive for? I’m not sure. But here are three suggestions.

If you don’t like planned obsolescence, don’t talk about it all the time. And stop calling my tools obsolete. What’s your agenda, soldier? They are obviously not obsolete. Retromania is commercial. Old media are expensive. New media is trying to catch up with the qualities of their ancestors. Teletext has everything that the webb lacks!

Stop talking about limitations. It doesn’t matter if you use quotation marks – you’re still saying the same thing. Every medium has unique potentials (theoretically, atleast). It’s not a bug it’s a feature. Always!

We like friction! It seems pretty popular. Tumblr and Twitter have pretty bad interfaces, right? Instagram is described as quirky, iirc? People want odd interfaces – we’re not really looking for invisible and ultimate interfaces anymore. If we spend time and effort to do things (instead of some automatic super solution) we feel good! We don’t want Newton, we want DIY. He he.

Where Did Free and Open Ever Get Us?

The Dutch theorist Geert Lovink has a long history of activistic academia – often talking about tactical uses of the media. Here he discusses several issues that I’ve been thinking about lately.

“In these times of ongoing financial crisis we can no longer afford to celebrate ‘free’ and ‘open’ as the default on the Web and pretend that it is everyone’s private business how they are going to make a living. [..] We need to politicize this situation and not presume that ways of making an income is a private matter”. For me this is spot on. Artists think too much about themselves. Why is there so little politics in electronic music? Why is it normal to use corporate tools to make, distribute and archive music into eternity? Perhaps “The main enemy is our own naïve passion to forget the politics of the tools that we fall in love with, time and again (Technikvergessenheit)”. How many people died to build your computer?

“Free software and creative commons never created confrontational situations— and that should make us think. As alternatives they have created their own modest niches but never created antagonistic situations. After 20-30 years it is time for the cybersubculture to publicly discuss these strategies”. Creative Commons makes little sense to me. When Swedish radio used my CC-licensed music for jingles, the license made no difference. The point with CC is more to encourage others to remix. But eh, who needs that?

“The free and open rhetoric needs to be dismantled. Instead we should promote a discourse which states that it is cool to pay. Sharing for free is boring and in the end a nihilist act. What we need are those bloody ‘alternative revenue models’”. Lovink has a point. Even if it’s a boring one. If you want there to be money in music, you need to talk about revenue models. Personally, I don’t make a living from music anymore, so I don’t bother. But on a structural level the whole free/open/CC-discourse hasn’t really mattered so much, right?

“Stop with the free services as they will screw you”. Yes. And we like it.

Why Chipmusic Is Not Retro

Here are seven points about why chipmusic is not retro. These ideas apply mostly for chipmusic as medium.

1. Unrecorded audio. Even if music can be nicely generative like Icarus (who I remixed once, btw) or performed live, it’s usually distributed as recordings. That has rubbed off on chipmusic, but there are hundreds of thousands of chiptunes that are performative: Each execution is unique. Chiptunes are to music what theatre is to movies; a different ontology. Especially with dodgy chips like the SID. And this is futuristic, simply because there’s no other large scale music like this.

2. Media materialistic music. There are several problems with a technical definition of chipmusic (= anything from a soundchip is chipmusic). But perhaps it will be more common; perhaps the aesthetic crisis in pop culture (retromania) will be followed by a renewed interest in tools and instruments. From language to object, if you will. You know, bye-bye to genius authors and sonic genres – hello to software virtuosity, digital materialism and folklore, artifacts, and live performance.

3. Audiovisualism. Music and visuals are interlinked. PAL/NTSC connects them technically (the available tempos are normally extracted from the framerate) and the low resolution connects them aesthetically. It seems obvious to me that music and visuals will grow stronger connections in the future, and chipmusic seems to have pioneered that.

4. Remixability. Chipmusic was concerned with remixing music already in 1951, 1961 and 1970. But during the 80′s and 90′s the sampling, ripping and reverse-engineering of music spawned a unique music remix culture in the demoscene. It could thrive outside of law and economics, since the scene had their own network infrastructure (BBSs, swapping, etc). And the mod-format for music was (and still is) superior to MP3/etc for a LEGO-style remix culture like Manovich writes about here. No copyright, no creative commons, no laws, no money — just good data and angry teenagers making up their own rules. Definitely futuristic.

5. Originality. It is made from scratch, manually. It’s not pomo remixism. Read more about that here.

6. Archive fever. The chipmusic archives that exist are meticulous works by enthusiasts. They are not threatened by copyright claims, and can usually offer almost everything. The music is also very searchable, since it’s not stored as recordings. For example, you can make powerful search engines to search for specific notes and instructions, like the SID theme finder. Definitely better than the centralized ultra-corporate options of today.

7. Unused potentials. There’s still so much to be done! Where’s all the interactive music players, generative visuals, auto DJ:ing, database explorers, etc? Syphus’ ChipDiscoDJ is only the beginning! If anyone is interested in getting involved with coding for such projects, let me know.

Originality is Back!

Talking about originality is asking for trouble. So not many people talk do anymore, atleast from where I’m standing. It’s just not a very relevant topic in a world where “everything is a remix“. In remix culture everyone (and everything?) is a DJ that is always inspired by others in various ways. Yeah, okay. Sure. But…

Still, I don’t value all music the same way. Consider the difference between a DJ who plays other people’s music, and someone who improvises with her own compositions using home-made software. It’s not that it’s more impressive, or better, or more complicated – but there is some kind of difference, right?

It’s not about the performance: a DJ is just as likely as a composer to use Ableton with 100000 clips. It’s not about the composition, because even if you don’t sample you’re probably stealing subconsciously anyway!! It’s impossible to find an origin to the composition.

Most importantly though, is that originality is not about “creativity”. What I’d like to propose here, is that it’s about the ontology: what is the song actually made of? I got this idea from Raquel, and thought I’d think aloud about it.

For example, if you take yer average electronic music release, it likely uses plenty of samples, effects and instruments that someone else made. It’s not super-difficult to copy the song if you find the source. For example, look at how Jim Pavloff rebuilds Smack My Bitch Up from scratch. The value in this bitch-song comes from the idea, not the labour.

Yeah, I said labour. By using music tools with a bit more friction you can move away from presets, towards manualism. Instead of tweekin’ sum knobz, you have to spend an hour to write a list of numbers instead. There are no instruments or samples to load, no automatic sliders or fancy algorithms to produce automatic variations. In the ideal manualist case there’s absolutely nothing but your hands.

Chipmusic is not 100% original – nothing is. But it does get pretty close sometimes. Most chipmusic software does not use samples. A lot of them don’t even let you save an instrument that you’ve made. Sure, you get some basic timbres and effects, and an interface with plenty of character. If u’re lucky there’s even some copy-paste functions. But then it’s up to you.

Por examplo – when lft makes Bach-music in C64 assembly, they are original works event if he didn’t compose them first. They are original, because he typed them by hand, from scratch. The list of common denominators is short: assembly, C64 and keyboard.

In Exedub from 2SLEEP1 you can see me composing the song live, starting with nothing but an empty music program. This seems to go well with this idea of originality. But the song is a recording. It doesn’t exist as an executable (a bit like with live coding) but I’m not sure if that’s important or not. Indeed, it does change the ontology of the music.

What is important is that purist chipmusic – provided in non-recorded file formats – is original by default. The ontology of chipmusic is quite unique. I’d say that it’s the only digital music genre in the world. All the others are just platform-independent recordings. I doubt that there’s any other genre that has 10,000′s of songs as executables or open-source.

Anyway. This idea of originality is an analytical concept, more than something useful for everyday life. Who knows how the songs are made, anyway? But I think it’s important to have concepts that are neither antropocentric nor über-structuralist. Materialism, yo.

A thesis about ANSI that hates PETSCII

I was reading an MA thesis in history by Michael Hargadon about ANSI art (pdf). It’s an interesting read, but struck me as rather odd, occasionally. Perhaps because it’s North American? For example, there is a newskool Razor1911 ASCII piece (the kind that looks strange on PC because the /-signs don’t align) is described as ASCII-art at its finest, effectively ignoring Amiga ASCII (just look at ASCII arena).

But what made me really worried was when I read that C64 BBSes never developed true BBS artwork like that of the IBM PC. He continues to say that only some block-drawing characters were available. This is ignorant to say the least, and actually makes me doubt the accuracy of the rest of the text. To be honest, I skipped through it rather quickly after the Big Petscii Diss.

Anyway. Theoretically, it is rather technodeterministic. There is loads of technical explanations. Perhaps that’s because, as far as I understand, the author was a SysOp and not an ANSI-artist. He quotes a historian saying that the first-order constraints that govern the creation of art and the form it takes are the availability of materials and the ways in which these materials can be arranged to produce meaning. So Hargadon later concludes that the limitations of a given platform will define the forms of expression that can be sustained on it.

I like when the machine gets credit for what’s being done, but I think this is taking it too far. I think it’s problematic to differentiate between unavoidable and influential constraint, as Hargadon talks about. The first is supposedly a consequence of a discrete and fixed object (called platform) and the latter is a consequence of the overall technosocial system (called operating environment).

But computers are not fixed objects: they change. Hackers continue to ‘push the limits’ and sometimes we even call their attempts new innovations. But these features were always in the machine, obviously. It was merely the human understanding that was ‘pushed’ and not the machine.

We cannot define these machines objectively. There is always a human bias. It is particularly obvious with objects that are continuously abused by demosceners. There will soon be a new C64-demo that requires the emulator programmers to start working again. Or vice versa – the emulator programmers discover something that leads to new 1337 coder tricks.

What I mean in this context is that ANSI-art could be disconnected from the ANSI-standard just like the term ASCII-art was. People could make all kinds of crazy text mode graphics on BBS’s if they just added software support for interlaced frames, changing fonts, etc. After all, BBS-software was often developed by elite userz rather than companies.

If you want to read long academic texts about warez d00ds, I’d recommend Alf Rhen’s Electronic Potlatch. Nevertheless, this is a valuable contribution to science despite its narrow scope that disconnects it from all other forms of text art (graffiti is not even mentioned). And although I agree with Hargadon that modern social science requires the relaxation of .. the rules of historical evidence, it’s something that comes with a great responsibility.

A New Hi to the High

There’s an interesting article in Vague Terrain about low-bit audio: A New High in Low: Adventures in Low Bitrate Audio. It’s a pretty good read, because it mentions 20kbps, Dex and the City and Floppyswop which I released music on several years ago. :) Just have a few comments to make quickly before I go for some food.

It starts by talking about zombie media, and how benders salvage electronics that other people throw away, even if it usually still works. So anti-consumerism is the starting point. The article writes about low bit-rate music as a new approach that comes with a visual aesthetics that the author describes as infantile (hi Kodek and Overthruster!), but also fills an important function for poorer parts of the world. “More interestingly, though, is that no clever scripting, hacking, bending, or esoteric software was required to kickstart this audio micro-revolution: the ability to encode an MP3 at sub-’CD quality’ bitrates is a feature built into the iTunes application”.

Hmmmm! It’s grounded in critical theory to describe lo-bit as a subversion, and art perspectives to say that presets can be used creatively. Or something like that. The standard way, you know? That’s all fine, but I think there are better ways to talk about this, which perhaps is less alien to the practioners themselves.

Not all music are recordings. MP3/OGG is just one option. For example, on my release at Floppyswop I used mod-files. Sounds better than a lo-bit recordings and it’s smaller in filesize. Non-recorded music is truly tricky for contemporary culture to deal with and it’s a shame that this article doesn’t discuss it. Well, I guess it wasn’t the point. Nevertheless, denouncing chipmusic as videogame remixes and emulations, is a bit perverse.

Lo-bit doesn’t have to be about authenticity. One charm with low bitrate is that it leaves things to the imagination. Low resolution gives more room for the listeners’ own interpretations. Some kind of brutalist hauntology. The articles says that authenticty is a mandatory selling point for culture consumers (which might be true), but it seems more refreshing to say: who knows or cares if it’s authentic or not?

Neither low bitrate recordings or chipmusic are re-animations of zombie media. People have done it for ages — it’s the things around it that has changed. And it’s not about unintended uses. Remember when it became possible to stream audio in the 1990′s? Real audio! It was quite useful, and it still is. Why wouldn’t it be? Because technology has changed? If yes, then you=technodeterminist and that’s not frexxy.