Amiga Apes and LSDj in Libraries

Archeopterix lives in Marseille and collects old hardware. Plenty of computers and consoles but also video cameras, keyboards, etc. I visited him after the Micromusic #5 festival and hung out with him a bit.

This photo is from the Game Heroes exhibition at Mars à L’Alcazar in Marseille, which he organized. The gorilla (built by Mégalo) is built from plastic guns, and his head is playing Amiga 600 games. The human ape is VJ Kissdub with his amazing PXL-2000 video camera that uses cassettes.

Monsieur Archeopterix also told me that he gave a Gameboy with LSDj to the library, so now people can go there and borrow it just like a book. I really like this idea, and he is trying to expand this to the rest of France. Let’s see if LSDj-Johan will file a massive law suit to destroy all libraries in France!

What seems to separate Archeopterix from other computer collectors is that he’s casual and playful and messy. Things just happen. He’s happy to share things and there’s nothing mainstream or academic about him. His place is more like a flea market than a museum, and you sort of just stumble across BASIC 1.0 for TO-7 or an Intellivision music keyboard or some strange storage media.

It makes me remember how the chipmusic scene was 10 years ago, before people had started to build fancy peripherals, research and reflect on the tools and cultures (like I do) and well, be very serious about things in general. Before it became infected by the standard tricks of art, pop and science. Maybe it’s time to GO APE again! Or Archeopterix.

The Music Sporters at Lazerscale

Congratulations to the musicians who managed to do one song every day last year! At Lazerscale, some people have succeeded in this music sport where many others have failed. Little-scale put 9 songs out the last day of the year to reach 365, and Lazerbeat offered us about 120 new songs in the last four days of the year. A special happy new year to you, David! :) Ubey also reached the goal a few days into the new year, but the rest of the people didn’t make it. When I wrote this post I have to admit I didn’t think anyone would make it. Glad they proved me wrong. They are music sporters, just like Björn Borg (see below).

Very impressive! Unfortunately, I haven’t listened to many of them. It would be great to have some kind of radio-function, because downloading these things file by file, and then listening to them as songs seems like the wrong way to go. A radio station for each artist would be great. Listening to “songs” often gets boring anyway, and this could be a nice alternative for a fragmented but highly contextual listening. The bestest explanation of 2010 for future generations!

Björn Borg by Charlotte & Sture Johannesson (Apple II, 1983)

 

Video Selection: Midsummer Haze

Exotic Escapes & Learning in Text Mode

After the previous teletext post, I found Teletext Holidays where you can browse current teletext travel ads online! Follow them on Twitter here for all your teletext holiday needs. A great service indeed, and I hope they pay me well for advertising their advertisements.

I like how the raw commercialism meets the blocky graphics. When you have 160 characters to set on a resolution of 23 x 39 characters in 8 colours, there is no room for fancy marketing. I doubt that current ad campaigns could be translated into teletext with much success. It just requires too many signifiers. Teletext fits better with a raw kind of product+price marketing. Have a look at Lektrolab’s teletext exhibition Microtel (2006) and all the advert-aesthetics in there aswell.

But teletext is also about news and education! Check out the Christian teletext edutainment by Bill Geers at his youtube-channel. And don’t miss the 10 episodes of Hands Up at this channel. Robots, cowboys and worms in hot air balloons, in the name of sign language!

Seriously, this is some very impressive work. I am not sure if this is all teletext. I mean, teletext is a lot more limited than the arbitrary use of colours in e.g. ANSI and PETSCII. Here you have to waste a character to change the back/foreground colour of the next char. Also, I don’t know how teletext animation works. Is it possible to broadcast longer animations than e.g. this one? Anyway, I guess they were not designed to be broadcast on teletext, because it doesn’t have sound. So, was teletext software really that good to animate with? Am I expecting an answer?

Below are two pieces from the Microtel exhibition. First by Videohome Training (Gijs and Marieke), and the second one by Drx (from Bodenständig 2000). If you want to make your own Teletext graphics, check Lektrolab’s tutorial.

If you wanna step up the obscurity yet another notch, get into the British teletext bureaucracy! First, try to understand how the different standards and providers and companies and channels worked in the 1990s. Then try to understand the present status of teletext, which seems to involve illegal text mode shout outs. Start here. You can see what people in Stoke-on-Trent think here (?!) and see a sentimental selection of highlights here (?!).

The Playlist Exhibition, and How Modern Technology Can’t Handle C-64

Playlist is an exhibition centered around chipmusic and had its opening party yesterday. As it moved from Spain to Belgium there were some new artists added, including yours truly. I wrote about the previous exhibition here, before I had even read the Playlist Reader, to be honest. There are some very interesting perspectives there, such as Ed Halter’s piece about digital materialism. It is great to read texts that take these works seriously, and go beyond naive perspectives of nostalgia or über-romantic notions of hacking. I think the Reader gives a refreshing art-oriented description. It doesn’t necessarily fit with the motivations and traditions of the demoscene and chipscene, though – for good and bad.

Many art works are also available online, so have a look. Demosceners might complain about the lack of demos (whatever that is), but there are four demosceners in the exhibition: Chantal Goret, Erik Nilsson, Julien Ducourthial, and me and Frantic. (Probably not the most representative demosceners though I suppose)

As usual, our C64 noise-play HT Gold proves almost impossible to show correctly with modern technologies. The frenetic glitch-shakes require 50 progressive frames per second, which is a piece of cake for oldschool CRT-televisions but a nightmare for modern screens and beamers. It’s a perfect example of planned obsolescence or the systems of secrecy that Kittler talks about. It is really difficult to show HT Gold to people! I’ve tried to transfer the video signal through myriads of protocols to finally end up with an online video that has lost all the things that made the original video special. I’ve tried to emulate it, but it doesn’t do the trick either. Sure, it’s fun to trash things, but it has to be classy trash! If anyone reading has a professional video capturing device, let me know!

Also, showing HT Gold was not made any easier by the Belgian post-man that destroyed the floppy disk I sent to Playlist. Someone should’ve told him that double-glitching is forbidden according to international law.

Photo by Rosa Menkman

Playlist Exhibition: Materialism vs Symbolics, Music vs Visuals

Playlist is an exhibition featuring many of the more famous 8-bit artists. It’s curated by Domenico Quaranta, who was also responsible for the recent Pixxelpoint exhibition where several low-tech old-media works were shown (mentioned here). Combining the list of artists at these two exhibitions gives an impression of what low-tech/8-bit art can be in European art (see below).

The concept of Playlist is to explore how music has been a driving force in the appropriaton of obsolete technology since the mid 1990s. It is grounded in the idea that musicians have historically been early in inventing, appropriating and pushing technology. It uses the example of Nam June Paik and how he manipulated electric signals for audio and video. “The core of Playlist will be the exploration of the “8bit movement”, spread out from the manipulation of obsolete game technologies in order to create new instruments to play music”. Sentences likes this are quite odd from a demoscene perspective, as I will explain below.

The text authors argue that today “the manipulation of the digital stream is mainly grounded in musical research”. It’s an interesting suggestion, which I think is correct in many ways. Chipmusic has certainly played a role in making 8-bit audiovisual experiments popular (again). But that doesn’t mean that their work was, or is necessarily pioneering research. Take the Gameboy. It was appropriated by the cracker scene in the 1990s who distributed games illegally, and by the Gameboy demoscene. The platform was not obsolete, it was interesting and many 8-bit crackers/demosceners enjoyed the new opportunities. The music was usually a bit so-so because the available music software (e.g. Music Box) was quite painful to use. Then a demoscener and an artist made two programs respectively, that seems to have spawned a global phenomena. So Gameboy music did not pioneer the appropriation of the platform, but it definitely popularized it. It’s plausible that this also goes for other digital technology: music often had a lower priority in digital videogames, art, demos and research.

But let’s say that musicians pioneered the re-appropriation of digital materiality. You know, when hypercapitalism (and you) describe technology as getting worse simply as time goes by, there is a new symbolic power in using it. No longer is it dirty consumerism; it has become a subversive hi-jacking of capitalist relics – connecting with DIY-punk hacking-reality kind of activism. For some, anyway. Others just enjoy the materiality of the machines – a C64 was always meant to use creatively – and couldn’t care less about the meaning of it (even if they might appreciate the attention). But (unfortunately) it’s often more interesting when activities are connected to politics or something larger than “itself”.

But anyway – the purpose of the exhibition is not to give some nerdy history lesson, it’s about exploring a concept. To me, the concept does not evolve around that people make 8-bit music/art, but what they make and in what context. Demosceners beware – it’s not about full frame-rate super perfect new impressive effects, but usually quite the opposite. Don’t control it, set it free. I wrote about this difference between the demoscene and contemporary chipmusic before.

The exhibition texts’s opening quote of Nam June Paik – “I must renew the ontological form of music” – is spot on for chipmusic, albeit in a different sense than Paik meant. Chipmusic challenges the dichotomy of recording-performance that permeats culture and economics on a very large scale. Chipmusic is a massive and publicly available manifestion of something that is neither recording nor performance. It is not a recording, because the soundchip is performing the music in realtime depending on PAL/NTSC, CPU, code, etc. So is it a performance? In the GRG-courtcase it was stated that the Swedish copyright collecting agency STIM considered SID-music as performances, performed by the author. But after lengthy e-mails with their lawyers it seems that is not true. And it makes sense, because spontaneously it is absurd to consider SID-music as live-performances. But, what is it then? Well, I am exploring this topic further in my thesis.

Artists at Playlist

Paul B. Davis (UK)
Jeff Donaldson / NoteNdo (DE)
Dragan Espenschied (DE) – member of Bodenständig 2000
Gino Esposto / Micromusic.net (CH) – aka Carl
Gijs Gieskes (NL)
André Gonçalves (PT)
Mike Johnston / Mike in Mono (UK) – part of ZX Spectrum Orchestra
Joey Mariano / Animal Style (US)
Raquel Meyers (SP)
Mikro Orchestra (PL) – previously Gameboyzz Orchestra
Don Miller / No-carrier (US)
Jeremiah Johnson / Nullsleep (US)
Tristan Perich (US)
Rabato (SP)
Gebhard Sengmüller (AT)
Alexei Shulgin (RU)
Paul Slocum (USA)
Tonylight (IT)
VjVISUALOOP (IT)

Artists at Pixxelpoint

AIDS-3D (Germany)
Mats Andren & Anders Carlsson (Sweden) – that’s me
Michael Bell-Smith (USA)
David Blackmore (UK)
Ian Bogost (USA)
BridA / Jurij Pavlica, Tom Kerševan, Sendi Mango (Slovenia)
Wayne Clements (UK)
Vuk Čosić (Slovenia)
Chris Coy (USA)
Florian Cramer (Netherlands)
Olle Essvik (Sweden)
Vladimir Frelih (Croatia)
Darko Fritz (Croatia)
James Houston (UK)
IOcose (Italy)
Tom Jennings (USA)
Oliver Larić (Germany)
Les Liens Invisibles (Italy)
Olia Lialina (Germany)
Paul Matosic (UK)
Eilis McDonald (Ireland)
Rosa Menkman (Netherlands)
Rafael Rozendaal (Germany)
//thatisaworkaround.com (Greece)
Thisgasthing (Italy)
Eugenio Tisselli (Spain)
Tonylight (Italy)
UBERMORGEN.COM (Austria)
Harm Van Den Dorpel (Netherlands)
Windows Media Players (UK, France, Brazil)
Math Wrath

VJ on a Chip

The American visualist/artist/teacher VBLANK just announced that the Pocket VBLANK is available for purchase again. It’s essentially a low-res VJ-system on a chip that reacts to audio, and it costs $110. The visuals are nice and lo-fi, but I am not sure exactly what it does. Judging from the videos it is not really meant for tightly synchronized visuals. And the hardware is not programmable, although VBLANK has burnt custom graphics onto the chip upon request. Currently it’s only for NTSC, but a PAL-version is apparently coming soon. Read the Blip-interview with VBLANK where he briefly explains about his lo-fi and act-inside-the-box preferences. He also refers to the Amiga as a supercomputer. In the bad sense. : )

Ready > Run Exhibition: What is in a system?

A month ago the Ready > Run exhibition opened in Philadelphia, and will run until November 7th at the Esther M. Klein Art Gallery. It shows works from Enso, minusbaby, noteNdo, Nullsleep, VBLANK, Animal Style, MET-Lab, NO CARRIER, Paul Slocum, Dan and Winckler. From the site: “Chip musicians and pixel artists work within the limitations of these vintage technologies by hacking their childhood toys to generate complex new genres of music and visual art that challenge and reflect the identity of contemporary art on an international level.” The text thus places the works as operating within the ‘limits’ of material systems, but expanding symbolic systems through ‘complex new genres’. Is that really what the exhibition does…?

As noted before, chipmusic is usually accompanied by either glitch aesthetics or 8-bit craftmanship; what Heidegger would label bringing-forth and challening-forth respectively. Videogame hardware or software are obviously used, and maybe more often than some artists want to admit (me?!) the symbolics and aesthetics of videogames are also used. This exhibition shows all of these discourses.

Enso and minusbaby represent craftmanship with their good-looking printed pixel graphics.The NES musicdisk Teletype by Animal Style and No Carrier, operates in a similar domain. Animal style also exhibits a Gameboy connected to a home made amplifier. Paul Slocum displays his old work ‘Combat Rock’ where a cover of “Rock the Casbah” has been added to the Atari 2600-game Combat.

There are several works that combine videogames and interaction, with glitch aesthetics. In Data Spills, Nullsleep hacks a NES-game and makes it spill program logic into the representational layer, producing glitch artifacts. No Carrier presents his GlitchNES that you can control with a Power Pad and noteNdo works with hardware-glitches of the NES that can be controlled by intercepting lazer lights. VBLANK also creates glitch aesthetics when he transcodes the ROM of an Atari XE onto the screen, and enables joystick interaction.

These works go beyond the limitations of systems in several ways. There are physical interfaces that are not inherent to the systems. There are no NES-printers and therefore printed NES-graphics can only exist outside the system. There are unfortunately no lazer interfaces to the NES either, and it is possible that the hardware modifications by noteNdo produces effects and artifacts that are out-of-system-experiences; things that software and emulators can only (try to) dream of. The ideal glitches; those that cannot be reproduced or explained.

To me, it is highly relevant to think of what constitutes a system and, from that perspective, define limitations and possibilities. How is a system empowering and disempowering? Chipstyled works are described both as remaining within systems, and transgressing the limits of systems, which seems quite true. But it would be interesting to study more in-depth what a system really is, by studying the transgressive aswell as traditional uses. It is not only relevant for chipmusic; such platform-specific analyses could maybe say a thing or two about popular culture in general. All photos below taken by Marjorie Becker.

Animal Style: Juvenile Amplifier

NES Landscapes by enso

Reset v2.0 by noteNdo

Teletime by Animal Style and No Carrier

Minimum Data >> Maximum Content

The VJ-festival Cimatics are running an online exhibition, so I have just “curated” something called Minimum Data >> Maximum Content. It is a tiny presentation of what people have achieved with 1024 bytes or less. I will return to this subject many times in the future, because it relates to many things I try to approach in this blog: maximising technology, not exploit limitations but embrace possibilities, hug bugs, media specificity, posthumanism, and so forth. In the mean time, enjoy the three lonely videos I have posted, and check an 8bittoday-post, and check how you can make cinema material in 4 kilobytes here. (warning for superman trance) And remember: recordings are sooo 20th century. 256 bytes look better than 256 megabytes!

(Some chip music curiosa: behind the name ate bit , included in my selection, we find 4-mat who is often blamed for inventing chip music with Amiga songs around 1990. Back when chip music was sample-based and semi-nostalgic music, *cough*. Nowadays he codes incredible tiny productions for 8-bit machines, like the recent interactive “DJ-tool” for Spectrum called 1kdj.)

Sequencing Computer Peripherals

I just found a version of Bohemian Rhapsody performed by an Atari800XL, 8″ floppy drive, TI 99/4a, 3.5″ floppy drive and four HP ScanJets. It’s apparently the hottest youtube-clip in Canada right now, yip yip! The same author also has Funkytown performed by C64/modem/printer and TI99/4a. Mentioned as his inspiration is James Houston’s Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any) which had a slow start of its Internet career, but has received lots of internet attention by now. It’s James’ final project for design school, so the visual aspect is also well worked through. A very special clip. It’s a ZX Spectrum with scanners, harddrives, and printers that performs a Radiohead-cover. James “placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there”.

While many chipmusicians claim to re-purpose technology, sequencing computer peripherals like this doesn’t even involve a sound chip! The first time I came across it was on the Commodore 64, where software would play music with the drive header. There is a youtube example of the 1541 drive playing Bicycle Ride For Two (originally from the first “chipmusic” record Music For Mathematics, 1962). There is also atleast one application to do this: 1541-music (1987), but don’t test it if your diskdrive is dear to you.

Back in the days, computers did not have a DAC (digital-to-analogue converters) which turn bytes into vibrations for loudspeakers. There is a peculiar story from 1966, when Tanzanian visitors to Sweden were treated with a printer playing their national anthem! Supposedly, this was the easiest way to make computer music for these engineers, although there was squarewave music elsewhere in Sweden at the time (where some pretty hardcore arpeggios were eventually made).

At the time, keyboards and screens were not common place either. Even in 1975 the Altair 8800 was just a box with switches and lights. The American hobbyist Erik Klein bought this computer as a kit and “30 hours later it was running with only one bug in the memory!” He happened to notice that the Altair was interfering with the nearby AM-radio, and he figured out how to control the tones and play his own music – “with nary a glitch“. Possibly this is the first piece of computer music made outside academia/art/videogames. But, the sounds are not digital and an AM-radio is not really a computer peripheral anyway.

On another (ir)relevant note, peripherals have been re-purposed in the C64 demoscene. If you run out of memory or CPU-power on your Commodore 64, you can use the 2 KB RAM and 6502 CPU inside the 1541. One example is the demo Deus Ex Machina (C64 2000) by Crest. Jeff’s song “Crossbow” apparently plays from the diskdrive.

So, the lesson to learn is that computer peripherals can be great tourist attractions and can probably be used for even more bizarre things. I’ll finish off this post with some more examples of music with peripherals.

Composing:

• Paul Slocum and his dot matrix synth, used for exhibitions and the excellent music project Tree Wave.
• Sue Harding’s Dot Matrix music. youtube. Does not involve any programming, but rather trial and error style by printing images and see how they sound. Notice the Amigas!
• Little-scale has a number of printer projects and an arduino tutorial aswell.
• Half Arsed Printar Shreddage at youtube. Feeding samples into a dot matrix printer head.
• Gijs Gieskes’ Image Scanning Sequencer
• Amiga-drive performing El Condor Pasa (stepmotor) youtube
• Amiga-drive performing a melody (“spinmotor”) youtube
• Amiga-drive playing a sample. youtube

Software:

• Tape Composer (C64 2009) Compose music for the Datasette (the “tape deck”). It plays back either through the motor, or through audio tape decks (the music you make is saved as data that sounds like your music, uh when you play it as audio) more info here. When I tried it I didn’t get much sound out of my datasette.
• Tap Music Composer (ZX Spectrum 2007) I forgot how this works, but the results sound like data-cassettes in the right tones.