This month’s piece was a slightly difficult one. I don’t know where I first heard the idea that each piece of software you develop has it’s own grain (was it something Michael Brough wrote, maybe?), but this one felt like it was fighting me the whole way. Like I was trying to work against its grain.
I got the initial idea up and running quite fast, but after that every addition I tried to make either didn’t work, or broke things in unhelpful ways. So there’s less to it than I’d intended, and there’s a lot less variation to what is there than I was hoping for.
Anyway, it’s primarily a generative audiovisual piece. Hit space at the start and it’ll just hum away indefinitely until you hit escape. I also added an interactive mode though, which lets you trigger the various audio and visual events underpinning the generative system. And, if you have a MIDI keyboard or controller, there’s a MIDI mode too, which will let you play the 3 synthesizers directly (as well as triggering events, manipulating colour palettes, etc.). There’s quite a lot of parameters, so if you’re interested in that stuff, check out the controls.txt file.
(If you’re reading this after September 2020 or you don’t have a Windows machine, I recorded a short video of the generative output here)
Download a quiet clamouring
Controls: space: start in generative mode; i: start in interactive mode; m: start in MIDI mode; escape: quit (see controls.txt for more)
The Rules:
The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (05/09/20).
All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
All source code and assets are included, licensed under the GPL (code) and CC-BYSA (assets).
As long as you abide by those licenses, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
I mentioned Warren Ellis last month, but the sheer number of people he abused is horrifying. The somanyofus site (CW: emotional abuse, trauma) is both a collection of testimonials and an incredible attempt to dismantle the systems that gave him (and others) so much power in the first place.
A powerful piece on storytelling and memoir by T Kira Madden (CW: child abuse, trauma).
I’ve seen a lot of writing about defunding or abolishing the police from a US perspective, but fewer articles that tackle it in a UK context. This medium piece by JS Titus is good on the UK’s specific situation, and what needs to be done if things are to change for the better.
Everest Pipkin recently watched 1 million 3-second videos from MIT’s moments in time machine learning data set to create a piece called Lacework. The piece itself is gorgeous and halucinatory, in the way that the best ML art can be, but the article they wrote about the process took my breath away. Highly recommended if you’re at all interested in how ML data sets are created, and the human labour that is often elided when we talk about AI and ML.
Speaking of which, this is an excellent twitter thread by Allison Parrish about the value (or otherwise) of pre-trained language models for computer-generated poetry.
Lastly, here’s a fascinating article about a DIY Yugoslavian computer from the 80’s that gave rise to an incredible homebrew computing culture. In comparison to today’s locked-down, corporate-controlled internet and hardware it sounds genuinely utopian, only it actually existed.
Well then, that’s it from me for another month. Hope you’re doing okay out there. Look after yourself, and take care.