if you can find it
This month's piece is an audiovisual musical instrument, where each letter on the keyboard is assigned a specific note, synthesizer and visual glyph. When playing chords the instrument will cycle through each note, emphasizing one at a time and tweening between the associated glyphs.
There's a short video of it in action here.
Download if you can find it
Controls: escape: quit; a-z: play note; mouse x-axis: granulator level; mouse y-axis: speed of glyph tweening; f1: miscellaneous settings; f2-f3: synthesizer settings
The Rules:
- The file at this link will be deleted 1 month from now (6/4/24).
- All downloads are zipfiles containing a Windows executable.
- All source code and assets are included, licensed under the Anti-Capitalist Software License.
- As long as you abide by the license, you can do whatever you want with the download.
Further Reading
Via Erin Kissane, a spreadsheet of gofundmes of people and families trying to get out of Gaza. Even knowing what's happening over there, seeing all these people's names and reading their words brings the horror home so acutely.
The scale of the games industry bloodbath of the past year or so, visualised by PC Gamer.
An anecdote by Rua M. Williams on students using ChatGPT to try and make their writing more academically acceptable, and running into massive problems as a result. Something I've been thinking about a lot is the way that the majority of these AI tools just aren't good at what they are claimed to do. And I think particularly with students, there's a real danger that people will gravitate towards them as a way of filling in some of the gaps with the more procedural/bureaucratic/academic parts of their work, only to get bitten in the arse because the tools end up obfuscating what they are trying to communicate.
Which is partly to say; I'm going to be talking to my own students about this very shortly.
A Body That's All Surface; Elisabeth Nicula
"They want us to describe ourselves in GRANT-WRITING LANGUAGE like we are PROJECT MANAGERS rather than to describe our ideas with the MANY VARIED LANGUAGES OF ART! This is how they make us speak THEIR desires! Participating in their strange bureaucracies is a major concession of our time that we could use for our animal purposes, to observe and make sense of the world, and to describe OUR visions. I propose that we stop playing along."
Hannah Nicklin on worldbuilding as a way of thinking through and finding a way out of the increasing accumulation of crises we are living through.
Music I was listening to this month:
"Love Kristin, P.S. keep them coming"
The haar was incredible this morning. I live on a hill, so when I left the house I was above it, blue skies and bright sunshine. Heading into Dundee though saw me heading into this bright golden fog, with occasional vivid shafts of sunlight in the places where it thinned. I hope things are golden and vivid with you too.