Notes On the Margins

onthemargins.com

It could be that every election year we question the election process.
But after two questionable victories by George W. Bush, I think that today we wonder even more if the election process could be improved.

I’m not only referring to redesigning ballots or eliminating hanging chads, but rethinking why we have the electoral college system rather than a more direct, popular vote.

I hear many young voters in NY right now talking about how they may or may not vote, but feel that it is alright since this is a blue state, and there is nothing much at stake. Voting power is only truly felt in swing states, where every vote seems significant in the decision. If you don’t live in a swing state, then your vote does not matter. These aren’t my views but attitudes I have heard. I don’t agree with them but see the reasoning behind it. This attitude, combined with the fact that a president can win the popular vote, but still not be elected, feels anti-democratic in a way.

I can see two reasons why the US system is at is is. One is that there were technological limitations. Back in the day, there was no efficient way to count each person’s vote. Imagine counting votes by candle light and sending messengers on horse to tally the results. The electoral college helped break the process into more manageable pieces.

Also, a main motivation for an electoral college was probably rooted in the unwillingness to completely give in to the will of the masses. The electoral college was a way rich white men could still exercise some control over the general population. I think the smarter decisions have been sacrificed in the last two elections, both due to “technicalities”. Al Gore, however, did win the popular vote. Another mistake could also be made in this election, because Obama doesn’t win all of the right states, despite the fact that so many people, a popular majority, want him to be president.

Fast-forward to the 21st century. We have computers now, the ultimate number crunchers, that could tally votes with lightning speed. If the issue is that the popular vote is still somehow flawed and not the best representation of our will, then maybe the voting districts need to be rethought, so the electoral votes aren’t at the state level, but per-district. I am sure Google could rethink a more fair algorithm based on current populations so that every voter would feel empowered again.

Of course, the idea of completely computerized voting conjures up the thought of political hackers rigging elections by flipping bits of individual votes, or hard disks getting erased. Not to say that the system of physical ballots has proved itself to be more tamper or error resistant. But I am sure we could come up with a pretty fool proof system that wouldn’t allow another decision like 2000.

We also need the Google government website Obama keeps talking about, complete with visualizations of lobbying patterns. While we are at it, I think we need to develop better visualization tools to help see the economic problems more clearly. Sergei Brin better be a cabinet member in the next administration.

This past weekend, I played music at a friend’s loft party in Greenpoint.
It has been a few months since I purchased Traktor Skratch from NI, and this is the second time I would bring it outside of my house. It’s good to take it out because problems arise that you would never face by keeping it safely set up in one place.
The first time I tried to bring it out, everything seemed to be on but the timecode would not get read into my computer. After about 15 minutes, my nerves got the best of me and I reverted to the 15 or so backup records I had brought with me down to Miami.
Little did I know the problem was due to a little button labelled input mode on the front of the box that must have been set to cd or something else. I checked my setup about a dozen times but didn’t think to look at this switch. This was a last obstacle, a stupid oversight… but I’ll know this for next time. There won’t be anymore setup blunders!

I was wrong. I thought I encountered all the difficulties I ever would, but this weekend after making sure the loft would have cd decks there, carefully packing my timecode cds and selecting music (the input mode switch still burned into my memory), I get to the party to find an all-in-one-cd-and-mixer-jammy, with no outputs for my computer to get to the timecode. I winged the rest of the night and played directly from my computer, which actually went pretty well and forced me to learn some shortcuts.

That being said all the djs there had different setups. There were no turntables - I would’ve brought them but I wanted to try to use what they had. There was the all-in-one cd jammy, I was using Traktor Skratch, sans Skratch, and another dj was using Ableton live. I’m trying to think of a comparable field or hobby. It just struck me as funny that we had three different setups.

I’m still on the fence about the benefits of djing digitally. It’s similar to the tradeoffs of owning mp3s, in general. In a way, its faster and more accessible because you have immediate access to your library in your computer, but it feels farther away and harder to get your head around this spaceless, faceless, massive amount of music. Now I’ve transferred this problem to my djing. I spend tons more time tracking down high quality files, making and organizing my playlists (since I can’t recognize an mp3 as fast as I can an album cover) than flipping through stacks of records and dumping them into a bag. Or at least it just feels like it.

I previously brought up the idea of a taxonomy for musical visualizations. Maybe taxonomy is not the right word, but I do feel that each of our endeavors at expressing music visually can be placed between two poles. These two poles are also present in visual art - there is that which is highly abstract - consisting of shapes and colors that do not refer to anything outside their own forms - and works that are much more suggestive, figurative, they refer to elements in the world around us.

With these two extremes there is another polarity - visualizations that are directly tied to a musical quality so that they are affected by a change in that quality, and those that are influenced “indirectly”, relying on the artist to create an effect in the visual in response to their perceptions of the music. I am not trying to make a claim right now that one is better than the other, although a direct tie between musical and visual expression would make the visual more of an information visualization. It would be based on something quantifiable.

Sunday, May 12th, I saw artists from Raster Noton perform at Issue Project Room, between Park Slope and Carroll Gardens. The environment was intimate and well suited for their music - there were a network of speakers throughout the room which were able to handle the frequency and sound limits these artists play in. There was also a large video screen.
I had previously seen Olaf Bender (Byetone), Frank Bretschneider, and Alva Noto (aka Carsten Nikolai at Mutek in 2004. There the show had a very important visual component, so I knew that this show would likely be an audio-visual one. Actually, Carsten Nikolai also does installations on the side for extra cash, many of which explore this audio and visual relationship. On Wikipedia it says he used principles of cymatics for creating visualizations. Thee principles weren’t apparent in his visuals for the evening.
The visual accompaniments differed from those of Meat Beat Manifesto - they represented the other pole of the sound-visualization spectrum - (which I have yet to lay out). There were no literal visual samplings, video clips of people talking or objects making the sounds being lifted for the music. The Raster Noton aesthetic is abstract in the sense that I have yet to hear anything in their work that refers to something outside of sound itself. With this strict abstraction comes a visual component of abstract forms and colors.

Static and lines, feedback dominated the performances of Alva Noto, Byetone, and Signal (Signal is the collaboration consisting of all 3 artists). It reminded me of Scott Arford’s Static Room
What stood out among the 3 was Bretschneider’s performance. It was done in such a way that the visual and sound components seemed to be interdependent - he seemed to be playing his visuals - or his music was coming from a visual instrument that we were all watching on the screen.

(Sorry for my lousy clip that doesn’t do it justice)

This is a good example of differential dynamics.

Most of Frank Bretschneider’s visuals were white light on black, mostly consisting of cylindrical or spheroid constellations that were directly affected by the music. When I asked him after the show about how he hooks his music and visuals up in real time, he said most of it is done beforehand, and he uses Modul8 for basic things like having amplitude control the visuals. “I like to keep it simple” he said.
I was a bit in disbelief when he said this, since his visuals and sounds seemed to be so inseparable. It definitely looked like one could generate the other - which is the mark of a good audio-visual work. There is an inseparability, which I think both this highly abstracted pole, ad the direct video sampling method can accomplish.