 Through weblog channels too circuitous to list, I came across this page of Soviet synthesizers. Who knew? Above is the Kvintet. Also, here's the New England Synthesizer Museum, which seems pretty comprehensive. Earlier Bill Schwarz posted a link to this site of electronic instruments from 1890-1990, which overlaps somewhat with the New England site. And as long as I'm dumping links, here's a site called the Obsolete Computer Museum. Check back later and I may have formulated something to say about all this. Or maybe not.
Certain works are victims to obsolesence of the medium. Paper has proven to be persistent for a few thousand years, at least from obsolesence. Film has a similar track record, but over only 100 years or so. Video (on tape) and computer programs are notoriously subject to the short and fickle lifecycles of the equipment.
Do you know about the Bruce Sterling/Richard Kadrey "Dead Media Project"? It's a mailing list/database of obsolete media. (Here's an entry on the pre-Inca Quipu, which is something like a calculator made of string. It uses knots and dyed colors to--we're not sure exactly.) The DMP is fascinating, but as Sterling has said, it's ultimately hard to draw any conclusions from it. The impetus for it is what you're talking about, the tendency of certain software and hardware-dependent works to become obsolete rather quickly.
Here's an excerpt from a Bruce Sterling speech about Dead Media (I much prefer this to his Dead Media Manifesto), specifically about the mysteries of the Quipu:
Have you ever heard of the quipu of preColumbian Peru? If you have, it's a minor miracle. The archives of Incan quipu were burned by the Spanish conquerors, after the Council of Lima in the year 1583. There are about 400 authentic quipus left in the entire world. Every last one of the quipus we possess nowadays was dug out of a human grave.
Well, not quite every last one. I happen to have a brand-new quipu here in my pocket. I was doing quite a bit of reading about quipu, so I decided I'd make one.
The word quipu means 'account' in the Quechua language, so the quipu was basically a kind of accounting device and calculator. This is a fabric network to carry data. This was the only recording medium that the Incas had. It served all the recording functions of their society.
No one today seems to have any real idea how these quipu worked. They all looked more or less like this one -- they had a thick fabric backbone, with a series of dependent fringes. But the fringes could also have fringes. Sometimes there were as many as six subdirectories coming off the backbone of the network. They had a variety of different knots. They had quite a wide variety of colors. People have only the vaguest ideas what the colors may have signified.
This is a very small quipu. The largest remaining quipu weighs about forty pounds and has well over two thousand dependent cords. No one has any idea what this device signifies or what message it carries. It was buried with a Peruvian gentleman who was modestly well to do, but doesn't appear to have been particularly prominent.
The Incas had no idea that the planet harbored any civilization other than their own. As far as they were concerned, these quipu were the absolute apex of human intellectual accomplishment. And one must admit they have a lot to offer. They're very light -- wool and cotton -- they're portable and durable. Crushproof. No problem with power surges or headcrashes. A good thing they were portable too, because one of their primary functions was the census.
It appears that everyone without exception in the Inca realm existed as a knot in a quipu somewhere. The Incas were great masters of ethnic cleansing. They thought nothing of ordering thousands of people out of their homes to distant realms as pioneers and settlers. Everyone simply loaded all their possessions onto their backs and left immediately. Thanks to the quipu, there was simply no way they would ever be missed by the authorities.
The Inca economic system was a centralized command economy. A third of the nation's economic output was stored in vast ranks of stone cells. Everything down to the last sandal was recorded on quipu.
I don't think there was ever an alphabet in quipu. I don't think that the Inca were literate in that fashion, because their empire was only a hundred years old. There was nothing to pronounce that you could find on a piece of string. But there may have been eneologies in string -- heirarchies, maybe family trees. Maps, even -- three days' journey, they forded a blue river, they fought a red battle -- you can imagine how usefully suggestive this might have been. Maybe you could attack language even more directly with a quipu: meter, stress, quantity, pitch, length of the poem -- why should this be hard to believe? In English we sometimes call telling a story "spinning a yarn."
These Incas were fine textile makers. They had a lot of wool and cotton, the government made them grow it, and their women spun yarn every day of their lives. When a quipucamayoc read one of these recording devices, I don't think his lips moved. There was nothing crude or halting or primitive or painful about the experience -- a quipu is certainly a more tactile and sensual and three-dimensional experience than a book.
The quipu was a medium. It was a way to cast the world into an entire new form of order. It was a medium invented by and for a very careful and methodical people, people who liked to fit huge boulders together so snugly that you couldn't slip a knife-blade between them. For the Incas, this was the Net -- a net that caught their population in a sieve that dominated the whole material world, a sieve that no one could escape.
You know, in today's ultramediated world, I think it's quite a good idea to go into a quiet room with a quipu. Go to a room and shut off the electricity. Don't look at the quipu with scorn or condescension. Just hold it in your hands and try to pretend that this the only possible abstract relationship, besides speech, that you have with the world. Really try to imagine what you are *missing* by not comprehending all economics, all governmental business, all nonverbal communication, as a network of colored yarn. Think of this as a discipline, as an act of imaginative concentration, as a human engagement with a profoundly alien media alternative.
It's truly pitiful how little is known or remembered about the quipu, a dead medium which was once the nervous system of a major civilization. And yet that is by no means the only form of knot record. There's the Tlascaltec nepohualtzitzin, the Okinawan warazan, the Bolivian chimpu. Samoan, Egyptian, Hawaiian, Tibetan, Bengali, Formosan knot records. So far, I know almost nothing about these beyond their names. I'd like to learn more. If I learn more and you're on my list, I'll tell you about it.
wow...knot stuff is fascinating...
all i brought was a few more synth links:
www.vintagesynth.org
www.synthmuseum.com
|
Through weblog channels too circuitous to list, I came across this page of Soviet synthesizers. Who knew? Above is the Kvintet. Also, here's the New England Synthesizer Museum, which seems pretty comprehensive. Earlier Bill Schwarz posted a link to this site of electronic instruments from 1890-1990, which overlaps somewhat with the New England site. And as long as I'm dumping links, here's a site called the Obsolete Computer Museum. Check back later and I may have formulated something to say about all this. Or maybe not.
- tom moody 7-18-2003 12:44 am
Certain works are victims to obsolesence of the medium. Paper has proven to be persistent for a few thousand years, at least from obsolesence. Film has a similar track record, but over only 100 years or so. Video (on tape) and computer programs are notoriously subject to the short and fickle lifecycles of the equipment.
- mark 7-18-2003 10:27 pm
Do you know about the Bruce Sterling/Richard Kadrey "Dead Media Project"? It's a mailing list/database of obsolete media. (Here's an entry on the pre-Inca Quipu, which is something like a calculator made of string. It uses knots and dyed colors to--we're not sure exactly.) The DMP is fascinating, but as Sterling has said, it's ultimately hard to draw any conclusions from it. The impetus for it is what you're talking about, the tendency of certain software and hardware-dependent works to become obsolete rather quickly.
- tom moody 7-18-2003 10:44 pm
Here's an excerpt from a Bruce Sterling speech about Dead Media (I much prefer this to his Dead Media Manifesto), specifically about the mysteries of the Quipu:
Have you ever heard of the quipu of preColumbian Peru? If you have, it's a minor miracle. The archives of Incan quipu were burned by the Spanish conquerors, after the Council of Lima in the year 1583. There are about 400 authentic quipus left in the entire world. Every last one of the quipus we possess nowadays was dug out of a human grave.
Well, not quite every last one. I happen to have a brand-new quipu here in my pocket. I was doing quite a bit of reading about quipu, so I decided I'd make one.
The word quipu means 'account' in the Quechua language, so the quipu was basically a kind of accounting device and calculator. This is a fabric network to carry data. This was the only recording medium that the Incas had. It served all the recording functions of their society.
No one today seems to have any real idea how these quipu worked. They all looked more or less like this one -- they had a thick fabric backbone, with a series of dependent fringes. But the fringes could also have fringes. Sometimes there were as many as six subdirectories coming off the backbone of the network. They had a variety of different knots. They had quite a wide variety of colors. People have only the vaguest ideas what the colors may have signified.
This is a very small quipu. The largest remaining quipu weighs about forty pounds and has well over two thousand dependent cords. No one has any idea what this device signifies or what message it carries. It was buried with a Peruvian gentleman who was modestly well to do, but doesn't appear to have been particularly prominent.
The Incas had no idea that the planet harbored any civilization other than their own. As far as they were concerned, these quipu were the absolute apex of human intellectual accomplishment. And one must admit they have a lot to offer. They're very light -- wool and cotton -- they're portable and durable. Crushproof. No problem with power surges or headcrashes. A good thing they were portable too, because one of their primary functions was the census.
It appears that everyone without exception in the Inca realm existed as a knot in a quipu somewhere. The Incas were great masters of ethnic cleansing. They thought nothing of ordering thousands of people out of their homes to distant realms as pioneers and settlers. Everyone simply loaded all their possessions onto their backs and left immediately. Thanks to the quipu, there was simply no way they would ever be missed by the authorities.
The Inca economic system was a centralized command economy. A third of the nation's economic output was stored in vast ranks of stone cells. Everything down to the last sandal was recorded on quipu.
I don't think there was ever an alphabet in quipu. I don't think that the Inca were literate in that fashion, because their empire was only a hundred years old. There was nothing to pronounce that you could find on a piece of string. But there may have been eneologies in string -- heirarchies, maybe family trees. Maps, even -- three days' journey, they forded a blue river, they fought a red battle -- you can imagine how usefully suggestive this might have been. Maybe you could attack language even more directly with a quipu: meter, stress, quantity, pitch, length of the poem -- why should this be hard to believe? In English we sometimes call telling a story "spinning a yarn."
These Incas were fine textile makers. They had a lot of wool and cotton, the government made them grow it, and their women spun yarn every day of their lives. When a quipucamayoc read one of these recording devices, I don't think his lips moved. There was nothing crude or halting or primitive or painful about the experience -- a quipu is certainly a more tactile and sensual and three-dimensional experience than a book.
The quipu was a medium. It was a way to cast the world into an entire new form of order. It was a medium invented by and for a very careful and methodical people, people who liked to fit huge boulders together so snugly that you couldn't slip a knife-blade between them. For the Incas, this was the Net -- a net that caught their population in a sieve that dominated the whole material world, a sieve that no one could escape.
You know, in today's ultramediated world, I think it's quite a good idea to go into a quiet room with a quipu. Go to a room and shut off the electricity. Don't look at the quipu with scorn or condescension. Just hold it in your hands and try to pretend that this the only possible abstract relationship, besides speech, that you have with the world. Really try to imagine what you are *missing* by not comprehending all economics, all governmental business, all nonverbal communication, as a network of colored yarn. Think of this as a discipline, as an act of imaginative concentration, as a human engagement with a profoundly alien media alternative.
It's truly pitiful how little is known or remembered about the quipu, a dead medium which was once the nervous system of a major civilization. And yet that is by no means the only form of knot record. There's the Tlascaltec nepohualtzitzin, the Okinawan warazan, the Bolivian chimpu. Samoan, Egyptian, Hawaiian, Tibetan, Bengali, Formosan knot records. So far, I know almost nothing about these beyond their names. I'd like to learn more. If I learn more and you're on my list, I'll tell you about it.
- tom moody 7-18-2003 10:56 pm
wow...knot stuff is fascinating...
all i brought was a few more synth links:
www.vintagesynth.org
www.synthmuseum.com
- big jimmy 7-29-2003 4:23 am