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Today I helped Jim Bassett haul the new Datamantic server down to a co-location facility in the bowels of Lower Manhattan. Datamantic is his company, which will be hosting Digital Media Tree in addition to more traditional business clients. I thought it might be interesting to document the physical hardware and where it will live, since the Tree and this blog are just cyber-abstractions to most people looking at it. Above is Jim booting up the unit. The images below are the server, first with the lid removed showing off all the hot-swappable drives, fans, and power supplies, and then installed in its modest cage in the Data Center. The Center itself is a trip, a labyrinth of boxes within boxes, rivers of overhead cables, and no people, except a couple of tech guys who stay in the office to get away from the omnipresent insane hum of hundreds of server fans and an enormous cooling unit that chugs away 24/7.
The press release for an upcoming show I'm in called
, aka the O Show, can be found in this .PDF file. The exhibition opens November 30, with a reception on Dec. 11, at SICA, on the Jersey shore, and is organized by New York curatorial combine MatCh-Art. I'm showing the DVD of this animated GIF. Other artists include Lisa Beck, Louis Cameron, Moriah Carlson, Orly Cogan, Mark Dagley, Joel Edwards, Rob Grunder, Francis Holstrom, Sharon Horvath, Jim Houser, Jasper Johns, Chris Kasper, Laura Ledbetter, Jim Lee, Monique Luchetti, Noah Lyon, Andrew Masullo, Rob Matthews, Derick Melander, Matthew Northridge, John Phillips, James Rosenthal, Savako, Randall Sellers, Mark Shetabi, Jordan Tinker, John Torreano, Alice Wu, B. Wurtz, and Nami Yamamoto. More as the date approaches.
"Two Bass Salad" [mp3 removed]
Number 5 in the Sidstation/drum machine suite. Bouncy and minimal. Will likely be remixed with more panning effects and possibly some kind of break or bridge, but this is the guts of it.
Now every Bush Administration underboss is stepping forward to declare he or she was "not Bob Woodward's source" for the earlier-than-Scooter outing of CIA agent Plame's non-official cover. A la "I was not Deep Throat." This is like Evil Watergate, with Woodward transformed over the years from a valiant underdog reporter into another lying White House stooge. Meanwhile, Congress reenacts the McCarthy years, attempting to destroy the reputations of those who challenge Bush's war fantasy, the latest being Congressman Murtha. This is all corrupt, inside-DC stuff. It's perfectly clear to the multitudes outside the Washington nuthouse that:
1. Whatever you think of the CIA's use of torture to gain information, exact confessions, etc in undisclosed foreign locations, recently revealed to include prisons in the former Soviet gulag (I think it's wrong and hurts us in the eyes of the world), as long as you're willing to agree that sometimes their secret agents do protect us from mass murderers (and it's very hard to concede this after the spectacular failures of 9/11), then there's probably a consensus that blowing an agent's cover for politics (in this case, selling a bogus war) harms everybody.
2. Bush lied us into war with the help of Congress and the press. To suggest the war is failing is to state the obvious. What is the mission now? To "beat the insurgents"? Did America invade Iraq to conquer it and hold it as a colonial territory? Most people don't think we did.
"Protest Song Variation" [mp3 removed]
"Marching Morons" [mp3 removed]
Moving ahead with the projected "ten songs for analog drum machine and Sidstation"; these are two more, recorded with the new gear.
Paper Rad Info is a blog about Paper Rad. However, it is not Paper Rad. That is here. Above is the Dooman Group. a spinoff band named after Dr. Doo; the photo came from Flickr. Inspiring!
And I confess I missed this Art in America article on Cory Arcangel, which discusses his collaboration with Paper Rad at Deitch Projects, among other activities. Fortunately I have the web to keep me up to date on print. We'll know a zeigeist moment has occurred when Cory is no longer called a "computer artist" and is just called an "artist."
Photos off the TV from The Adventures of Prince Achmed, 1926, a full-length animated film dir. by Lotte Reiniger. Amazing stuff, all silhouettes, inspiring this exercise in couch-potato photojournalism. More on the film (thanks to dave).
Dear Music Diary, I wrote some posts about the difficulties I was having recording a recently acquired analog drum machine. The sound was either clipping or too quiet. I had some good suggestions for ways to compress the drum sounds and those were much appreciated but I finally solved the problem by getting a firewire sound card--the MOTU 828mkii. The audio/digital converters are better than my three year old computer's and the sound is just generally better. I'm using it with a laptop, also recently acquired, which has more RAM and is also better and faster as a music-making machine. Also I can use two screens with it. So once again production will slow down as I migrate programs and sound files to the new environment.