My love/hate relationship with machines
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,68341,00.html
I just read, describing how people grow affectionate with machines.
I might seem to fall into the category, I talk to my pc -or rather its OS, and sometimes I´ll gently stroke the casing of my Layla sound-card. But most of the time it´s harsh and hateful remarks that come out of my mouth. People who have seen me attempting to save files off a pc with a dead system will hear me curse endlessly, not in abstraction but directly to error messages coming up on the screen. At times I´ll address king William Gates III as if he was actcually there, and not in a language that besuits a king(as I come from a kingdom the I know the protocols involved in speaking to royalty). I can go on forever:
Fuck you Bill... fuck you bill... fuck! you bill...
I wonder if Tarantino named his villain in "Kill Bill" after this king of the pc revolution. While an OS such WinXP has given the clueless(no offense) access to the interweb in large numbers, it has further removed me from my precious files, adding ever more layers between me and the actual data. And with an error-rating somewhere in the 99.999% or whatever(I don´t know the actual figure) it seems clear that I will face catastrophic loss of data approx once per year, my back-up routines are pretty good by now. But I´ve never been able to afford full security, meaning a redundant system that makes a full backup at least once per day(preferably once per hour) to at least two physical locations; lacking this, I burn my backups onto DVDs(which I trust as much as a maroccan street-dealer(no offense)). Sometimes I keep the files on two hard-drives and keep one of them off-line, but given the cost per gigabyte, this is very expensive. Currently I have about half a terabyte online at all times and god knows how many terabytes offline.
I hate having data offline.
It really slows me down, like -oh I´m gonna need to clear out say 50 gb for this project, that´ll take some 12-15 dvds which takes 10-20 minutes a pop to burn(while my recorder claims to have x12 rating it more often than not burns at a measly x4), then I´m gonna have to load in the old data from dvds, and it often takes 5 minutes a pop to do this. Now I´ve spent half my day, my original inspiration is long gone, and i think I´ll go eat something, watch a movie and forget about the whole thing.
It sucks.
And it´s always been like this. Every year or so hd sizes double, but every year or so, i have ten times as much data as last year; so my need is outpacing what is available on an exponential rate.
What I really need is a file-server, a huge motherfucking fileserver, with at least 10 terabytes of RAID 5, and remote robotic backupsystem. Donations are happily accepted :-)
So, to return to where I begun, I mostly hate machines, they´re poorly programmed, error-prone, ripe for mechanical failure(recently had to replace my graphics card because a .00005$ resistor burned out, it can be replaced at massive cost) and just not powerful enough. I want more, bigger, faster, better. I want winxp to support 720k floppy disks because my amiga still uses those(win98 does -what the fuck is that?).
But hate is a feeling too. So I feel for machines nevertheless. But then, all my work is in them, so maybe it´s my work that I feel for, and I resent the machines for treating it badly, for not understanding what it is about, for not ignoring a single erronous bit in a 50 billion bits file; I mean, it´s only two possible states -why not let me try both?
On the other side, my work would not be possible without machines, if I was living before the industrial revolution, I´d probably be trying to build machines.
But here I am, typing away in an internet cafe using this historical error called winxp. Global communication at my fingertips.
On the other side, I feel nothing at all for objects such as my cell-phone(except annoyance when the battery runs out, ever more often as it´s old and busted) and will happily throw it away when I can afford a new one. I want a new one, a G3 one, with the latest hype in video-compression(oh please miniturize a H.264 encoder and put it in a cell with 3 megapixel sensor and a decent lens(sweet dreams, but I wouldn´t think twice to pay $2000 or more for such a device)), that allows me to stream at least D1 video directly to server at the max bitrate the system will allow. I have no interest in still pictures, they´re still, unmoving, boring.
I feel zero for my portable music player. Maybe I would if it was an ipod(like, this is way to expensive to carry around), but I am ofcourse an ipod hater -or, I hate the people who flaunt them(look how rich I am...), I mean, I´ve been walking up and down manhattan and these people come walking with their arm stretched out, like for a handshake, but they´re holding their ipod there. What is that? These people must be desperately lonely or something. But then, I never liked status symbols, the thing I like best about my no-name music player, is that it is no-name. Go Taiwan! More no-name stuff, I want no-name everything! Bought a chinese transistor radio called "Sunny"(you know, like "Sony", but more sunny ;-)) -I really like it.
Then ofcourse there´s my video-camera, which has been with me thru´ thick and thin, which earns me nick-names whereever I go(hey, japonese!), which(I was about to write ´who´) has recorded many intimate moments. I know the controls by touch(which is good ´cause much of the lettering is long since worn out), I know that it can longer be focused on maximum zoom, and that it will lose focus on the zoom range between x7 and x8 unless I compensate, and so on. It´s like an old and busted car that still works, you love it because it takes you where you want to go nevertheless, you live with the quirks, humanize them.
And I suppose this is the key in my relationship with machines, if they work flwlessly they´re nothing, just a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, 100% predictable. A machine. But if it´s got flaws, that´s something else, the logic isn´t 100%, you have to pamper it, reason with it, put the tape in in just that particular way -the only one that will still work, but sometimes fails. It´s like when I´m writing beats on the computer, they´re lined up with sample-accuracy, makes me miss MIDI, ´cause MIDI was flawed, the interval between two beats was never the exact same one, the bitrate of MIDI is just too low for that to happen. Much like a real drummer.
So I apply various functions to achieve this imperfection, sometimes adjusting by hand, other times using DSP functions that I know is not sample accurate, deliberately distorting the time-line to induce soul. ´cause sample accurate music isn´t music for humans. It is machine. It has no soul.
It´s like editing pictures. Many a times I have complained that there is no sequencer functions in my editing applications(not in any of them as far as I know). I have complained to manufacturers and programmers alike. They all say that "editing is an art", and ofcourse they´re right. But so is music, and music have been doing fine with sequencing for three decades. They don´t get it. Let the machine do what the machine does well, and let me scramble it with my humanity afterwards.
It´s like, I saw these high-production-value videos by someone I barely know, but have met on occation. And he has no rythm. He had gotten money and people to make these things, and they are t*e*r*r*i*b*l*e, only because the edits are all on the wrong places, put there with machine accuracy by humans. In my opinion, art can´t get lower, than when the soul is sucked out by the humans and not the machines, ´cause make no mistake: there is(are?) soul-less people out there. And they are more dangerous than the machines.
b
I just read, describing how people grow affectionate with machines.
I might seem to fall into the category, I talk to my pc -or rather its OS, and sometimes I´ll gently stroke the casing of my Layla sound-card. But most of the time it´s harsh and hateful remarks that come out of my mouth. People who have seen me attempting to save files off a pc with a dead system will hear me curse endlessly, not in abstraction but directly to error messages coming up on the screen. At times I´ll address king William Gates III as if he was actcually there, and not in a language that besuits a king(as I come from a kingdom the I know the protocols involved in speaking to royalty). I can go on forever:
Fuck you Bill... fuck you bill... fuck! you bill...
I wonder if Tarantino named his villain in "Kill Bill" after this king of the pc revolution. While an OS such WinXP has given the clueless(no offense) access to the interweb in large numbers, it has further removed me from my precious files, adding ever more layers between me and the actual data. And with an error-rating somewhere in the 99.999% or whatever(I don´t know the actual figure) it seems clear that I will face catastrophic loss of data approx once per year, my back-up routines are pretty good by now. But I´ve never been able to afford full security, meaning a redundant system that makes a full backup at least once per day(preferably once per hour) to at least two physical locations; lacking this, I burn my backups onto DVDs(which I trust as much as a maroccan street-dealer(no offense)). Sometimes I keep the files on two hard-drives and keep one of them off-line, but given the cost per gigabyte, this is very expensive. Currently I have about half a terabyte online at all times and god knows how many terabytes offline.
I hate having data offline.
It really slows me down, like -oh I´m gonna need to clear out say 50 gb for this project, that´ll take some 12-15 dvds which takes 10-20 minutes a pop to burn(while my recorder claims to have x12 rating it more often than not burns at a measly x4), then I´m gonna have to load in the old data from dvds, and it often takes 5 minutes a pop to do this. Now I´ve spent half my day, my original inspiration is long gone, and i think I´ll go eat something, watch a movie and forget about the whole thing.
It sucks.
And it´s always been like this. Every year or so hd sizes double, but every year or so, i have ten times as much data as last year; so my need is outpacing what is available on an exponential rate.
What I really need is a file-server, a huge motherfucking fileserver, with at least 10 terabytes of RAID 5, and remote robotic backupsystem. Donations are happily accepted :-)
So, to return to where I begun, I mostly hate machines, they´re poorly programmed, error-prone, ripe for mechanical failure(recently had to replace my graphics card because a .00005$ resistor burned out, it can be replaced at massive cost) and just not powerful enough. I want more, bigger, faster, better. I want winxp to support 720k floppy disks because my amiga still uses those(win98 does -what the fuck is that?).
But hate is a feeling too. So I feel for machines nevertheless. But then, all my work is in them, so maybe it´s my work that I feel for, and I resent the machines for treating it badly, for not understanding what it is about, for not ignoring a single erronous bit in a 50 billion bits file; I mean, it´s only two possible states -why not let me try both?
On the other side, my work would not be possible without machines, if I was living before the industrial revolution, I´d probably be trying to build machines.
But here I am, typing away in an internet cafe using this historical error called winxp. Global communication at my fingertips.
On the other side, I feel nothing at all for objects such as my cell-phone(except annoyance when the battery runs out, ever more often as it´s old and busted) and will happily throw it away when I can afford a new one. I want a new one, a G3 one, with the latest hype in video-compression(oh please miniturize a H.264 encoder and put it in a cell with 3 megapixel sensor and a decent lens(sweet dreams, but I wouldn´t think twice to pay $2000 or more for such a device)), that allows me to stream at least D1 video directly to server at the max bitrate the system will allow. I have no interest in still pictures, they´re still, unmoving, boring.
I feel zero for my portable music player. Maybe I would if it was an ipod(like, this is way to expensive to carry around), but I am ofcourse an ipod hater -or, I hate the people who flaunt them(look how rich I am...), I mean, I´ve been walking up and down manhattan and these people come walking with their arm stretched out, like for a handshake, but they´re holding their ipod there. What is that? These people must be desperately lonely or something. But then, I never liked status symbols, the thing I like best about my no-name music player, is that it is no-name. Go Taiwan! More no-name stuff, I want no-name everything! Bought a chinese transistor radio called "Sunny"(you know, like "Sony", but more sunny ;-)) -I really like it.
Then ofcourse there´s my video-camera, which has been with me thru´ thick and thin, which earns me nick-names whereever I go(hey, japonese!), which(I was about to write ´who´) has recorded many intimate moments. I know the controls by touch(which is good ´cause much of the lettering is long since worn out), I know that it can longer be focused on maximum zoom, and that it will lose focus on the zoom range between x7 and x8 unless I compensate, and so on. It´s like an old and busted car that still works, you love it because it takes you where you want to go nevertheless, you live with the quirks, humanize them.
And I suppose this is the key in my relationship with machines, if they work flwlessly they´re nothing, just a bunch of hard-wired logic gates, 100% predictable. A machine. But if it´s got flaws, that´s something else, the logic isn´t 100%, you have to pamper it, reason with it, put the tape in in just that particular way -the only one that will still work, but sometimes fails. It´s like when I´m writing beats on the computer, they´re lined up with sample-accuracy, makes me miss MIDI, ´cause MIDI was flawed, the interval between two beats was never the exact same one, the bitrate of MIDI is just too low for that to happen. Much like a real drummer.
So I apply various functions to achieve this imperfection, sometimes adjusting by hand, other times using DSP functions that I know is not sample accurate, deliberately distorting the time-line to induce soul. ´cause sample accurate music isn´t music for humans. It is machine. It has no soul.
It´s like editing pictures. Many a times I have complained that there is no sequencer functions in my editing applications(not in any of them as far as I know). I have complained to manufacturers and programmers alike. They all say that "editing is an art", and ofcourse they´re right. But so is music, and music have been doing fine with sequencing for three decades. They don´t get it. Let the machine do what the machine does well, and let me scramble it with my humanity afterwards.
It´s like, I saw these high-production-value videos by someone I barely know, but have met on occation. And he has no rythm. He had gotten money and people to make these things, and they are t*e*r*r*i*b*l*e, only because the edits are all on the wrong places, put there with machine accuracy by humans. In my opinion, art can´t get lower, than when the soul is sucked out by the humans and not the machines, ´cause make no mistake: there is(are?) soul-less people out there. And they are more dangerous than the machines.
b
posted by bangskij at 14:23
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