This part of town. My corner of the internet.

It's basically becoming a derelict wasteland. It's falling to pieces. Neglected. The flows of life, of information, of "voice" have moved elsewhere.

I've successfully avoided the clutches of Facebook and Instagram and Whatsapp. Only to be similarly addicted to Quora. And increasingly dependent on Telegram for actual social stuff.

I have online existence. But not "here".

And I'm not only talking about this blog : Composing.

I'm talking about many of my online presences.

I'm talking about ThoughtStorms wiki, which has retreated from an open forum for debate. Via the idea of the Smallest Federated Wiki to a closed, but federal. To now an entirely personal closed thinking space. Perhaps inevitably, given the increasingly hostility to be found online. But is now full of outdated, half-baked, deprecated ideas.


I'm talking about my so called home-page which is now three years out-of-date.

I'm talking about the presentations of my projects which are languishing on public but unvisited static pages. Because, again, these aren't part of the flows  of life.

I am no longer living "publicly", putting what I do online. I don't even know if I want to be living "publicly" in such a way today.

Or to put it another way. I fragment over various places online and IRL. And each fragment has freedom to be what it wants. Unconstrained by the other fragments. How much do I want to try to reunite and reintegrate my fragmented personality? Or do I enjoy the small sense of "privacy" that remains when I allow these fragments to have independent lives of their own? Is becoming the "dividual" the only way to avoid being signed, sealed and delivered into the hands of the machine learning mind controllers today?

But how do you even "live" in a world where "existence" is increasingly tied to participating in the right flows?

Don't ask me. I have no fucking idea.

But ... what I do know is that it's a mess around here. So ... it's time to knock down a lot of stuff and build something new.

So ... in the next few months, I'm going to blow up this blog : Composing. I'm going to be blowing up Synaesmedia. And, perhaps most shockingly, I'm going to be blowing up ThoughtStorms Wiki. And a bunch of other sites.

None of that means that everything is going away entirely. 

What's still valuable will come back in some form.

But I'm going to make big changes. I'm going to break links. (Who cares about broken links?) I'm going to break names (what do my names even mean? Alchemy Islands? Gbloink? Mind Traffic Control? Why are they stuck with the crumbling signifieds they're currently pointing to?) I'm going to break online libraries. (Is anyone really using the ThoughtStorms libraries? If so, pay close attention to what's happening in the online repos)

I just over a year, I want to have achieved a thorough clearing out of the junk and cruft from my online life. And be focused on fewer, more live and dynamic, channels, better suited to today's internet and my current interests.

Code. Think. Make. Play.

I just iterated once more on my personal homepage.

I rather liked the large-tiles I used for my Goldsmiths Portfolio so I'm experimenting with folding them into my more general web presence.

Synaesmedia.net still isn't meant to be a blog. It's a one-shot overview of who am I am, balancing reasonably up-to-date projects with a couple of classics for context, and an extensive list of where else to find me online. Hope that makes sense to new visitors.

Here's more stuff I haven't been paying enough attention to.

Guitar Hero

vs.


Kaossilator (vs. Ghostradioshow)

Wow! These are fantastic; especially when considered together.

I really never watched a Guitar Hero video before. :-)

But what a synthesis of music and game cultures! And lights! And virtuosity. And performance.

Of course, it's "karaoke" in the sense of putting creativity on rails. And yet it hints at much potential for new instruments with new movements, new user interfaces, new syntheses of sound, light and motion.

The Kaossilator seems like more of a "real", freer instrument. Undoubtedly there are still many constraints, but it's closer. Once again the novelty of the UI unlocks novel performance possibilities, even if the resulting music (nice as it is in this video) sounds strangely unaffected by it's unorthodox origin.

How do we get Gbloink! (not necessarily the program, but the true spirit of "synaesmedia") into these damned things?

Update : or is Guitar Hero actually a degeneration towards karaoke from this?

Flyer
Originally uploaded by interstar

Tomorrow night I'm DJing at a party at the Clube da Imprensa under the somewhat quotidian name : "Phill". (Note the double L)

Bit pedestrian compared to all the "Gangster"s and "She-men", eh?

Basically, I never gave the organizers of the first party I played at any sort of nome-de-disc and so they printed up the flier with this mis-spelling of my real name. Now I guess it's going to follow me around, and if I change it no-one will know it's the same person, will they :-)

Frankly I can't think of anything better at the moment, anyway.

Which is a shame, because I do rather like the way that all the Niche producers have robotic voices saying things like "T2 Productions" or guys with northern accents saying "Mikey B On Productions" all the way through the track. In an age of sampling and audio downloading the only way to guarantee your attention is to watermark / brand ruthlessly everywhere. It's cool to have a logo. It makes you feel somehow important.

So I spent 10 minutes playing with the the new Fruity Loops voice synthesizer saying "Synaesmedia Productions". The Synaesmedia brand flails around, never really attaching itself to anything properly, but it can have some fun there for a while. However, the track went all "Super Radio FM". Not at all niche or bassline house. Just sort of old-skool, easy listening house with the bright but miasmic glowing melody line smothering everything else.

Well, it's 2AM in the morning ... so I guess late-nite is what I'm feeling. Even though I have no idea what I'm actually going to play tomorrow and I should be preparing my playlist etc. Expect it to sound nothing like this, though :

Synaesmedia Logomarca