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Picture of the
Day
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Saturday
October 29, 2016 |
| Tonight's finale of 9e2
was marked by a couple of extraordinary sound
performances. Hemispheres
placed the audience inside a 3D sonic model of the
performer's realtime brain activity as she reacted
to and reprocessed ambient sounds from the immediate
environment. EEG
sensors on the front, back, top, and sides of her
brain corresponded to speakers placed around the
space, which made for a heady feeling in that
old building, which became a kind of skull for
sounds that ricocheted like thoughts.
Gene
Splicing by John Roach seemed to suggest that
if you want to make omelettes, you need to break
some eggs. More-or-less randomly generated prompts
based on their own genetic sequencing guided two
percussionists who tapped, pounded, rubbed, bowed,
and ultimately hurled an array of resonant glass
objects--chimes, bowls, rods, and globes with
rolling balls rattling around inside. Those lovely
artifacts were not
long for this world. Maybe that's a metaphor
for how the vessels that pass information are
shorter-lived than the information
itself.
That was certainly the message shared by Johannes
Goebel at the Henry earlier in the afternoon.
His bottom line on the
durability of digital information is the data
itself can be stored almost indefinitely on various
media (M
discs seem best) but the means of retrieval
are more fragile than we think due to a universal
weak link in the hardware boot-up process no one
seems to have considered before.
All
this data is just snowflakes in a blizzard
that will melt sooner or later anyway. |
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