1024 Waarden, by ookoi

january 25, 2007.

With the official release of the '1024 dvd' drawing closer, ookoi went number hunting across the internet ... 1024 Waarden is a flash animation that we did for the 'Oog' ('Eye') section of the website of the dutch newspaper 'De Volkskrant'. It's a play with the many numbers that every hour, every day pop up in head lines all over the world ... With a click of your mouse you bring up a cloud, and every second one has you uncovering hidden connexions ...

Dorkbot, or People Doing Strange Things with Electricity

january 25, 2007.

For your entertainment here's some pictures of the first parisian Dorkbot meeting, wednesday evening february 25th, in Ars Longa, avenue Parmentier in the 11th arrondissement. Dorkbot is a fine 'meme', that has been spreading over the world since 2000. And in Paris, like elsewhere, there's loads of people doing strange things with electricity. So. Good. Good to have a dorkbot here ...

Dorkbots are different everywhere, but all of them 'curiosity driven', as the work at the MIT Media Lab, exposed by Joëlle Biton - and as in all good research, of course, be it in the sciences, the arts, or whatever mix of both of them. This first parisian event was somewhat too 'formal' for my taste (but that's going to change, we were assured ...)
I'm an academic of sorts myself, as you may know, and I have nothing against academic presentations per se, but I do think that here they do miss the point ...

The 'mix' as applied by Emmanuel in the explication and demonstration of his home builtretro-active instruments ('feedback, bifurcations, chaos, music') and by David Steinberg in his introduction to circuit bending was far more appropriate already ... While observing the dorkbot visitors listening to and looking at David and his toys, it suddenly once again struck me how very much of a boys' thing this 'circuit bending' is: it made the girls giggle an awful lot, whereas the boys were posing questions ... :-) ...

[ More pictures at the Dorkbot Paris web site :: Watch a video of Emmanuel's 'Le pendu de Foucault (Michel)' at YouTube :: great circuit bending by Gijs Gieskes ... ]

365 Days, or the Bless and Curse of Internet Radio

january 23, 2007.

Three hundred and Sixty Five (365) Days are back...
Otis Fodder this 2007 daily, as all along 2003, will be serving again free downloadable auddities [audio oddities] ... And while back then having and keeping enough server space to keep all of it online was not so easy, now, four years later, the sky seems to be the limit ... The 2007 edition does not restrict itself to your one or two daily tracks ... often there's full albums and more ... !

Several of these are completions of items of which the 2003 series brought only some extracts. Such is the case with the very first of this year's edition, which brings us the complete Michael Mills radio show on Hidden and Satanic Messages in Rock Music, from 1981.

Three of the three past weeks' campy or otherwise bizarre highlights:

• - Bent Bolt & The Nuts - The Mechanical Man is a beauty dating back to 1966; 'beauty' for many reasons, including this 45's fine sleeve, but most of all for the vocalist's (Teddy Randazzo) rendering of the silly lyrics, imitating some sort of vocoder without actually using one ...
• - Play It Safe, volume 4 ... The recording on this 33rpm vinyl LP, of a New York jewish couple bantering back and forth, was meant to be played in repeat mode [] while you're out of the house and at a level where someone standing outside the house can hear that there's people talking inside without being able to make out what's being said[,] in order to fool potential burglars into thinking someone's home ... The record came with detailed instructions included for rigging up a whole myriad of different types of turntables with a twist-tie (included in the jacket) so the record will properly repeat over and over until you come home... A fine audio companion to that somewhat similar, printed, 'classic': Anthony Greenbank's Survival in the City ...
• - An Experimented Terror. It's the B-side of a 45rpm dating from the mid-1960's, by American pop band The Greek Fountains who - probably with a little help from the recording engineer - appear to be doing n'importe quoi to fill up the 'obligatory' flip side ...

This new edition of '365 Days' appears as part of WFMU's 'Beware of the Blog' - which already all by itself is (one more) fascinating 'source' to follow ... but even worse is that it risks to teleport you sooner or later onto the homepage of WMFU, America's longest running freeform radio station; and then that you might go on from there, clicking and listening, either to the live stream, or else dive into the archives ...

... and when you do, I think you soon will find out what made me jot down this entry's title ...