Geomancy and Earth Codes

earth coding, sonic acts, workshop, FoAM, geomancy

Akin to the psycho-geographical derive, we walked through electromagnetic and coding territory, to observe what we would find rather than seeking out. Our actions, a form of contemporary geomancy, concentrated on the interacting signals between the atmosphere, the ground, and ourselves – all potential sites of transmitting, receiving, disrupting, and originating signals. Unlike outright divination, the more general category of scrying is a system for asking questions without solutions.

http://sonicacts.com/2015/blog/geomancy-and-earth-codes

Reading Earth/Worm Poetry

earth coding, sonic acts, workshop, FoAM, geomancy

Through exploratory field trips that focused our attention down into the earth, we opened a window into a world of telluric currents and fugitive radio waves that normally would remain unnoticed or inaudible. This was achieved through iterative, performative processes in the field: at one point, we plunged a circuit board into the soil to listen for what the earth (and a few worms we found there) might have to “say:” the currents thus detected were fed directly into a computer where they were “translated” via Python program into letters and spaces of the English alphabet. This process resulted in a “worm poetry.” This process quite literally returns circuitry to the earth from which it once came, in effect inducing the earth (and its intimate inhabitants, worms) code itself.

http://sonicacts.com/2015/blog/reading-earthworm-poetry

But broadly speaking I’ve been thinking about this by analogy to the world of music. Most photography nowadays functions like…

“But broadly speaking I’ve been thinking about this by analogy to the world of music. Most photography nowadays functions like most music: free online. I’m a fan of this and have always engaged in things like blogs, Tumblr, and Instagram. But this streaming flow seems to make more physical, tactile experiences all the more important. This, I think, is part of the reason photobooks, like vinyl records, have become more popular of late. People want to touch something. But people also want an experience. This is where traditional exhibitions as well as more temporary installations and performances come into play. A traditional exhibition is like going to the symphony; a pop-up show is like going to a rave.”

– When to Hold ’Em and When to Fold ’Em A Conversation with Alec Soth (vialostinpublications)

Unless the vexatious problem of digital preservation is solved, all texts “born digital” belong to an endangered species. The…

“Unless the vexatious problem of digital preservation is solved, all texts “born digital” belong to an endangered species. The obsession with developing new media has inhibited efforts to preserve the old. We have lost 80 percent of all silent films and 50 percent of all films made before World War II. Nothing preserves texts better than ink imbedded in paper, especially paper manufactured before the nineteenth century, except texts written in parchment or engraved in stone. The best preservation system ever invented was the old-fashioned, pre-modern book.”

– Darnton, Robert. The Case for Books: Past, Present, and Future. New York: Public Affairs, 2009. (viacarvalhais)

Famous type: The fight over the Doves

typography, history, font, london, dove, doves, thames, type

That painstaking process is similar to the technique Cobden-Sanderson and Walker used to create the Doves type, itself a confection of two earlier designs. Doves owes most to the type of Nicholas Jenson, a Venetian printer from the 15th century whose clear and elegant texts shunned the gothic blackletter favoured by print’s early pioneers. A few letters were added, and others redrawn. The arrow-straight descender of its lower case ‘y’ divides critics; purists lament the thick crossbar of the upper case ‘H’. Most people neither notice nor care. “No more graceful Roman letter has ever been cut and cast,” opined A.W. Pollard, a contemporary critic, in the Times. Simon Garfield, a modern writer, celebrates its rickety form, which looks “as if someone had broken into the press after hours and banged into the compositor’s plates.”

http://www.economist.com/news/christmas-specials/21591793-legendary-typeface-gets-second-life-fight-over-doves

A snow covered street in Kensington, Brooklyn, after another wintery day/one of the parrots Natalie is currently living with in…

A snow covered street in Kensington, Brooklyn, after another wintery day/one of the parrots Natalie is currently living with in Caracas. This bird has a huge vocabulary of Venezuelan slang and none of it is polite.
We are @NatalieKeyssar, an American photographer from New York in Caracas, and @VeronicaSanchis, a Venezuelan photographer from Caracas in New York. #echosight #doubleexposure #montage #multiexposure #collab #blend #mashup #caracas #newyork #rudebird by echosight (via http://instagram.com/p/zZ7ewlpIPK/)

GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal…

“GCHQ also claimed the ability to manipulate the billing servers of cell companies to “suppress” charges in an effort to conceal the spy agency’s secret actions against an individual’s phone. Most significantly, GCHQ also penetrated “authentication servers,” allowing it to decrypt data and voice communications between a targeted individual’s phone and their telecom provider’s network. A note accompanying the slide asserted that the spy agency was “very happy with the data so far and [was] working through the vast quantity of product.””

–The Great SIM Heist: How Spies Stole the Keys to the Encryption Castle (viaiamdanw)