With time, @Horse_ebooks regained its status as a mysterious source of wisdom and art, and “Everything happens so much” came to be a mantra. Twitter users have called it the “general tweet of the decade” and “the defining text of our age.” It has been used as the title for essays, songs, at least one novel, and an orchestral arrangement.
(via Kaitlyn Tiffany)
Farmers Manual – Mobile FM (AM)
“Done with the utmost of improvised, joyous spirit the two pieces seem to be restrained by absolutely nothing. This total freedom results in something that becomes completely and deeply compelling, a true joy to behold.”
“Employing a greater deal of noise and chaos, Farmers Manual ratchet up the tension to unfathomable degrees while layers veer right into pure cacophony. Distortion layers on top of itself, resulting in an ornate series of patterns. By the latter half Farmers Manual only lets the distortion and noise take over, with any trace of humanity fully scrubbed out.”
Farmers Manual – Sonderzeichenmassaker
“Always ready for a spot of fun, Farmers Manual ensures that they destroy everything in their path. The tension they employ throughout results in a surprisingly great deal of joy, the way they allow everything to burst forth in a tremendous almost flowering of sound. Very much in the noise realm of things, they make sure that the song’s unpredictability allows for a few jump scares, while they increase the volume into uncomfortable degrees. Outright amazing, they prove exactly how to allow sound to completely lose it while documenting the results.“
“Something particularly unique to Farmers Manual, they never make a grand entrance. Their emphasis relies on a steady patience, one that allows a stream of consciousness approach to songwriting, or textural exploration. It feels quite natural what they do, allowing their sound to speak for itself. Over the course of the piece this proves to be true for they take a light touch the sound, only gently nudging it when absolutely necessary. For the most part, it is the sound that does most of the work, growing with an unrealized kind of potential. About halfway through the piece the pulsing rhythm starts to truly assert itself, allowing for a great deal of madness right on the periphery to gain considerable clout. When the piece becomes unruly, it truly becomes all-encompassing, offering no escape from the onslaught.”
http://www.beachsloth.com/farmers-manual-sonderzeichenmassaker.html
Farmers Manual – Stat = Conjecture Pirayune Snart
“Is Farmers Manual, after years of relaxing at art exhibits, finally about to become normal? Considering this particular piece’s main description is“farmersmanual dropped some bluish green squares on the floor” the answer is thankfully no. One of the more unique and sorely missed groups of extreme computer musicians, there is something quite intense about what they do. Rhythms are mangled, textures warped, and any discernible reference point to actual genres a mere accident.”
“Jagged little edges and crackles introduce the piece. From there the tiny textures have a near-funk like element to them. Noise emerges until it virtually collapses upon itself.“
“With “Stat = Conjecture Pirayune Snart ” Farmers Manual prove they are the oddity of all oddities, a group that remains committed to the most abnormal of sonic explorations.”
http://www.beachsloth.com/farmers-manual-stat-conjecture-pirayune-snart.html
Hang’s photographs carried the tags of nude, youth, sexuality, social norms, gay?, even in China!, and seemed enough for a story. That’s what I went with; the significance of Ren Hang would not become clear to me until a few years later. This interview was originally conducted in Mandarin. It has been translated and edited for length and clarity. Interview by Erik Bernhardsson. Translation by Dier Zhang.
Facial Weaponization Communiqué: Fag Face
Facial Weaponization Suite protests against biometric facial recognition–and the inequalities these technologies propagate–by making “collective masks” in workshops that are modeled from the aggregated facial data of participants, resulting in amorphous masks that cannot be detected as human faces by biometric facial recognition technologies. The masks are used for public interventions and performances. One mask, the Fag Face Mask, generated from the biometric facial data of many queer men’s faces, is a response to scientific studies that link determining sexual orientation through rapid facial recognition techniques. Another mask explores a tripartite conception of blackness: the inability of biometric technologies to detect dark skin as racist, the favoring of black in militant aesthetics, and black as that which informatically obfuscates. A third mask engages feminism’s relations to concealment and imperceptibility, taking veil legislation in France as a troubling site that oppressively forces visibility. A fourth mask considers biometrics’ deployment as a security technology at the Mexico-US border and the nationalist violence it instigates. These masks intersect with social movements’ use of masking as an opaque tool of collective transformation that refuses dominant forms of political representation.
Zach Blas. 2012
13 weeks of persistent and exciting struggle in the Automated Trading Championship 2012 are over and the winners already can celebrate their victory! All Expert Advisors have been stopped and it is time to announce the final results. For many weeks, we have covered the course of the competition events publishing interesting articles, statistical reports and exciting interviews with the most successful developers in “News” section. Someone has managed to earn fame among thousands of traders, while someone has ended in a fiasco but received invaluable experience and knowledge. We congratulate everyone on the completion of the ATC 2012 and honor the winners!
Welcome to the 2013 edition of the Bruce Sterling/Jon Lebkowsky State of the World conversation/rantfest. Bruce and Jon, old friends and rambunctious digerati, have made this annual mess every year of the 21st century; this year’s model should be particularly interesting, given the current hyperactive state of the world and the abundance of available conceptual lenses.
http://www.well.com/conf/inkwell.vue/topics/459/State-of-the-World–2013-Bruce-St-page01.html
Joseph T. Goodman successfully deciphered the complicated system of the Maya calendar. He published his results in 1897, describing a “Long Count” system of a “count of days” based on several units or periods of increasingly larger size: the k'in (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (360 days), k'atun (7200 days), and bak'tun (144,000 days). The ancient Maya kept track of time using this system, which was combined with additional counts of 260 days (the tzolk'in) and 365 days (the haab) to produce Long Count dates. Goodman believed there was also a larger “Great Cycle” of 13 bak'tuns (1,872,000 days) and determined that the start of the present Great Cycle was on 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 8 Cumk'u (that is 13 bak'tunob, 0 k'atunob, 0 tunob, 0 winalob, and 0 k'inob, followed by counts on the tzolk'in and haab). Later scholarship showed that this was a sacred “Creation” date for the ancient Maya, who referred to it in their mythology as a kind of “birth” of the present world. The Gregorian equivalent of this date is August 11, 3114 BCE. The next day was 0.0.0.0.1, with each day clicking another unit in the count. According to scholars who support Goodman’s idea of a 13-bak'tun Great Cycle, the current period will conclude on 13.0.0.0.0 4 Ajaw 3 K'ank'in, the Gregorian equivalent of which is December 21, 2012 (or possibly December 23, or yet something else…)