[PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies

[Jonathan Wilkes]

--- On Wed, 12/22/10, Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca> wrote:

> From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju at artengine.ca>
> Subject: Re: [PD] [PD-announce] Piksel video report: Sonification of IT censorship technologies
> To: "Marco Donnarumma" <devel at thesaddj.com>
> Cc: pd-list at iem.at
> Date: Wednesday, December 22, 2010, 8:02 PM
> On Mon, 20 Dec 2010, Marco Donnarumma
> wrote:
> 
> >> If one can't reasonably hear the censorship in it,
> is it appropriate to
> >> advertise the work using such a title ?
> > How would you define a 'reasonable listening of
> censorship'?
> 
> Well, perhaps there isn't one that can be done with IP
> addresses. IP addresses don't mean much to people, even less
> than phone numbers do, because the DNS and WHOIS systems do
> their best to hide those numbers away from people. There are
> hardly any well-known IP addresses apart from 127.0.0.1 and
> 192.168.0.1, which are reserved for things outside of the
> internet anyway.
> 
> Then there is the problem of putting numbers in any way
> that the numbers could be recovered (or recovered enough)
> from the data. In the case of IP addresses, anything one bit
> away is a totally distinct address, so, if such distinctions
> are hard to hear, you aren't really playing the IP address,
> but rather, a fragment of it. The way you play it, even if
> someone could make sense of MIDI notes as high as 255 (when
> even just 140 is above Nyquist...), there are 24
> combinations that would sound the same (for most IP
> addresses), because in an IP address, the order of the bytes
> is important, which is not rendered as such (you'd be either
> preserving the order or doing anything else that amounts to
> doing the same). Thus there are many combinations of
> non-banned addresses that sound exactly the same as the
> banned ones.
> 
> Both things led me to think that in this work, the IP
> addresses are secondary, the fact that they are banned
> addresses is secondary, and the concept of censorship is
> secondary.
> 
> That said, I don't know how censorship could enter a music
> piece as music.

Throw Beethoven's Eroica into a DAW and replace all the sforzandi 
with a 1000hZ sine tone.

-Jonathan

> 
> However, there are obvious ways to make it enter as lyrics
> : you write a song against censorship, and then it will get
> censored in China, and now it's doubly relevant to the topic
> of censorship.
> 
> > Sure, but in this case soundfile is only for online
> documentation, the work is exhibited as multichannel audio
> installation, the audience can interact with the software
> and read relevant information about the how/what/why.
> 
> Ah, that's very nice. Will you put some of it online one
> day ?
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________________________________
> | Mathieu Bouchard ---- tél: +1.514.383.3801 ----
> Villeray, Montréal, QC
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