Paul Flannery

Physical ascii

Paul — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 17:16:51 +0000

  .adAHHHAbn.
 dHHHHHHHHHHHb
dHHHHHHHHHHHHHb
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
VHHHHHHHHHHHHHP
 YHHHHHHHHHHHP
  "^YUHHHUP^"
      "~"

Power-up as a unit of measurement

Paul — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:41:59 +0000

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The band who play the same song over and over

Paul — Sun, 22 Aug 2010 22:54:43 +0000

The band played the same song over and over, they sped it up, they slowed it down and they played it every tempo in-between. Through repetition came refinement and they played it perfectly every time. Sometimes, they would take it in turns to embellish certain chords with intricate trills, but only as an in-joke between members of the band. The audience who heard the music only as background noise, failed to notice. The playlist, despite its simplicity, was carefully constructed; the band would watch the crowd from the wings during the build up to the performance and rate them out of five. Each member would score and when everyone had had their turn they would calculate the average. The average would determine where in the song to start and set the tempo to finish the final repetition. Half scores would be rounded down. The higher the average, the faster the final turn; the more the crowd needed a crescendo. Nothing else was left to chance. They wanted to perform as though they were an mp3 on repeat and add nothing more to the room than an iPod docked to a sound system. They wanted to be ignored as an act and be experienced as a ubiquitous sonic event; people should be occupied with other things while they played. They aimed to suffocate the experience of watching a band play live and whenever possible make it a non-event. Shortly after forming they wrote a manifesto of sorts, it was effectively an agenda in three parts, it went like this: we want to be one song on a multi-gigabyte storage device (their words) set to shuffle; we want to be paused at any point; we are a physical download.

Untitled 7.2

Paul — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:30:13 +0000

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Thinner air

Paul — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 22:25:48 +0000

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Untitled 4.1

Paul — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 22:14:30 +0000

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Morning

Paul — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:39:05 +0000

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The cognitive responsibility of tape

Paul — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 12:26:14 +0000

After some time, the VAX crashed. It was on a service contract, and Digital was called. Laura Creighton was not called although she was on the short list of people who were supposed to be called in case of problem. The Digital Field Service engineer came in, removed the disk from the drive, figured it was then okay to remove the tape and make the drive writeable, and proceeded to put a scratch disk into the drive and run diagnostics which wrote to that drive.

Well, diagnostics for disk drives are designed to shake up the equipment. But monkey brains are not designed to handle the electrical signals they received. You can imagine the convulsions that resulted. Two of the monkeys were stunned, and three died. The Digital engineer needed to be calmed down; he was going to call the Humane Society. This became known as the Great Dead Monkey Project, and it leads of course to the aphorism I use as my motto: You should not conduct tests while valuable monkeys are connected, so “Always mount a scratch monkey.”

http://edp.org/monkey.htm

Untitled 3.3

Paul — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 08:47:49 +0000

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18 terabytes of space

Paul — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 10:46:26 +0000

“Lots of westerners came out to Afghanistan to help the Afghans become a modern democracy. [T]here is an art expert who has come to teach them about Conceptual Art. [She] starts with a group of young Afghan artists watching film of an installation in a western gallery, then she shows them Marcel Duchamp’s 1917 urinal.

She is very keen to get them to say that if anyone did what Duchamp did in today’s Afghanistan then they would be put in prison. It is interesting that the Afghans in the room, though they are polite, seem to disagree.” – From Kabul: City Number One – Part 10 by Adam Curtis