Hello World

I’m really getting into the idea of learning some programming. Maybe not really difficult, complicated programming, but the kind of simple language coding set up for people who want to do audio/visual things. You know, programming for artists.
This past week was full of information and experience (and some intense moments). I had my first first-hand experience with hardware. An Arduino board. It’s so pretty! All blue and silver. Shiny! I got the LED to blink and everything. Bending little wires can be so satisfying.
So Hello Wired World. I'm all ready for the next baby step.

On Thursday I went to Tresor (an historic techno club) for the closing of their IOSONO speaker system. It’s a wave-field synthesis system (if you don’t know what that is—and I don’t expect one would—look it up online. There are sites with graphics that can explain it much better than myself.) It was the closing because apparently the system wasn’t being used effectively by DJ’s who played there. So for the last night they got a DJ who could really use the system: Monolake, a fairly well known electronic/computer music artist. Also known as Robert Henke...also known as one of my teachers.
As you can imagine, it was superbly entertaining to see him in that context, turning little knobs and frenetically bobbing his shaved head above multicolored blinking sound equipment. The same goes for the various classmates of mine who showed up. We danced and geeked out, discussing and critiquing various aspects of the sound system and our teacher’s set.

Oh, did you know you can make music with waterdrops? And flame? You should check out Paul de Marinis. He came to give a talk/presentation about his work. It was amazing to hear about things he thought of….like playing holograms of records with lasers (this really works!). He was using computers in the early 70’s already to program music and also did things like hack Mr. Spells for the first time. He did a lot of things that were very humorous but obviously took huge amounts of dedication and effort. He came to give this talk on Monday and became something of an instant hero to those of us students who were present.

email excerpts from november

It's hard not to want to sleep so much more these days. It's 5 here and of course already dark dark dark. The birds have been flying around and around from roof to roof, a greater gathering of wings. Meanwhile a christmas market has sprung up at Alexander Platz. I can see the little wooden shacks through a space between two buildings and the crescent curve of a ferris wheel above another. I'm glad there will be lights there since sometimes the days barely seem to get light at all. And even then, by the time I get out of class it is dusk.

Today in uni we had a workshop where we talked about game sound. It was mostly a review of the history of computer games and how sound effects and music has been integrated. It was pretty interesting, if only because I know so little about the computer game world and never had a playstation or gameboy or something similar. It was cool to consider the way people went about inventing games and how they developed in parallel to computers. The fact that games for computer have been around almost as long as computers themselves says a lot about the way we think about using new mediums. Like the original space shooter game that took a whole room of machines to run. And now we have little silver bullet boxes that blip and light and bleep and flicker.
It started me reading about the games that people are trying to develop nowadays, trying to lift the genre out of the bloody gutter of the first-person shooter. Thinking about how we interact with/through these machines never ceases to confound me.

Pink Umbrella and Me

Berlin was a cold shudder today. Wind and sudden precipitation transforming the way home from my university into a great northern scene, images of Russian winter wisped before my eyes as I walked in a dimmed world. The falling snow filtered city sounds to a white noise giving the feeling of singular isolation. In the semi-stillness the soft patsch patsch of snowdrops on a pink umbrella accompanied my steps.

Pink umbrella and I treaded onward, slanting against the force of stinging wind. My hands reddened around its ice clear handle.

Snow muted the faces that passed, the black coats, the snow spotted girls and indiscernible bundles of scarves and woolen hats. It iced the steel girders of the station, frosted glass storefronts and washed out the cobblestones and curbs.

In the gray tundra from train to apartment the oil slicks on the tram tracks were the only colorful things we passed.

The man met in the elevator and I rustled our dripping umbrellas in warmhearted camaraderie, ruffling their wings—she a great patterned bird of paradise shedding the wetness of a tropical storm.

the long and short way to a sometimes home

the first of august saw a great English exodus aus berlin. Ms Rose, Flic and Softleyandy all headed, for various reasons and intended stays, back to their great brittle island. Whom will I ever learn English from now?
As always when one leaves a place, a great week of gathering and frenzied friendliness preceded, which was as lovely as the people and places it involved. Sitting by shimmering willow-edged water, or within the warm candlelight colored walls of a corner bar, many of the moments passing seemed suspended in an everyplace, not here or there. Orientationless and temporarily eternal.

It reminds me that I only have two weeks myself. It is time to start working on projects in earnest.

Explosions and Unkindnesses

There are fireworks out my window again. The past couple nights ive caught the display.
I don’t know what they are from, but I can just see them, far to the right, only a little bit blocked by a building some streets away.
They are wonderfully colored—subtle hues somehow—and go on for a suprising length of time.
My favorites are a certain kind of very very large white chrysthanemum ones, that have starry trails on the inside and light up everythin around.

Tonight there was something even more striking though. A fluttering of wings below the window. The cyclic migration of dark shapes. Many, dark, flapping, shapes. From the roof next door, over the trees, past the windows here, and back to alight on neighboring building-tops.
Ravens.
A swarm of them—or an unkindness, as it’s called.
They cry in a way that makes me think they must be joking; making a parody of themselves.
Their bodies look so heavy, but they whirl around in their multitude and I stare down at them—and up at them and sideways as they circle—transfixed.

Whatever are they doing? What are these mesmerizing movements? What could they be plotting? To be soaring and gyrating so aimlessly and so intentionally?

They take a few more turns and then somehow disappear. A momentary distraction by a firework explosion and, suddenly, the birds have vanished into night.

Marigolds and mums are still blooming burning blue above Berlin, but the night is cold, so I close the window.

Good mornnggnggshshzstaphzzshzzztaptapzsshshhsgzzzgzgh.....

Unbelievable. Awoken to drilling. Sharp, penetrating and, worst of all, impossible to localize. Repetitive but completely irregular making it absolutely nerve wrecking. The walls, the ceiling, the floor, my bed, my head: all these could be the origin of the sound which was not just a sound but a palpable physical disturbance. The very air molecules shuddering with every grating, vibrating drill.
Construction? Destruction? Mass disruption? The drilling was broken by an irrhythmic hammering. Even higher pitched and almost more irritating because of its unpredictability. It was tinny and cut off but still so unforgiving.
Unacceptable! I say, inexcusable! Curses! And curses again! And where to throw these worthless sounds? From what direction was this unendurable noise even coming? What untenable objections to a maddening, maddening, maddening sound!
Anytime this would be irritating, but at 8 in the morning? Torture.
Unable to stay one more moment I ran out of the apartment and began to pace the hall like a crazed dog—hunting, ears rigid, for the possible source. Upstairs? Downstairs? Up. I went two floors on the lift. 22nd floor. The halls were literally shaking. So was a very livid I.
By the 24th floor I couldn’t tell if it was louder or not. Still in an underslept dreamstate I gave up and went back to bury my head between pillow and bed. I started to imagine that a giant was taking a mega enormous drill down the whole side of the building At some point the drilling died down, but not before strange dreams emerged in which I was still restless, hunting on the balcony of the highest floor, for the source. Barging in and out of people’s private rooms, in and out of vibrating halls until giving up and retiring once again, in an endless cycle, back to my bed; only to be importuned myself by barging dream people coming in to meddle with my dream windows.

pitchers part I: living and studying

Ok here it is! What you’ve all been waiting for! A semi-demi-update in picture edition. brought to you by berlin-so-far productions.

i rent a place from friends. this is the family, she's a photographer, he's a musician. cute no?

the view from my windows, ta da
in case i need to check the time, two clock towers! (rainbow, limited edition)

and this is the sunset sideit looks over Hackescher Markt.
i wanted to take a picture of the vertical view to the bottom but i dont know if i have—oops i dropped my camera from the 18th floor—insurance.

here is berlina in my kitchen, on a night lotte was here and we all wanted brownies and ice cream and banananas foster.

note the e f on the wall. i rearranged it to my liking but it was already there before i moved in.
fate?
p.s. that was the most awesome dessert night of my life.




so..sound studies. here are some people
jan who makes records and marco from venezuela who documents everything and has amazing video art.
we explored an former brewery and
found some underground artists studio.

i mean literally underground.
















we are all working on a project about Siemensstadt, an old industrial settlement to the west.
jana and marco and i went there to do ground research and find out what this place was about. so we climbed a refrigerator.


found some tracks.







went through a dark rusted gate




and found an alternate universe

well, thats all for today. photos upload so slowly! tune in for the next installment: people, music and madness!

nightwalker

It is late. I am restless, and descend from my tower to pace. survey the realm.
Places should all be closed by this hour, concerts over, kids asleep. And there is a certain stillness, quietness to a Sunday midnight. Still, there are many many exceptions. Oranienburger is decked in its perpetual post dusk glow (tourists roam drunken, lost, loud, overwhelmed, euphoric; prostitutes pout—dotting the way like sugar candy in plastic pink wrapping and black laces; dealers lounge in the gated doorways of Tacheles courtyard; the new 24 hour health food snack store glares green from across the tram station, and all is right with the mitte world). So I wander in a wide circle, past these lights, around to Tor (the last fruit and beer stands still open, grapes for sale) peer in schokoladen as I pass, then back down through some winding way finding the right path half by instinct and half by following the blinking light of the tv tower.
It is still one of the things I love about berlin that you can walk down not just one, but even two or three streets in the very middle of the city and not see a soul. As though the night retains a certain sacredness.

why do we find out all we would have wanted to know
as soon as we don't want to know it.

sleeping like a baby

Babies filled my dreams,
Babies with oversized heads and eyes.
One with a robotic looking thing for a neck. The head atop it shaped elongated like a fetus.

On the subway somehow a group of us who were gathered for a reason I now forget, passively resisted the controllers of the train car. We refused to pay, to leave, we just wanted to get back home. At the critical moment when the controllers first came the man across the aisle, eye twinkling, looked at me and said ‘tar?’
I knew what that meant.
‘tar.’ I answered. We shook hands.
That’s how the resistance started.
When we got to where we needed to go we dispersed in small groups. My friend, I and a man with a crooked nose went to an abandoned ice cream factory, or a working one that my friend owned. Upstairs was an apartment (christines? Where lived her mother father, grandmother) with colorful but yellowed wallpaper. That’s where the babies were. It was just one at first, sleeping. But then they started waking up.

for whom

I can hear church bells out my window, interspersed at various distances. Muted by buildings, tilted widows and that gathering dusty fog that seems to settle here of an evening. Sunday, they began at half past five and are still at it. It’s something that still strikes me as quaint, church bells; something that shouldn’t be part of the city soundscape. In my dirty old town, sunday bells were the toll of ice cream trucks.

Its hard for me to hold up the first few classes (the first week) of the sound studies program against what I expected, because I have no clear idea exactly what I expected. Dissent is brewing over the sound anthropology section though. It turns out that the professor who was there before needs to leave for a while, so he is not teaching our class and there is a woman instead. She has written a lot on music and philosophy and so on and so forth and must have been deemed the woman for the job. But her program, though it includes fascinating materials and themes, is very different than the focus before. Many of the students, myself included, find it far too much music theory and traditional aesthetics and not enough of the sense-based acoustic communication approach that the previous professor outlined. How to reconcile this? to move toward the former themes without alienating our present professor? We will figure something out. The side result of this is that, I think, we are banding together more as a group.

Ah, the group. its quite funny. There are a people who seriously studied music (medieval chamber choir) and have done sound to installation art, a guy who studied acoustic engineering/mastering, musicians of rock bands, electronica, a couple people from punk music, a pr rep who’s done logopaedic singing, people who’ve done music to animation or video or commercials even, an engineer from Tokyo who’s done fluxus-type art pieces, a mixed media photo-documenter from Venezuela and then there’s, well, me. Aged across the board. I’m definitely curious to see how and what turns out. also remind me to talk about sam auinger.

The bells have stopped. It’s six.

it says so

When i heard we were to present ourselves for a 10 15 minutes and i wondered what i should say about myself and what i would present my first instinct was to turn to books. This i think in itself is a good indication of the way i go about things.

reservations

Finally by the time the bus comes i have considered the 6 plus hour train ride. I barely want to look out the windows to the last views of the bielefeld highway.
The boy a seat ahead reseves the front windows with two beers so that he can stare down at his sodoku.
We pass eckendorferstr and i feel...sad! or not so much missing as though i did not get enough sleep. Was that only this morning that they left, I accompanied on four hours sleep to the train station to bid farewell, on a long flight to ny?

I miss them already, I am anxious to go, I am anxious that I am going, I miss my space already, maybe it is the small sleep but I start to cry half a dozen times before breakfast.

Aha! I am here, am in berlin. Disoriented and sleepyheaded or dreamachy as much as six hours sedentary bus ride as sleeplessness.
Sibylle’s baby is crying in the next room, she awws and oohs to calm it. Mostly it is a cute bundle, pimply at the moment with some sort of babyacne, which just makes it look so comical and easier to laugh at, which is good, because that makes it smile too.