Harley Byrne vs. Success

“Whichever way I turned, nothing appeared but danger and difficulty… I had no alternative, but to lie down and perish…

I reflected that no human prudence or foresight could possibly have averted my present sufferings.” 

(1795)

"I shall set sail for the east with the fixed resolution to discover the termination of the Niger or perish in the attempt. Though all the Europeans who are with me should die, and though I were myself half dead, I would still persevere, and if I could not succeed in the object of my journey, I would at least die on the Niger." 

(1805)

- Mungo Park, adventurer, idiot.

Harley Byrne makes his screen debut in A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear at this weekend’s Abandon Normal Devices festival – where the festival theme is ‘Success’. Given that Byrne’s seemingly impossible mission is to record and make available for download all the world’s music ever, and given that across countless episodes of the UNIVERSAL EAR time travel adventure serial he always gets his track, we at the Institute have put together an 8 point guide to success, Harley-style. A shorts-wearing, trans-dimensional loner he may be, but many of these rules are adaptable to our own lives here, and now, whenever that may be:

1. Never learn. Byrne’s career can be defined in terms of what Debord referred to as ‘cyclical time’ – but what we might think of as ‘sitcom time’. Every episode of UNIVERSAL EAR is a reboot. We have no idea what order the episodes are supposed to be in because there is zero character development. Byrne is good at his job because he does the same thing again and again without getting any big ideas. His unwavering self-confidence is rooted not in a superiority complex, but in his faith in himself as the right cog in the right machine. Envy the man who doesn’t even know how stupid he is. He doesn’t know what he is missing, or that he doesn’t know that he doesn’t know what he’s missing.

2. Never doubt. Life is such a varied and wonderful thing that it is easy to find examples to prove whatever argument you started out with at the beginning. Byrne has an infinite number of cultures to visit before he can complete his mission: if he doubted for a moment the validity of his own perspective, what ‘self’ could he truly expect to represent in the social sphere? A robust personality is like a non-lossy file format. If the you that’s here today, reading this, wants to prevail, you will zip yourself up and change for no-one.

Also, avoid listening too carefully.  People have a lot to say and you’re not going to like much of it.

3. Never mind the paradox. Physics is a pretty subjective affair and you’d be a fool to let it stand in your way. In the great imperialist tradition, Byrne considers his own time and place to be sacrosanct, and to be the definitive watchtower for all human history (and future). It is Manchester, 2012, where the definitive catalogue of all music ever is being created and consecrated. Therefore, if he drops the odd causality wrapper elsewhere, leaves behind the occasional empty tin of paradox, well, people should just be glad he’s graced them with a visit and preserved their music forever – even if, on occasion, they themselves no longer have access to it.

4. Align your modern wants with your primal needs. However sophisticated our personal mission statement might be, we’re all fundamentally in this for the same thing: a good meal, a tussle in the long grass, and perhaps the reciprocated emotional affections of one or more objects of our obsessive fascination. This is the man that kissed Turing after the arrest; played love games with vegetables in ancient Greece; and caressed killbots to ecstasy in the year 2019. As a lone field agent far from home, Byrne draws little distinction between executing a task and R&R. The world is his music studio and he’ll create the right recording conditions by whatever means necessary. Further, he conducts his work with two key sexual principles in mind: that you win someone’s trust by taking off their pants, and that when a woman is rescued, she expects to be kissed.

5. Rationalise, don’t compromise. Harley Byrne would never knowingly go home with anything less than a pure recording of the track he’s set out for – captured in perfect conditions and with the appropriate phonic and metaphonic settings.  But he is quite capable, without any sense of cynicism, of reconsidering what it is that he should consider a ‘pure recording’. Such is the malleable beauty of the human mind. As the great thinker Costanza once said, “it’s not a lie if you believe it.”

6. Good manners will only get you so far. Byrne is a gentleman of the old school, but as a time traveller his personal code is not always appropriate to the situation he finds himself in. Thus, a quick analysis of the UNIVERSAL EAR episodes available to us reveals that over and over again, he is forced to scale down his etiquette until he gets results. Why not try applying Byrne’s 3-tier back-up plan next time you have trouble at work or in your personal life? --

Plan A: Ask nicely.
Plan B: Seduce the antagonist.
Plan C: Tie everyone up, get your recording and go home.

7. Abandon normal devices. If you want to achieve something unique, you’re going to need unique tools. Byrne’s shed-built recording device, the Universal Ear, is more than a microphone. The Ear – a kind of gun-shaped sound vagina – can be used to interface with dumb computers, pick locks using complex wave arguments, and has a flashlight function with three different settings. Byrne has even used the warmth of the Ear’s hard drive to fry an egg in order to avoid starving to death. Whilst stuck in a tree.

8. What did we achieve today? What went wrong? This one’s not from Byrne but from our production process. At the end of the day at Universal Ear Studios, before the doors are unlocked, everyone sits down and discusses how the day went in the above terms, while panicking about what we’ve left ourselves to achieve the next day. Apologies are shared; excuses spluttered. It is important to always end on a What Went Wrong – because if you’re not going to spend all night staring at the ceiling, dwelling on your failures, how do you ever hope to succeed?

UNIVERSAL EAR: A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear plays at Manchester’s Cornerhouse this Friday at 1pm as part of AND Shorts Programme 1.

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear to premiere in Manchester this Friday

Thrills in the hills! Love, tussling and deceit at dizzying altitudes!  The first episode of UNIVERSAL EAR has now been completely (p)reconstructed and will premiere at the 4th Abandon Normal Devices festival in Manchester this Friday.

There’s love, tussling and deceit at dizzying altitudes as heroic ex-postman Harley Byrne travels back in time to 19^th century Romania to record the world’s first ever remotely delivered electronic music. While recovering from a dramatic splash-landing, he finds himself falling head-over-heels for his host, the sultry inventress Nola Luna. Is she really all she seems? Will she let him record her electronic ‘Orchitron’? Or will Harley Byrne finally be thwarted in his ongoing mission: to record and make available for download all the world’s music, ever? Find out in...

A Flea Orchestra In Your Ear @ Abandon Normal Devices
EVENT: AND 2012 Shorts, Programme 1
WHERE: Cornerhouse, 70 Oxford Street, Manchester, M1 5NH
WHEN: Friday, 31st August 2012, 1pm
COST: £3 - £5.50 (advanced booking recommended)

 

I told Turing, 'Your machine does not think.'

Update, January 2013: the full ebook from which the below is an extract can now be downloaded for free.

 
Here follows an extract from the memoirs of Harley Byrne, concerning his brief association with Alan Turing, whose centenary it is today. The full chapter, entitled Listlessness In Early Automated Composition Devices, will be released in ebook form later in the year. 

As we join them, Harley Byrne - whose ongoing mission is to record and make available for download all the world's music ever - has travelled back in time to 1952 and tracked down the "mathematician and homosexual" Alan Turing. Having insinuated his way into his home, Byrne finally convinces Turing to take Byrne to his place of work - the institution we now know as the University of Manchester.

"[I]f there was one figure who really stood out among the community, it was Turing himself. He would jog to work the twelve miles from Wilmslow and, to counter the rains for which the region is quite justifiably famed, had invented an aerodynamic umbrella which attached to the shoulders of his running vest. Such was Turing’s involvement in his work, he would often forget to remove the vest or the umbrella upon arrival at the university. Not even his most trusted colleagues felt close enough to him to draw his attention to it. Instead, he would wander the campus all day, his obliviousness to the construction over his head proving a testament to its lightweight design. Here comes old dry-hair, mischievous students would hiss at each other in the canteen. I don’t think he noticed. Anyway, we were the only ones in shorts, and I think this helped him to trust me.

On the third day, after lunch, he consented to show me his latest contraption: the automated music composition device whose output was my quarry. This computing machine, Turing told me, was the closest thing to artificial human intelligence that had been built at the university so far. His colleagues referred to it as the electronic brain. Turing had named it ERIC52.

Turing had occupied an unused office on the fourth floor of the university Main Building and filled it with machinery of his own design and labour. The electronic brain filled 90% of the room’s space, being comprised of a dozen irregularly stacked washing machine-sized cabinets and a console unit mounted on a reinforced cake trolley. The outermost cabinets were open-fronted, their switches, dials and sockets bared for all-comers to see. But, by Turing’s account, visitors were rare: it was a personal project, he had few trusted allies at the university, and those with whom he was friendly knew to keep a respectful distance.

Forcing my way into what tiny working space the room held (between Turing, myself and the cake trolley, not one of us could move without adjusting the others), I ran my good hand over the flickering lights of an output panel. The machine vibrated invisibly, and I closed my eyes to better assess its sound life, the most prominent features being an unmusical inner roar and a clucking sound that I couldn’t place. I sensed Turing bristle at my shoulder and with some difficulty lowered my arm to my side.

'So this is it then?' I asked, raising my voice over the din. 'The electronic brain?'

'Please don’t call it that.'   

I continued to stare at the electronic brain, unsure what to say.

At length, I asked Turing, 'Can it think?'

'Ask it,' he told me.

'Ask it?' I looked the steel towers up and down. 'But how would it know?'

Turing side-stepped the issue: 'It’s just one way of looking at your question. If ERIC52 can convince you it thinks, to the extent that you would be unable to distinguish its answers from those of an intellectually functioning adult human, then who are we to say it can’t think?'

Turing turned on his axis and pulled me by the sling until we were back to back, with him facing the console trolley and I, the brain. I was to put my questions to Turing, who would feed them into the brain via teleprinter tape. Turing would then translate ERIC52’s answers, which came back as dots on a  cathode ray tube, into the new Queen’s English. As such, the reader should note that the following interaction took place over the course of six and a half hours:

Can you think?

NO.

Okay. Thank you.

I’M JUST A COMPUTER.

Yes.

NO THINKING HERE.

Righto.

DEFINITELY NOT.

I see.

CAN YOU?

Yes sir.

OKAY. WE KNOW WHERE WE STAND THEN.

I revolved until I was facing Turing and told him, under my breath, 'Your machine does not think.' He ran his finger along the cathode ray tube, apparently deep in thought.

'No,' agreed Turing, without turning to face me. 'But he does seem a little more chatty than usual.'"

The Institute will be publishing full chapters of Harley Byrne's memoirs, UNIVERSAL EAR, in ebook format later in the year. To be kept up to date, please join the UNIVERSAL EAR Facebook Page. For further information, visit the official UNIVERSAL EAR website (work in progress).

Harley Byrne: Library of Postures and Expressions

Readymade emotions

It is not uncommon, in the world of television and the cinematic serial, for the producers of a new show to create libraries of their main characters’ tics and poses, in effect "backing up" a serial's stars in case they should become lost or disfigured before the end of the run. We certainly believe this to have been the case with the original UNIVERSAL EAR, for not only did director Francis Dove place no value on authenticity of emotional performance, he planned to create entire unofficial episodes using just off-cuts, bad takes and whatever other footage he could get his hands on without alerting Harley Byrne (who played himself in the original) to his scheme.

So it is that, one week into the Institute’s short-lived Universal Ear Studios venture, I opened the day’s work with a brief lecture on the science of facial expressions, ahead of a planned afternoon of filming stock emotions for the UNIVERSAL EAR-remake library. Truth be told, I had pretty much thrown the speech together in a bar whilst waiting for Lockwood to get home with the keys the previous night, but all the same I was somewhat put out that he failed to take Duchenne seriously until the latter’s name cropped up in the former’s Acting Basics book a few days later.

There is clearly far more work to be done on this subject, and it is one of my great regrets of the Universal Ear Studios era that we did not have time to spend more days like this – speculating and creating standard parts, rather than zealously pursuing the completion of entire episodes. (A transcript of our ‘therapy’ session from that day’s end is available on request).

The lecture was open to the public without entry fee, but only Lockwood attended. I positioned myself between him and the door:

Faces, Electropuncture, and the Actor’s Craft

“Whilst facial expressions are thought, with a few ambiguous exceptions, to be universal (cross-cultural), the different proportions of an individual’s face can cause confusion. For example, somebody born po-faced might not necessarily be miserable – it’s just the way their nose came out.

As such, we calibrate our own minds to read the faces of people we know – to make minute personal adjustments to the rules their faces generally play by - and this also applies to the familiar stars of a regular adventure serial. We know, as it were, what they can achieve with their face, and we understand their feelings within those parameters.

There are three alternative processes, to my knowledge, to elicit a facial expression:



Above: polished-up diagram of 3 methods for eliciting a facial expression (terms in brackets refer to what can go wrong with each process). Below: two charts to each be considered synonymous with the above.

Concerned as we are here with controlled methods of production, we shall naturally consider following the ‘science’ route, as pioneered by Monsieur Duchenne, who would isolate and faradize the facial muscles of his heroic volunteers in order to learn more about the mechanics of emotional manifestion – face-wise. Duchenne de Boulogne (1806-1875) believed that one could not read moral character from facial expressions - only emotions. However, we can posit that a series of such emotions – frame by frame – in the context of a particular narrative and aesthetic surroundings, allows us to at least attempt a moral or dynamic emotional analysis: and this is Cinema.

The danger, though, is to assume that cinema – or rather, photography – is Truth. It is not. It is  re-presentation, pixels or photons splattered onto a 2-dimensional screen. As such, this is what gives us license to manipulate the human face-image as a collection of symbols that hint at a real human face whilst referencing broader visual codes, from colour and geometry to landscape or circuitry. But we only have so much time today… and given that Mr Lockwood is interpreting Harley Byrne’s reinterpretation of Byrne’s own real-life experiences, we might do best to adopt (however multiply-filtered) verisimilitude as our aesthetic priority.”

So the lecture ended: and indeed, without verisimilitude of circumstances, verisimilitude of emotional expression was no picnic. My attempts to inspire Lockwood’s emotions with a range of condiments (salad dressing &tc.) or with carefully chosen images from a favourite book of mine were controversial at the time and remain a bone of contention between my muse and I to this day. However the results – if they do not speak – sneer, cower, spasm and thrust for themselves.

Please note the music is not our own work but has been shamelessly checked out from Pietro Grossi's Electronic Soundtracks library music LP.

Down The Rabbit Hole: watch online

Dear Blogspot,

Dazzled by the bright lights of Facebook and Twitter I forgot to tell you the parade film previously alluded to is now complete and ready to view online.

Here it is, anyway, complete with original song by Aidan Smith.

Cheese, Cube'd: Breaking Out and Breaking In at McHale's

Breaking Out and Breaking In is a distributed film festival co-ordinated by the ever-inspiring BLDGBLOG. Taking as its theme "the use and misuse of space in prison escapes and bank heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you’re looking for", the festival encourages geographically dispersed cinephiles to watch a series of set film texts and respond online (there will also be a bit of a do in New York when it’s all over).

On Friday 24th March, we participated with a screening of Vincenzo Natali’s Cube (1997) at Old McHale’s Mantelpiece Cinema, the Institute’s pocket picturehouse in south Manchester. The McHale’s way of doing things involves various rituals and etiquettes, such as the preference for a double bill (to draw out unexpected connections between tentatively linked films), a thematic cheeseboard (with contributions from proprietors and audience alike) and projection onto the textured wallpaper of the McHale’s chimney breast. Although discussion is encouraged at McHale’s, the Breaking In/Out event marked the first time we’ve set aside specific slots for group speculation. These breaks doubled as convenient moments to revisit the cheeseboard.

As co-proprietor of the cinema, I shall herein attempt to summarize our architecturally-oriented findings. Spoilers will abound.

Clumsy heroics

Following a last-minute revision of the evening’s program, we open with two escape-themed episodes of The New Adventures of Tarzan (1935) – Crossed Trail and Devil’s Noose. The opening escape from a temple where our hero is about to be executed/sacrificed is more about low-scale genocide than the exploitation of architectural ambiguities:



But this particular incarnation of the E.R. Burroughs adventure is more fascinating for its semi-developed, yet semi-decayed, cinematic grammar than its reflections on real-world spaces. Shaped by the naivety of its early talkie form and eroded by years of material neglect, the show seems to be put together from a mix of surviving prints. The result is a curiously compressed space-time of the jungle, where people are closer than you think and emotions can be rebooted with a cutaway:



The taming of our environment through technology and architecture has both intended and unintended results, malicious and accidental. Thus it is a series of accidents (and a neat symmetry of the elements) that results in Tarzan being suspended in the air by an animal trap (the Devil’s Noose) even as he tries to rescue love interest Ulla Vale from the firy prison of a flaming cabin.

Theory of remains

Next on the bill is Jean Rollin’s short Le Pays Loin (The Far Country, 1965). A young man meets a young woman in a nameless town and they search for a way out, through a maze of ruins and micro-enclaves. It is the dérive as nightmare, the cosmopolis as isolation cell. Nobody they meet speaks their language, and the exotic (urban) cultures they encounter remain insular, however harmless. They meet another couple who are, on reflection, probably in the same situation as our heroes, but who of course don’t speak French: the mutual frustration leads to violence. You aren’t trapped by society, as Cube will later reinforce: you are society.

If Rollin ultimately settles on truisms (love is the answer; we’re all of the same flesh), Le Pays Loin remains of interest for its contemporaneous alternative to the Situationists’ take on urban planning and cultural homogenization. Rollin’s prison-city is not the modernist rat maze the Situationists would critique and subvert: it is closer to the organic, irrational playground they idealized. Again, this dichotomy will be echoed in Cube: is civilisation a conspiracy or a series of accidents and inevitabilities?

Le Loin Pays at McHale's

Cheese Cubed

We prepare for the main feature by topping up our glasses and plates. There are thematic cheese cubes and olives on sticks (the latter rationalised by the claim “the pimento wants to break out”), and Breakaway bars for the sweet-toothed (which British delicacy proves a revelation to Colorado-reared guest – and sound designer on the Institute’s UNIVERSAL EAR project – Mr Cacioppo Belantara). There is wine.

Our initial response to Cube is to identify it as a massive game – a scaled up Mousetrap, pick-up sticks or, of course, Rubik’s cube (some recall there being a Mousetrap movie, but when do we get a Jerry Bruckheimer pick-up sticks blockbuster?). Just as the trials of life are scaled down in the toys and games with which we are socially trained, the apparatus and the stakes of these games are scaled up for our heroes, who must think, perform and behave with guile and agility to win survival. (It also recalls Natali’s Cypher (2002), where in order to prevail, Jeremy Northam’s character must play dumb and fit in with a virtual community while privately plotting his own escape).

The social agenda of the cube revolves around the idea that we each have a function to perform if our home, village or metropolis is to thrive. Whether the evil mastermind behind the cube (or his/her casting director) chose prisoners with complementary skills as an over-zealous experiment, as a demonstration, or as a cynical joke, is never revealed: the prisoners include a policeman (to direct the human traffic), a mathematician (to crack the codes), and an autistic chap - Kazan - with the spark of genius the group, and society, needs to progress. (Ms Kipling, in the audience, suggests that the special skill of the short-lived bald guy, killed off early to demonstrate the cube’s lethal logic, is ‘exposition’). The acknowledged irony is that life outside the cube is just the same: Worth, who designed the outer walls of the cube, admits to never having met the "door guy" or anyone else involved in the construction. Yet the cube is complex, rational, and continues to function.

Cube: co-operation

 

What the cube lacks, and what makes our mutual dependency in real life a little more palatable, is horizons. (The cube also lacks toilet facilities, and although the prisoners turn their noses up when Kazan pees in a corner, the subject is not brought up again during their lengthy incarceration - where do the others go?). Each of the six inner-faces of every cell is identical, these cells’ frustrating, alien omni-directionality made more absurd by the repeated image of a boot flying forlornly through the air. Each boot is tossed ostensibly to trigger booby traps, but figuratively it is searching for gravity, a firm footing, orientation, an absolute.

The vaster space of the cube as a whole is hinted at throughout the movie by its peculiar sonic life: distant, echoing creaks and moans which the characters seem to ignore and which therefore remain ambiguous to the audience – are these the sounds of the cube or are they non-diegetic, a film score of tones to pull the audience along without the comforting familiarity of rhythm or melody? A third alternative is that the sounds are subjective: half an hour in, as Holloway loses her composure, the cube groans and creaks as though its very frame is straining to keep itself together. The big reveal to characters and audience alike is that the first idea is closest: the noises occur as a side-effect of the cube’s sporadic reshuffling of cells.

We turn to Mr Hill, McHale’s guest engineer (and also the inspiration for the Institute’s 2009 choreographic exploration of mental space) for a technical take on the cube. Hill postulates on the use of rails or runners on which the inner cubes would need to slide and points out that the magnetism involved in heaving such massive blocks of metal around would likely have physio- and psychological effects on the prisoners. For that matter, the lack of oxygen could account for Quentin’s descent into psychopathy – is there not something of the submarine movie in Cube?

And so we wind up back at psychogeography, or more accurately psycho-ambience. If there was, indeed a ‘door guy’, the characters are so preoccupied with survival that they don’t have a moment to give the ‘wallpaper guy’ a nod. The inner panels of the cells are decorated in something between an art deco flourish and 1980s, Tron-esque circuit board chic. This could be Natali flagging up the need for everyday folk to build our online universe with tolerance and co-operation. But more pertinent to our characters are two particular aspects of the panel design: firstly, that the backlit walls give the impression of daylight offering hope as through a stained glass window; and secondly, the use of coloured light as a mood modifier. It would take an audience soberer than the present one to trace any consistent emotional program in the cube’s colour scheme: the autistic Kazan cannot abide the red rooms, but any effect on the others remains subliminal and unremarked upon by the prisoners.

Foreground: cheese cubes, Background: circuit board wallpaper

 

The program winds to a close, the crowds disperse, and Mr Hill and I accompany Ms Cookson back to her Withington digs, spotting on the way this most portentous sign:


It is our hope that the maze is not snapped up by evil hands. In the meantime, our Breaking Out night is deemed a success and we look forward to a Breaking In night or two: Rififi on March 19th, and perhaps Inception, which concept is made more palatable by the idea of a thematic cheese within a cheese within a cheese within a cheese.

Down The Rabbit Hole premiere in Manchester this Saturday

The Institute's short film of the 2011 Manchester Day Parade will premiere with a free screening at Manchester's Nexus Art Cafe this Saturday at 2pm.

A 5-minute Super-8 odyssey tracing the preparations and parade-day antics of the Nexus Art Cafe float (a giant travelling tea party complete with aerialist owl), the film features a specially composed new song from staff composer Aidan Smith.

The film will show during the lunch rush at Nexus, and all are welcome to venture down into the subterranean cafe to buy a brew and/or pie and/or sweet thing to keep your mouth busy while it plays. The film will be introduced by filmmaker Graeme Cole and aforementioned songsmith Aidan Smith.

There are some preview photos on our Facebook page.

Down The Rabbit Hole @ Nexus Art Cafe
WHERE: Nexus Art Cafe, 2 Dale Street, Manchester, M1 1JY
WHEN: Saturday 18th February 2012, 2pm (cafe open all day)
COST: free

Psychotransitionary datamoshing on parade, with MC John Cage (apologia)

nb: If you are not trained in the interpretation of psychogeographic metering I recommend you start the video and let it play while reading the notes below. It is not meant to be entertaining.

Technical Notes

I AM SO SORRY

It is often said that a film or video should stand up on its own, unsupported by the post-rationalisations of its progenitor. I don’t necessarily agree with that, but anyway in this case the movie is a mistake and I feel I owe you an explanation.

COMPRESSING/DECOMPRESSING EMOTIONAL VALUES

Last week I set out to edit our short film of the Nexus Art Café float at the Manchester Day Parade 2011. The footage had been shot on Super 8 film and transferred, out-of-house, to digital, and I had watched it back in the latter format without any problems. However, when I then imported the same digital file into the Institute’s post-production engines for editing, I was confronted with the images you see in the above video. Something had gone wrong. I assumed it was me.

My first instinct was to delete the file. But since a lot of my work here at the Institute involves the recovery of lost films, I took pity on whatever future-me might have the job of reconstituting the canon of ‘unintentionally datamoshed parade movies of the early twenty-first century’. I saved him or her a job by saving the corrupted file. Anyway, when one ‘deletes’ a digital file it is not actually erased, but only marked for overwriting - and so, if data-energy is never truly destroyed but only restructured, might I not learn more from my mistakes by taking responsibility for restructuring the file's raw information myself?

I set about charting the binary ruins of the video, and it was not long before I began to notice a familiar pattern. Having seen the uncorrupted rushes of the parade, I recognised amongst the rearranged pixels a visual echo of the route we took. There, through the luminous video-fog, could be made out the streets and buildings and the dancers and even some of their moves. But, in addition, the newly fragmented pattern seemed to channel the conflicting feelings I felt on the day:

• The pride I felt in representing with my Nexus comrades and celebrating my adopted city, shattered by self-consciousness and crowded-room loneliness into neat rectangular shards.
• The particular dismal brand of existential emptiness I’ve only previously felt during extended periods of inactivity while playing left-back for the GM Hurricanes, punctuated by the giddy euphoria of eye contact with this old friend or that sworn enemy in the crowd.
• The desire to dance and the fear of falling over, expressed through neurotic video jitter.
  

Somewhere between committing the images of that day to film, and translating it into a digitally manipulatable form, it seemed that the movie had become corrupted moment-for-moment by the emotions I felt on parade. How?

You will remember (and it doesn’t matter if you don’t) that for three months over the summer of 2010 we were asked to vacate the Institute while one of the major search engine companies mapped the dynamic emotionality of the premises for its latest online cartography resource: a (still) unnamed(*1) psychogeographic atlas of the known universe. It so happened that, as they worked in our absence, several expensive pieces of their psychocartographic machinery were irreparably blown due to incompatibility issues with the Institute’s wiring. The workmen dumped the remains in the Institute’s gardens before they left, and since that summer our IT manager(*2) has frequently raided this abandoned equipment for spares. I asked him: was it possible that some kind of ghost codec had hijacked the parade file and decompressed its latent emotionality? Some frustrated algorithm designed for compressing psychogeographically-metered video, now released from its silicon purgatory by the integration of its motherboard into the Institute’s hardware infrastructure?

He told me No, it was not possible, but that as emotion is a matter for the heart and meaning is created in the mind - and if it would make me feel better - I could certainly ‘read’ the video as some kind of pseudo-scientific videograph of the emotions I felt on parade. This did in fact make me feel a bit better. Then he pointed out that nobody else was going to see the corrupted video anyway, which made me feel worse again - yet more determined to salvage the thing.

PIANO HACK

The moving images were saved by mere fact of their re-contextualisation. By considering the broken video from a psycho-transitionary angle, it had meaning again, without even needing to be ‘restructured’. But it still wasn’t much fun to watch, and it needed some sound. It would be dishonest to create and sync up a psychogeographic soundmap after the matter, and besides I didn’t have the processing power to facilitate such an endeavour. Instead, I thought about a song.

The idea of chance discovery and the turning of unfavourable circumstances to one’s creative advantage called to mind John Cage’s invention of the hacked piano, or ‘prepared piano’ as it was known at the time. It is a story that he recounts on Indeterminacy, a recording of 90 one-minute tales ranging from composer-clique gossip to Zen parable. Cage was the most important composer of the twentieth century but he died without hearing the word ‘Pro Tools’. So I decided to rip/sample/steal this most pertinent anecdote of his and add a beat: time, rather than tone, being the fundamental index of music; and beat music being an instant fix for unwatchable movies.

In the original recording of the story, Cage solves a technical problem - how to create percussive music in a room where there is only a piano - by opening up the piano and attaching objects (a pie plate, a nail) to its strings. I decided to hack the narrative so that in the remake he solves the initial problem but creates a new one, accidentally inventing Dance Music (rather than music for a dance) and being unable to un-invent it. This unhappy ending, this punchline of undesired creative productivity, brought the anecdote closer to my own experience.

The audio facilities at the Institute are less than ideal. The track was put together using Audacity 1.2.6 on an iMac with a 600 MHz G3 processor and 256MB RAM for your listening pleasure, though it might have been easier to use tape and scissors. Bring on the interface city where a gesturally operated Protools XI will be embedded in the ambience of bus shelters! In addition to the Cage number, The John Cage Bounce (as the new song was christened) samples The Rose by Nine Circles and Martin Denny’s March of the Siamese Children. There is no original sound.

TRASH BIN

(*1) I suggested they brand it [search engine company name]Hurt. But by the time they read my email, they had apparently lost interest in building a personal rapport with the Institute’s staff and the series of cold but suggestive replies I received seemed to have been generated by a bot or similar
(*2) whom I detest