rose marshack : whyamistillawake.com

I watched my music business students talk about John Cage’s 4′33″ today. One of the students (one of my best) had just encountered it in my other class and … well let’s just say she is learning a lot in college. I asked her to explain what she’d seen - she saw the YouTube performance of it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUJagb7hL0E) earlier today and she was floored - not in a very good way. “If I paid money to see that and there was just silence, I’d be very, very angry” she said in a bit more colorful language than that. The class was hysterical by the time she finished describing it.

I think that John Cage would have loved to have been in the room watching 10 students laugh their asses off at the prospect of a silenced orchestra at a concert. I know I loved it!

I’m sitting in Noodles Anonymous trying to coerce myself to stay at a motel tonight instead of driving 46 blizzarded miles home. I’m just afraid that if I stay overnight here I might accidentally not come back. There has to be a line drawn somewhere and 10pm is going to be that line.

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Things you didn’t even know you needed.

ACCEPTANCE!

Looks like some of us are going to ISEA2008 in Singapore! Of all places, why Singapore? It’s like New York City on steroids.

To be fair, any city to me is like New York City. I don’t like them. I can feel the millions of voices crying out, too much humanity around me. Actually, no, I think I dislike the commerce of cities, the stores. That’s why I like places like Kathmandu so much. Not much to buy.

When I’m around places where I can acquire THINGS, my mind gets addled.

Speaking of that. Since Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina visited us couple of months ago, and they made us show them where our local co-op was, guess what. We became members. And it’s wonderful and amazing. The co-op is in a little room, the size of our bedroom, and it has pretty much everything we need. We can buy bulk nuts, beans, eggs, by bringing in our old jars and egg cartons. We are cutting down so much on packaging here in our house! And when we need sauces, like BBQ sauce, there are usually only one or two types there, but you can look at the back and they do NOT have High Fructose Corn Syrup! So we’re eating healthier, just because Ian decided to stop by and visit on the Evens’ way to Peoria or wherever they played.

Stewart Dickson, visualization programmer at the ISL lab at Beckman (a place I kinda used to work with), is hot on the tails of our Eggpass (http://www.eggpass.org) eggs! This is very exciting to me. (If you want to know more about Stewart, google him. He has done everything art and tech!) Anyway the eggpass project was supposed to continue, with people passing the eggs from friend to friend. QUICKLY. With 12 eggs, you’d think at least one of them would get passed. What are people doing with them? Are they on their shelves? Did they throw them out? It would be so neat to find out what went wrong with the experiment, especially since we need to do a phase two of it.

The problems of the week now:

1) How to teach the History of the Music Industry and have it be interesting. I don’t find it interesting. Should I dress up in a costume?

2) How to physically and/or electronically manifest the idea of interconnectedness. Should I dress up in a costume?

You cannot just say ‘Oh, web2.0 shows interconnectedness.’ ‘Social networks show interconnectedness.’ Interconnectedness is not just about people. It’s about everything; it’s about rocks, snow, chocolate, and events. How to manifest an event?

Interconnectedness theory leads into a perfect explanation of emptiness. I understood it 3 months ago but now I have to revisit and review everything again. I suppose I should take notes in this blog.

But right now it’s time for Korean Food!

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16 Eames Stamps for 2008

Originally uploaded by eamesd

I need to start blogging again, but until I do, here are some nice Eames stamps for you to look at.

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a guy cut into a Dr. Who program on WTTW Channel 11 in Chicago to broadcast himself in a Max Headroom mask and someone’s butt. http://tinyurl.com/2co77h

I actually missed this, and never thought I’d see it, in my lifetime. What a great invention Youtube is.

And I have to agree with some of the commenters that Max Headroom was a great show.

We are on a new dietary kick - we have bought some vegan cookbooks (Veganomicon and The Garden of Vegan) - and it’s like a new world. Vegetarian cookbooks for some reason befuddle me, and they’re usually filled with Cheesy Potato and Cheesy Broccoli recipes, and my problem with that is I hate cheese. I just don’t like it. Now vegan cookbooks, you don’t have that kind of crap to fall back on. Everything here is new and non-cheese, and awesome. There are all kinds of grains and beans and tomato recipes, and recipes that contain olives and stuff… very exciting! I’m overwhelmed just looking at them.

I’m working on the new HMD Academy website which I promised to do a year and a half ago. So no fun at all until that is done.

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Gram is a Punk Rocker

Originally uploaded by rosepkid

Gram saw his first rock concert (that his parents weren’t playing at) - it was Riotfest 2007, in Chicago. One of his favorite bands, Naked Raygun, was playing. They played his favorite song, “Surf Combat,” after which he promptly fell asleep.

He also saw a bunch of kids with mohawks - he was SO excited, he started screaming, “LOOK!!!! LOOK!!!! THERE’S A KID WITH A MOHAWK!!!!”

I had a pretty good time parading him around Riotfest; there were lots of other parents there that were around our age and of course, less, and they came up and told us about their kids, and then there were the kids who were probably only about 10 years older than Gram who were there and were not happy about seeing a toddler there. My laughing thought: Gram’s a lot closer to your age than you are to the bands’ ages. Ha Ha Ha.

SURF COMBAT!!!

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I’m compressing “Faith Healer” from Big Dipper’s Boo-Boo album. They are reuniting and playing some shows in April, and releasing an album in March. Oh, maybe you’re not supposed to know that. Anyway Rick and I do work for Merge and Touch + Go Records and sometimes ThrillJockey; we compress and write the Enhanced-CD software. Leftover knowledge from our free non-working days.

What does Big Dipper mean to me? If they are not playing in the midwest, I will fly out to see them play on the East Coast, and we all know how much I love the East Coast. YUCK. I’m not exactly sure why I’m so excited to see them. I guess they’ve just been gone for so long. And Bill has such a beautiful voice. I was tempted to try to see if we could open for them, but fuck it. I’d rather just enjoy them.

Rick, Gram, Jim, and I are going to see RiotFest 2007 - Naked Raygun and Stiff Little Fingers - this Saturday. Gram, who is 4 years old now, has special noise-canceling children’s headphones made by RJ Reynolds to protect his hearing (and ostensibly, give him his first whiff of second-hand smoke; at a concert).

I had another one of my epiphanies last night; the kind where I am at least a year late to jump on some kind of bandwagon. I decided that it would be prudent to

“Employ artistic uses for augmented reality platforms to explore ideas of sustainability.”

Things like RFID tags, GPS, etc. Cool idea, huh? Why not google Spatial Practitioners and see if anyone has been doing this for the past 5 years. Duh. And on top of it, they are doing it at UIUC, where I have somewhat just banished myself from. Maybe I did come up with something new though, and forgot about it and assimilated my interests into what my colleagues are doing here in Champaign. For example, I think that MUSIC fits in there somewhere, along with SOUND. And I don’t see much of it, that “M” word in what already has happened. How can we fit that in, and also get a more authentic version of the P word (Performance)? Maybe there is still some work left to be done.

Here’s a good crapshoot: I’m trying for the Reality Jam theme of ISEA2008 with Rick’s and my Eggpass project (phase II). They say they want augmented reality and religion. I can provide that thanks to my 3 days with His Holiness.

We are currently designing an augmented reality project that which employs a social network trace to help envision the doctrine of Pratitya-samutpada; the Buddhist principles of interconnectedness.

This paper describes data collected from phase 1, an augmented reality social network trace begun in 2004 (http://www.eggpass.org) along with the design process and initial results of this next phase.

On December 8, 2004, in a classroom on the campus of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a dozen sculpted eggs bearing the URL “eggpass.org” were handed out with three simple rules:

1. Pass the egg to someone with whom you are on a first-name basis.
2. Please explain these rules to them.
3. Please visit eggpass.org and answer a few questions.

Stanley Milgram’s work on the Small World Problem was an obvious precursor; however while Milgram’s studies involved sending a package to a specific recipient through personal connections in order to determine the links between two strangers, Eggpass was meant to be open-ended, it was our hope that the eggs would continue to be passed from friend to friend for an extended period of time, building up a complex web of relationships and tracing them via the world wide web.

Almost three years have passed since this project’s inception, and with our data (collected via php and mySQL) we now design Phase II, the ultimate goal is to explore the possibilities of using an augmented reality social network trace to visualize (“prove”) the doctrine of Pratitya-samutpada; interconnectedness.

Buddhism posits an interconnected and interdependent reality where all phenomena (actions, conditions, results) are fundamentally connected in some way. All human action affects perceived reality. All actions are social actions. It is our hypothesis that using the tools of augmented reality (GPS, RFID, SMS, and the internet), we can illustrate these principles.

Total crapshoot. Why do I know ISEA is a great conference to go to? Because Kevin Hamilton went there, and anywhere Kevin Hamilton goes is probably awesome. More deity worship.

But get this. There has to be a way to display proof of the doctrine of interconnectedness with all these new technologies. Buddhist thought especially lends itself so easily to be visualized with scientific instruments. All the Prayer-Wheel-in-a-Hard-Disks, all the 3D CG mandalas. The next step is proving that butterfly wing effect.

I know just the men and women who could help me with this. If I could get a team together of my favorite brilliant authors and scientists, I could have a really nice party with chocolate cake and then someone could figure out a really neato experiment to do and I could program it. But it’s not the 1990s anymore and they’re all spread out over … uh… Illinois and Indiana. And I’m spread out all over a gradebook.

One of my best students brought in the new Oliver Sacks book. A tip of an iceberg. A tree of knowledge. My mind turned into a vein of amazon.com for 30 seconds: which should I tell him about: temporal lobe epilepsy? Nuns? (The book Lying Awake?) Other Oliver Sacks books? He hadn’t heard of them. That movie with Robin Williams? Richard Powers? (His newest book has an Oliver Sacks character in it). Other Rick Powers books about music? DNA? Happiness? Where do you start?

I have only ever wanted to wake people up. But now I have a bunch of students in front of me and their eyes are wide open! Now that they’re awake, what do I tell them?

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My job is pushing me to create and learn and explore and create some more. Constantly. First, an 88-key midi keyboard appears in my office (a “gift”) - which scared me for a good day - and little by little have gotten used to it… and two nights ago I actually performed with it. I accompanied Hank Hofler of Oh Astro (a college of mine at ISU) and a student of his, Katchmare (?) in playing a type of music I’ve never played before - Ambient Music!! I wanted to tell everyone it was harder than breastfeeding - so hard to fit the noises in at the right time, and the notes in at the right time. And worst, to make sure that what I played wasn’t CHEESY! I’m still unsure of the rules of ambient music.

Isn’t it funny that all music systems have rules? And you have to be careful about breaking them. A good friend (I think it was Heidi from Mercy Rule / 13 Nightmares) once told me about composing music for a major label, that she is very aware of which direction her hand moves. If it moves one direction (towards one chord) that might make the song commercial and sell copies, and the other direction makes the song more “cool.” I remember having that awareness while we were on Reprise, but not doing anything about it. If we had done anything about it, we probably would have moved our hand towards the anti-commercial direction.

Oh Astro’s new record just came out - it is really awesome to listen to. As much as I hate myspace, http://www.myspace.com/ohastro - you can hear some of their songs and you should buy the album.
So now my brilliant boss (who is calling me her “colleague” which is like the biggest compliment in the world) has listed my blog under her newly created blog, http://www.knottypinekitchen.com/Sharis_Stuff/Blog/Blog.html. By doing this, she’s forcing me to write more now, because she knows I’m gonna read her blog (she’s a brilliant writer) and I’ll see mine listed up there and feel like I’m defacing her blogroll if I don’t keep mine up.

And yeah, I know this sounds like kissing up, but I’m so past that. If I worship someone, they know it. That’s just the way it goes. I couldn’t care less how it looks.
Look, the woman came into my class today and totally added so much more literary cred. I realize I can be a tourist in so many different areas. We were talking about this: You Must Be Logged In To Do That! http://www.sevensixfive.net/myspace/myspacetwopointoh.html and Gilles Deleuze and she took the conversation to a whole other level, talking about how Deleuze defines ‘the discrete spaces of enclosure, the “prison, hospital, factory, school, family”’ - I missed family! –and how we think of ourselves, and whether or not it all boils down to commercialism … one distraught student asked, “if the commercialism and marketing were taken away from all this, would it be ok then?” There are individual answers for this (hope he figured that out.)

At some point the class deteriorated into how to make money off Secondlife - and then of course my DJs started thinking about making music in there…a question was brought up about the differences between making music in a virtual world or the “real” world (think about it, you need a music-playing device near you for both, and when it’s gone or off, the music’s gone)… but this was like “Duh, of course it’s the same” to the students. Not to me though.
So speaking of worship, let’s move on to His Holiness and His Other Holiness. I was fortunate enough to be able to spend $250 to listen to the Dalai Lama’s teachings in Bloomington, IN (where Shari went to school). The teachings were on something called Atisha’s Lamp of Enlightenment which I was going to read but I read stuff about New Media instead. The cool thing about his teachings was that they sort defined and elaborated upon the idea of interrelationship (nothing exists without being referenced or tied to something else) and then if you take away interrelationship, you get emptiness. He talked a bit about the idea of compassion: two types, one you feel for your family and friends and want something in exchange and the other type, is when you care for all living creatures; it’s that second type he’s interested in.

There was lots of other stuff but I’m going to sell that information on my paying site (just kidding). Robert Thurman (Uma’s dad) spoke one night at the conference and he was hysterical. People gave him a standing ovation. Both he and the Dalai Lama are great at making these types of teachings easy to understand for westerners. I’ve experienced some other Tibetan teachers and they are not always as accessible. Of course when I first heard Thurman, years ago, I had no idea what he was talking about. So maybe I’m getting advanced.

The basic thing to know for a western scientist is that Buddhist studies (about meditation, happiness, etc.) go completely along with current neuropsychology and cognitive psychological research, so much so that there are always studies going on with happiness and The Brain and How You Connect them. (and this is the subject of Rick Powers’ new book, I’m told… can’t wait!!)

I could say something about taking vows at the end of the lectures. We got to repeat a nice poem at the end of the lecture, which just happened to be my favorite poem. That and the Dalai Lama said it in Tibetan and the audience followed along in English. That pretty much floored everyone. People around me were bawling. I was so touched I had to call my dad and tell him about it. It was very nice.
His Other Holiness and His Better Half visited us on their way to Springfield Il - Ian MacKaye and Amy Farina, the Evens, are again on tour through the midwest. They stopped by to give us an hour of their time - it is so great that some bands are still touring. Back in the day, we’d be travelling around constantly and seeing our friends in different corners of the world. Now I guess we just have facebook. Or ichat. I’m trying to remember what we talked about for that hour. An hour of conversation with Ian MacKaye should count as about 1 year of graduate school. He makes you think that much.

How do these people get so smart?

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I’m going to become part of the peeing antibiotics into the earth problem I think. How the hell can I get so sick?

Here’s some food for thought that I assigned my students.

<http://smg.media.mit.edu/papers/Donath/SociableMedia.encyclopedia.pdf>.

I’m starting to like making them read. I hope they enjoy it. I even told them about how if you’re going to be a professor, you need to start getting exhibitions and papers written in journals and presented at conferences.

My whole goal at this point of teaching is to make them want to learn something before I teach it to them. How hard should that be?

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Poster Children 8387

Originally uploaded by Robert Loerzel

I love being able to search for myself on flickr!

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Wow! When the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art has a party, it really HAS A PARTY. We just played in a giant, gorgeous tent outside the museum, blocking the entire front staircase. IT was SO COOL!!! Actually it was kinda hot in the tent, since it was 90 degrees outside.

This was part of the Intonation Festival - Rock bands playing at the museum in conjunction with this “Sympathy for the Devil” exhibition which is really cool. The museum is 40 days free right now, you should just go and check it out. There were hundreds of people milling around the exhibition that day while I went in there - probably thousands in and out of the tent as we played. What a great 20th anniversary show!!

And what a dream to play the song “Modern Art” that Rick wrote 20 years ago, in front of the Museum of Contemporary Art. Can it get much better than that? I wish I had good photos, and I totally forgot to take a picture of the audience. It’s hard when your 3-year old kid is staring at you from the audience.

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