After fiddling around a bit with SoundCloud I listened to a sudden hunch and uploaded most if not all of my albums to Bandcamp: novadeviator.bandcamp.com. So you can now buy the digital albums or download the tracks. Your support is more then welcome.
Here’s a track from an album from year 2000.
Playing around in an old PureData patch using GEM and some ‘metapixelated’ images.
Trying to move forward with more music, more ‘honest’, ‘true-to-self’ creations means finishing old unfinished tracks of work. In the primary view is therefore the finishing of the album with tracks from Frozen Images performance we did with Maja Delak (Wanda & Nova deViator) in early 2010. At the moment there are now 7 tracks pretty much above 90% finished. There are 4 tracks that seem realistic to finish by the end of the month. I find it extremely difficult to restructure, upgrade and finish music that we rehearsed and performed so many times (3 years?!). My creative process with music works like so, that I need to hear something (musical ideas) in my head and feel it in my body in order to start working on it outside of me. This is not true for momentary and very short sound/musical ‘object’, but more for compositional, larger structural blocks.
Anyhow, the sprint and finish line is before 30th of january. After that I will take what we have and give it to the mixing engineer and mastering engineer.
I finished the 7th track – an instrumental track called “Princess” (for now) few days ago and I’m too eager to share it, so here’s preview:
This is a breaks mix made for Deviant Funk Music Club in december 2012.
download:
nova_deviator_-_i_am_not_like_that_in_real_life_(dfmc_winter_2012).ogg
nova_deviator_-_i_am_not_like_that_in_real_life_(dfmc_winter_2012).mp3
Anthony Storr: Music and the Mind
“Pre-literate societies have very little idea of the individual as a separate entity. They regard the individual as indissolubly part of the family, and the family as part of the larger society. Ritual and aesthetic activities are integral parts of social existence, not superstructures or luxuries which only the rich can afford. Amongst the Venda of the Northern Transvaal, music plays and important part in initiation ceremonies, work, dancing, religious worship, political protest — in fact in every collective activity. Especially important is tshikona, the national dance. This music can only be performed when ‘twenty or more men blow differently tuned pipes with a precision that depends on holding one’s own part as well as blending with others, and at least four women play different drums in polyrhythmic harmony.‘
– Music and The Mind by Anthony StorrTSHIKONA Pipe Ensemble:
It’s been a crazy crazy drive for last couple of months for me. I was mainly very busy with things of programmatic (content) nature at Cyberpipe/Kiberpipa space. And it will be crazy for next two weeks like hell, as we are approaching the launch of the festival HAIP, biennial festival for new media arts, which is now in it’s 5th edition:
Internet [...] has overturned what we take as given and as possible. The dream of all people getting access to all knowledge suddenly came within our reach. It seemed just an issue of interpreting when the trajectory curves of global personal computer distribution and internet access penetration would finally make universal access to knowledge a reality. However, the actual trajectory of development of public libraries in the age of internet are pointing in the opposite direction – that the phenomena we people are most proud of are being undercut and can easily go extinct.
Public libraries now cannot receive, and sometimes not even buy, the books of some of the largest publishers [1]. The books that they already hold they must destroy after lending them 26 (?!?) times[2]. And they are loosing the battle to the market dominated by new players such as Amazon, Google and Apple.
On the other hand, we are also part of “ACTA – Active Citizens Take Action“:
The project brings together citizens active in youth and Internet non–governmental organizations from different European countries to discuss authorship rights, piracy and privacy on Internet, efectivness and ethics of the movement Anonymous; to analyse the involvement of civil society in the decision making processes about ACTA at national and European level, to research and learn how to influence national and European parliament on the policies and legislation.
We want to foster action, debate and reflection on European citizenship and democracy through analyzing ACTA and related issues. Encouragement of interaction between citizens and civil society organisations from all participating countries and discussions, exchanging views and presenting citizens opinion and project results with relevant decision makers at local, national and EU level, will be the key principles of the project.
At the end of august I was invited/applied to Green Academy at croatian island Vis. It was a great and inspirational experience all-in-all. One of many things that came out from discussions within ‘digital commons group’ was also some kind of report, which I’m publishing here in a very raw form.
In the general world of commons problems are mostly localized and are sometimes addressable locally. The digital commons debate is already lasting for some time and the problem is that digital enclosures are conditioned globally through harmonization of intellectual monopoly regimes, limiting the capacity of localized action.
What are digital commons?:
- culture, science & knowledge without property exclusions, limited by copyright regulation
- a positive message relating to digital commons is that there is already abundance in the digital. It makes it more visible as a contradiction between property and social use and thus makes it more immediate to intervention by the commoners. Therefore, we have seen communities transforming the institutions.
- protection of copyright monopolies expensive both socially and economically
- there’s good things about digital commons and bad things: openness and universal access vs. commercial capture through monetizing of our relations to one another as in the example of Google’s page-rank –> our relationst to objects of the world are commodified by Amazon and our relations to our fellows is commodified by FBook
How is this changing the world of information, culture and knowledge?:
- Free Software movement as a model of struggle against enclosure: it was an avant-guard movment as it gave a gift to the world, and then gift got split: big beneficiaries are proxies and commercial entities, but some of these gave us benefits too – however, given the opportunity they will move it back into an enclosure
- this is an interesting lesson for other commons movement how commercial entities capture commons
- a big commons built upon free software is internet
How this got replicated onto other fields beyond:
- communities: free culture (Wikipedia) and piracy (ex Gigapedia/ LibGen/Aaaarg.org)
- institutions: open access to scientific journals, open education resources, public sector information & open governance/consultation/democratic procedures (Icelandic constitution writing process)
- those initiatives and commons struggles that emphasized the user rights changed the perspective on copyright that prioritizes monopoly of right holders, and bottom-up initiatives to reform copyright (open content licenses and institutional mandates) should and could prove successful with institutions with a public mission
- commercial approach is dominant in these institutional fields (commercial academic publisher) and we are now trying to revert the predatory practices of commercial actors
Looking forwards towards the future:
- proxies such as big internet companies appropriate the commons, then the question becomes how do we reappropriate
- proxies replace proxies, but can p2p replace Google and the question is then how do we produce that desire
- observing the problem of commons in the digital domain reveals their common character on a global scale, however local they may appear observing other commons.
Thanks to: Marcel Mars (Nenad Romić), Tomislav Medak, Vuk Čosić, Jodi Dean and everyone else in the digital commons group.
Today I encountered problems with encoding video/audio material due to same old problematic, which so many people seem to not notice but seems that it is oh so important. At least to content creators.
In short, here’s the thing: avconv, the flagship encoder/decoder for most of a/v content (it’s a fork of more famous ffmpeg), now cannot in a simple way encode AAC audio (this is the most common format for h264 mp4 video – or so it seems). In order to have avconv with libfaac encoder (which creates AAC audio) compiling is necessary – without an option to create a deb (if you are on Ubuntu or Debian). That’s quite inconvenient. However, there is an experimental work-around: instead of -acodec libfaac, use ffmpeg/avconv’s own experimental encoder by using -acodec aac -strict experimental.
So here’s the full commandline:
avconv -i INPUTFILE.EXT -s 480x320 -r 25 -b 1000k -bt 1600k -vcodec libx264 -pre:v medium -acodec aac -strict experimental -ac 2 -ar 48000 -ab 128k OUTPUTFILE.mp4
Above was made in order to transcode any video to a format suitable for Waterwheel online platform.
I’ve uploaded this collection of drone-ambient tracks (album), created in 2008 (and released on NYE from an Istanbul cafe) to archive.org, jamendo and bandcamp. I’d like to get it on SoundCloud too, but I’ve spent all my upload minutes, huh!
CC-BY-SA of course. Local (deviator’s) microsite is here.
I’ve created this album purely with my granulators – patches written in Pure Data on Linux, using Doepfer’s Drehbank as a controller.
A thought-provoking critique of the commons ….
“[...] communicative capitalism celebrates and relies on constant, nearly inescapable injunctions to participate, to express, to be part of a common that is expropriated from us rather than shared by all of us. It enjoins us to share in an illusion, to embrace a fantasy that extreme inequality is accidental rather than essential to the capitalism of global communication networks. Because we know it’s an illusion, a fantasy, at least part of the work of consciousness-raising is done. The task, then, is to claim the common against those who say they own it, accentuating the division between their claim to own and our communicative acts, power, and production.”
– Jodi Dean
See also her books Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive, Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics and her blog I Cite.
Tumblr