Monday, January 2, 2023

Performance Notes for Solar Sounders on the Canal, May 2022

Near Patch Point on Forsterstr in Kreuzberg, Berlin, flows a canal slowly, with a peaceful bank of flowery bushes. A French cafe is always bustling with expats. This sandy shore receives sunlight most reliably, compared with the urban canyon of old houses that Patch Point sits in. There the birds echo accross the buildings, many high twitters, and in the evening a songful blackbird who claims the street trees by its everchanging, multi-resonant patterns. 

To perform an afternoon of solar sounders, the sandy canal bank was targeted, and thus thereafter, a demonstration of vegan fishing would be folded into the performance. The opportunity would not be missed, to combine my two favorite sports of center-pin reel casting, with experimental off-grid electronic sound art. 

To prepare for this piece, I had finished a new case design that combines two of my favorite aspects of woodworking: computer scripting for efficient and tight-fitting parts in fine hardwood, and scrapcrafting with glue... The scraps are mini lumber from the edges of old prints (previously cut pieces of hardwood). Often this way I can save many beautiful patterns that would otherwise be burnt.

The case features a parabolic bulge that houses the panel and mount, and two angled chubs for speakers. The panel supplies nine volts and comes in a few different sizes, roughly corresponding to frequency energy for soprano and bass voices. After gluing the structure together, the sides are crafted with scraps simply glued on, then everything is sanded like its from Pier 1. Yes, this is how I chase my ideal 90s import store.

The ground mount is a new addition to the solar sounders, and this piece thus concerns itself with ground. A steel pipe, purchased at Bauhaus, screws in firmly to an aluminum flange on the underside of each box, after it is hammered into the ground. The flange and thus whole assemby is connected to ground of the solar circuit. Thus we can create or even play with the ground connection between each instrument. 

 


Traditional banana plugs were mounted on each box, and connected in to the androgynous pulse-brain within its circuit. We listened to each without any patched points, while I poured canal water gently into the sand at the base of each one. There was a simple experiment to be done, asking if we could hear a modulation with this wet makeshift ground for it all. THe banana cords were connected between each instruments, and what was heard as un-syncronised birdsong, became synchronous.

While the experiment was running, I threaded a european canal bobber onto a long rod with light line, and affixed it with banding. Three lead-free splitshot (ROhS) anchored the bobber upright from beneath, and they tapered in size properly from largest at the top to tiny at the bottom. As I said, this is vegan fishing so just a wisp of line hung beneath the tiniest splitshot. I could assure protection of my audience as I started with only underhand casts but moved to overhand once I got my courage up.

The weather was a perfect mix of everything chaotic. It had rained earlier but the sand was still quite dry. There was strong blasts of sun followed by deep depths of cloud, which is the best most natural solar dynamic, as far as musical expression is concerned. As a bonus, the wind came from many directions, gusting up the canal in ripples, and even coming from behind me to get a rare cast with the wind. 

As the instruments clucked gently and resonant in the shade and bloomed in the sun, I bided my time watching the bobber slowly drift down the canal. The analogy was about ground and the canal. Current flows in the channel, but it can only be measured if there is a still ground under it all. A bobbermontage will also demonstrate a gradient if weighting is properly spaced, as current is fastest on the surface and slowest on the bottom. I joked that I was sensing bites but no one in the audience got the joke.

The audience was there to experience electronic music at patch point, and drink beer later in the evening. This is the time of Superbooth, and many visitors had just arrived from out of town. 

The sand is a compelling medium for performance because of the electro-shamanism of ceremonially imbibing its earth. Vegan fishing was a great way to bide time non-violently.


GRBL ESP32 CNC CASE

 
This is the Berlin (wood) workshop. We currently have three 6040s, one 9040, and we are building a collection of 3040s upstairs for little work. Managing all these CNC machines at once, in a loud and dusty environment, required some rethinking.
 
The traditional way to run CNCs is with a desktop computer assigned to each one, that sit nexts to it and you go to it every time you need to change a job. There exist, however, wonderful open source operators for arduino nano (GRBL) and ESP32 (GRBL ESP32). These make the woodshop into an internet of cutting things!
 
So, in GRBL ESP32, each machine is on the local network, and has a name that you type (such as tony.local) into a web browser. There are seven signals that then go to the CNC machine through a printer cable. We are currently working on making musical sense out of these square waves, but this report concerns itself only with making CNC machines work the best.

Each ESP32 fits perfectly inside a Busch-Jaeger "Ocean" Steckdose, which was already being used for the electrical wiring in the workshop. When I got one for myself I was rekindled on home improvement case hacks. It even has a rubbery cable relief that perfectly fits one usb cord and one printer cable, which is split up and soldered directly to the board. Extract all the electrical plug furnishings, and the protective flap on the front leaves a perfect little space for the SD card, also wired directly to the board.

Eventually, I realized something about the dusty, noisy environment. These are little computers, being left in the cold woodshop, with tons of electrical noise emanating from the spindles. Our biggest CNC was crashing a lot, and I made a plan to separate its grounds with opto-isolators. Now the ESP32 has its own private ground, which it does not share with the ground of the CNC driver. You can see in the following picture, floating above a layer of kapton tape, seven licorice jelly beans which are the optoisolators for each channel:
 
Inside an Ocean Steckdose with ESP32, seven licorice jellybeans are there to optoisolate grounds.
 
 
how to prep the opto-isolator spider ticks.

Another brashless view inside an Ocean Steckdose.

Schematic of the opto-isolator circuit, after Oskar Schlemmer.
 


Ocean Steckdose with GRBL ESP32, and in front, an Aquastar Steckdose with GRBL on a nano, which requires the nintendo game-style controller for movement and program control. This option is also solid, especially at 9600 baud.

Another view inside the Ocean Steckdose with ESP32. You can see the cathode resistors (around 150 ohm) for each optoisolator. Red button is hold, and there's a resume button on the opposite side.
 
Here is a handy chart that should work with any parallel (printer cable) driver on any machine bigger than a 3040.:
signal name
esp32 pin
parallel cable pin
nano pin
xstep 12 2 2
xdir 14     3 5
ystep
26
4
3
ydir
15
5
6
zstep
27
6
4
zdir
33
7
7
spindle PWM
2
1
11

Note, the SD card is wired according to the standard hacker instructions, where you solder directly to a microSD holder.

Under the 3040 size, CNCs don't usually offer a printer cable connection. They are usually only connected by USB, but usually they have their own GRBL driver and you can always hack into the TX and RX pins to use a nintendo-style (also called "random-style" in the 3018 manual) controller.

Monday, November 15, 2021

Shbobo Fret


 

Trying to get this cast in either brass or nickel silver.

Meanwhile I found a company who says they can machine them from brass.

Will make shtars much nicer to make.


 

Friday, October 1, 2021

Lecture on Bauhaus vs Hornbach

 On September 19, 2021, as part of the SUPERBOOTH non-activities, I delivered a lecture at Patch Point on the topic of Bauhaus versus Hornbach. Here is a description of the lecture:

I will procure a laser pointer to narrate twenty slides about the history of the bauhaus movement and its relationship to hornbach. My words will be mangled/backworded by cocoquantus that we sell at patch point, a solid group of interesting people.

I did not procure a laser pointer, and I did not pursue a slideshow with projector, so the program became the usual, a narrated benchmark test procedure of cocoquantus. In retrospect, I realize that I realized quite a few things about the oranging sector, and what it means to be an orange store, of home materials or synths. And since this is an orange blog, it seems important to document here. So here's the google slides, what could have happened was awesome:

Sunday, April 4, 2021

Troutnalysis 1: Petrogenesis

My name is Pete, professor of fictional electronics, and for your computer music lesson, shall not subject your piece to strict analysis, but rather employ a meta-sport diversion called "troutnalysis."

Troutnalysis is part of my "interrogajoke" series: interrogating topics in a post- fashion by employing jokes. Troutnalysis is a three part course: Petrogenesis, on the relationship between sport and petroleum; Action, on the subconscious need for mystique; and a response to Georgina Borne's ethnography of IRCAM.

 Petrogenesis

Author of essay:  Petroleum Bottle 
Primary Duties: Mesh/messmaking, Facilitating objets-stereos.
Secondary Duties: fishing, driving petroleum vehicles

The ribbon of highway sometimes runs up with the stream of salmon (fishing in the pavement). My trout-shaped car trolls the pavement, sometimes I note an old man on a boat. All arts make someone suffer. Fly fishing is an art, which literally makes the trout suffer. Who suffers from your art?

My name is Petroleum Bottle, because that's how a girl named Danielle made fun of me in third grade. I cried that night. My older brother spoke of my girlfriend, it felt like making fun, and I cried some more. I sobbed at my dad that I didn't want a girlfriend. How wrong would I be.

Like a primordial dream of treasure in a cave, the Soviet theory of abiotic petrogenesis. Mineral energy springs forth underground, from the rock itself, not from crushed up plant material. Driving a petroleum bottle up the mountain is communing with these powerful rocks. The mountain creeks have a rainbow sheen, a natural slick that irradiate a collective hallucination in fly fisherman, as they naturally flow with a small amount of petroleum.

I have to admit that I am somewhat competitive when it comes to fly fishing, but that is because I entrust you or part of my fold, or become part, and take my comments as curmudgeonly generalizations on human nature.

The economy of fishing derives from petroleum industry: you must drive to a mountain lake to do it. It also deals with the technical and toxic metals: lead is used to bring baits to the bottom fish. Lead is bio-active, changing and impeding an animal chemically. Fly fishing is somewhat resistant to the toxic metal, preferring no weight at all, some brass and copper. The most conscientious fisherman uses tungsten, it is heaviest and bio-neutral.

like the website "gink and gasoline" which means petroleum based fish lure ointment plus the automobile locomotion to home in on a fish in the mountains; they won't know what hit them! Petroleum Bottle did!
 
What is the lead fish? What fish is most "at home" with this heavy metal? To know, we must think of all fish and what alchemical symbol belongs with each; the sharks of the deep, and the lighter fatty fish of the shores that taste so good when smoked.

Onion Sandwich Man

Ernest Hemingway wrote a modern fly-fishing story early in the career; it was obviously a crucial metaphor to him and potent with analogy to war and industry. Fly-fishing is, in fact, ancient, as we will detail later in the chapter on Aelian. Hemingway lived at a time when modern plastics and composite materials revolutionized fly-fishing, yet it tied to the ancient technique of fooling a fish and eating it; there still is violence, perhaps more because of the efficient way that plastic line casts.

Fishing, in "The Great Two Hearted River" is a metaphor for the war technologies of World War I. That war was the most efficient to be known thus far, an exponential growth from previous ones due to technology. Fly-fishing, too, became more exponentially more efficient. Yet, the protagonist eats only an onion sandwich for most of the book: he is post-haunted in the ruins of war.  For this reason, we call him the Onion Sandwich Man. Let us perform a psychoanalysis of this "onion-sandwich-man" (OSM).

He is a deep individual, not just simply surviving in the wild. He may be in a wild place, but he is wilder inside and this makes him a complicated individual. He is not fly-fishing the wilderness, but a burning town. It's not just survival, it's chaos magic. There's a non-rhythmn with his actions and how he catches fish: the first one he released so gently, the second one was big and he lost it. The third he kept. Finally he gutted them. Only later in the book is tension released when he slaughters the fish.

He eats a simple, onion sandwich. This act of improvisation marks him as magical, an alchemist of sulfury into savory. The onion sandwich itself is a red flag of chaos, the sulfur smell added to his breath, makes him rub up against others disjointedly, the sulfur smell is a symbol of noise and tumultuous change. The only scent allowed on one's flies should be garlic, rubbed on your hand and your sandwich.

The town is burning and he's eating an onion sandwich: that is a flag of chaos magic.  That is, the art of contingency, leveraging weather (a sudden freshet or riffling breeze) or circumstance: burning town, only an onion to be found. It is said that the gods do not mark fishing as time wasted (even when skunked), because the fisher is engaging in the chaos computer (programmed by god), learning patience, and awareness to sudden opportunities.

Tying flies is a natural technology, that has been mixed with synthetic technologies: plastics research, nail polish, and electronics parts such as wire and Mylar bag. After the world wars, surplus materials such as copper wire became widespread in flies. My uncle was in a radio shack on Guam, did not see much action but many water buffalo, and repaired electronics in the morning. It was boring, but using his hands, he created a nice little shack. The same in his guest bedroom, using ostrich herls and rooster capes, he prepared to meet nature again with his new nylon lines. Time flies with these materials is learning how to be at peace with them.

The onion sandwich man is surplus personality from war; he is trying to finding out how to be at peace.  He's at odds with the water, at best adapting to it. there he encountered stange animals in mud ventures. He never told me any war stories, just about the muddy electronics shack, and the yellowstone cutthroat.

What would it mean to be Ernest Hemingway in a world of global weirding? You still have your short sniped sentences, and the sharks are still there, but your sport has chaotic storyline. The good fish are gone and the weird fish remain. In his twenties, Hemingway sought a storyline in Spain, drinking and bullfighting with his hipster friends. His fishing trip there was completely sullied by polluted waters, but in his fictional trip (The Sun Also Rises), the trout were fat, eager and ripe.

Classic fly-fishing is considered dry, or on the surface, wet, or just beneath the surface. However, some forms have evolved, based on solid foundations in entomology, to go deep beneath the surface: imitating the chironomid. This midge, or tiny fly, starts its life on the very bottom of the lake as a worm, quickly evolving into a mysterious vertical larva in the water column. It is deep, and still, yet it has a mysterious hand gesture: it is named for this gesture. It part of the art of flyfishing to transform one's own hand gestures into an imitation of this creature of the deep, tethered by a long and slender line.

My first experience with chioronomids confirms that esoteric is chaos magic. fly fishing is a quest for the esoteric and chironimids are the most esoteric. At Lava Lake, dinner and breakfast was trout, we didn't bring eggs. Bright green midges in its tummny. Powerbait and lead go hand-in-hand, fly fisherman  are against the use of lead in the lake. Midges eat lead.

LED Chironomid

Chaos Magic

Go fishing in a polluted body of water. Salvage electronic ruins. Derange a wild cat by taking it to a bagel dumpster in the suburbs. Go to a place that you know has bad luck, multiple times to accumulate it, so you can have good luck somewhere else. At the waterfalls there are old transformers and turbines.

If you are from Oregon then your grandpa represents the Oregon trail. The Oregon trail still exists, in the thousands making their way to the global worming refuge. My truck has shelves and pots and pans and niches for onions. It looks like a green wagon trail camper. Because my dad is dead and my grandpa is too, i have no Oregon trail, i have to be both dad and grandpa if i move to this land.

His kids can live in the city and he can realize his ideal of theOoregon man. But I don't have a dad to be the Oregon man so how do I respond?  This is the same question as how does a man retain a mystique on the water? Well I will not buy a camper and for a boat I will have a kayak, try to keep it minimal. I wear dirty pants. My grandpa tore up old shirts to use as twine. My grandpa squeezed the lead sinkers on with his back teeth.

Holidays should be at random times in the year, to minimize exposure to campers and to reveal secret migrations. Always look for the onion, when i met a camping family,  the grandpa of a family showed me a bunch of trout poaching in an aluminum rollup and it smelled like onions. He used random spices, but only a little bit, because they forgot salt, and it was great! Then they found some salt and unrolled the foil to put salt in it and put some butter in. Grandpa said it was better with less foil because then you can smell the fismoke. the presence of onions is confimed in the chaos magic story. Onions are the key ingredient that caramelize and release chmicals into the trout and change its form along with the butter. Another great ingredient is orange peppers.

the coastal range fish eat orang, inspired by the orange bellies on the newts in orange slit on the throat. the cascade range eat green, inspired by different shades of moss green and algae, from the deep sediments at the bottom of lava lake. the two colors orange and green are those of the mountain "dew"

Oil

There are thjree kinds of oil. The oil used to transport the sportnsman to the wilderness spot. The oil that is polluting his home rivers in the city: pcbs. And finally the oil in the fish's brain that is used for its memories. It is along its spine too; body memory. These three oils have a relationship to each other. The fish oil is how it goes from the coastal city the river into the wilderness passing through the port city. The fishemans oil also moves him but in a dumb way. The pollution oil is a taint on the fish's brain, but its dielectric constant has a mysterious and unknown effect on thoughts. The pollution oil is from electronics and i am polluting again with the transistor ant.

There are different kinds of trout, you can taste them by eating them. You can taste it when you eat them. Hatchery pond blue-green pond. trail north worst, they taste like urine. The best is a wild small trout from a deep lake, or a rocky river. You could taste it wehn you eat it. There are types of flesh incarnate that are fooled by the smell of rotting dough, and there are ofther flashes that are fooled by girl patterns, recognition etched in omega oil. It is the recognition oil that the fly fisherman seeks. I seek to know if trout recognize electronic components.

Trout and Salmon both have this salmonid oil, which has evolved from their need to journey up mountain rivers to keep their babies safe. They remember the way home by the smell of the water, landmarks, colors. They also peel back the onion skin to what they ate as babies: little aquatic insects and other tiny tasty things. It is a sequence of ghost-images they remember as they take this journey of life, and of death, for that is their fate once depositing their young. Is the pink ghost flesh that we are after eating, for it is a psychedelic.

The forms of the flash incarnate. The tree pond brown turd sucker. Deep sea predator and noble king salmon, black gum king salmon, spirito-politically owned by the gillnetters. And habiter of mottled places, where sudden dances the entomologist. The football linebacker, the steeler, chrome worker of back hills Pennsylvania and Ohio. golden trout is mythical and small, should you eat it or worship it?

The wild man of the mountains is limited by the barrenness of his soil, that says , so he turns to hunting cougars and coyote, which in turn feed the meat soul and makes him more of a hunter. When the cowboys encountered these people they also left behind a sort of pale worm band who only prefers to eat the oily fish of the little mountain streams. There were men also had typewriteers which they typed the first modern novels on, in sandals there.

A receipt from Ollie Damon's, where we bought shad darts and strange discount bass jellies. We also bought line and rooster tails, and asked the old reddening man on how to wrap a sardine around the lure. My revelation of the day was that this man did not know and think about how to flare an LED in the depths of the river, and he knew about the piezoelectric force, that may provide enough current to dimply flickering the LED. He knew it needed something striking it to discharge it as he said.

I eat salmon so I can put the memory oil in my own brain and subsume it. The dam is like a hard electronic obstacle, which the salmon oil seeps around. The salmon encode a memory in oil, starting in their deepest brain as a baby, eating little things: crustaceans in the river, and the smells of their adolescence: the smell of the city sewers. Trout are likewise, they do drip down the stream eating things.

All these things encode a memory that accumulates, which they peel back again in their later years, stripping the oil off the memory oil in their brain, and reverting in the end of their life when they trophy, to eating tiny things. This is the concept of patterns, which are hard like symbols, but encoded in oil, like the concept of the PCB (Polychlorinated Biphenyl) analog delay drum. This rotating cylinder was employed in some poisonous electronic music studios to encode sound directly in the swirling fluid, as dielectric charge. Then the sounds were replayed through the speakers again, emanating from the encoded oils.

The salmonid encodes its journey in oil, from the inside out, then travels back within; back in time as Rudolph Steiner told us to recount our day to ourselves, backwards, every night. If you rotate it fast enough, though, it stops swirling and becomes froth, and mixes up the memory. This sort of globally-weirded-fish can swim in more than one direction on the river.

The yellow fungus eats their memory away. Remember you can record audio onto a rotating head of poison oil. The Salmonidae also record memory on two layers of oil in their body.

This is a technique I learned with Stefan Tcherepnin, of blowing marijuana smoke into a synthesizer before playing it. Now I do the same with flies, to make a creative undulation happen in their computer music.

Blanc's question starts with the rumor that trout like the smell of a spray lubricant, WD-40. What if they like other petroleum flavors, what if they like industrial smells such as electronics? Can salmon smell the PCBs in the Willamette river? Can they learn to be attracted to this most synthetic smell? Can they smell heavy metals?

Like the onion-sandwich-man, who takes great care to not damage the protective layer of slime on his first trout, I am damaged by waterways full of PCBs and leaden sculpin; that is the damage that makes me angry at the clean fish and want to kill them employing a piece of electronics. Like the bird who is snared in a fly-line, my children are angry about their aborted world.

Mountain Dew

I get my tungsten beads in metallic coffee, because I can, and that marks them as the special metal of the deepest chironomid, or Pennylvania midge. Also, a good morning camping on Lake T_____ will involve an espresso in my aluminum grenade.

Major Carey traveled by railroad to the interior of Canada, where the great lakes dwell, and pitched his tent by the grandest body of water. He then made coffee and sat down at his camp table, praying to himself; this is the combination of my dreams in the wars, of sitting down and creating something in nature. What he created was the Carey Special, essentially a truly green Aelian, using a pheasant's rump for the partridge hackle. It's olive body and dun undulator evoke the older days before bleach and synthetic dyes.

Jeff Carey employs a nice gaming joystick and also some really effective LED strobe lighting to deliver chaotic and gestural noise music to his listeners' ears. When I saw him there where no colors, just the action of flickering white light, a hooked, enigmatic penusius grasped by computer musician, creating undulating sheathes of sandstorm sounds. These are three most important points of the LED fly: action, mystery, and again, action. The first action is synthetic, the flickering of mylar strands; the second action is natural, sheathes of feathers slipping in the stream. Mystery is essential to the stone-age fly, because there is always the question of "what is the hook?" You use ACTION to convince the trout that it is simply the tail of a juicy and easy prey, as Carey uses noise and flickering lights to convince you his joystick is a penusius.

Do you mountain dew or do the mountain?
Jeff Carey is sponsered by the Dew Tour. The colors contrast with the Mountain Lake times past nostalgic colors of General Carey. In Japan, Dutour is a nice cafe with muted tones and good boutique coffee. However, in America, it is an outdoor stadium of blood, with bright green attractants and nutritious hooked hooking fluids. The river is green not from pcbs, from nature.

General Carey was the first Dew Tour. The military has dumped about six thousand pounds of trout into Henry Hagg Lake every month of the spring. Dough suckers, bombs of dough suckers. In contrast, the paisley Oregon Dep't of Fish and Wildlife releases pretty things into Lost Lake deep in the woods.

Science project, stomach pump 1:" 1 beautiful chironomid, estimated to be at size3 18 2x long nymph hookwith gray metallic, i.e. mylar chip bag with 1tan floss, black wing case like peacock herl, black haed, P.t. trutt. and two tinty white gills . Stocmach pump two: similar wormy like forms and patterns. stomcah pump three: nothing. stomach pump 4: yellow and gree n Mountain Dew colored powerbait with mylar flash holographic flashes in it.

a[pprocahes scientific through use off the stomach pump/
lost lake, mar5ch 30 2017

Fluorescent green and yellow powerbait flecked with irridescent specks of mylar. If I were an EPA official, I might even confuse it with capacitor ingredients. Like powerbait these trout are branded with energy discourse. Mountain Dew volt. Powerbait is measured in wattage, like md volt, these trout are branded... don't get me wrong i like hanging out with men of the river, stuyrgeon men with wabndering eyes.

These are my babies, in the cement tank in Clackamas. My babies, my tank: I manage it, I come here on my days off to feed them dough balls. I liaison to light artists to display bright green and orange colors through aa milky perspex cube in the bottom of each tank, for the entertainment of my babies. They like light, they like sounds. When you control the breeding tanks at the top of the stream, you own the fishes' minds, their core memories. I've taken away the natural programming of muyted insects in natural tiny mountain streams, and replaced it with bright hypercolor flashes of mountain dew cans. in their deepest memory.

The tank in clak is for streelhead.

The disco beach is a synthetic natural phenomenon of the trout industry. Take a lacunarian location such as trillium lake in Oregon on the slopes of Mount Hood. The lake itself is created from a marsh, impounded by earth. Then the dough ballers at ODFW installed trout that respond to synthetic mylar sparkles in the dough, this dough gets discarded on beaches and the sand becomes Berkely and it also has little balls of lead in it. Like an industrial museum of the twentiethe century: the lake!

Take a away his phallic joystick, bring him to the shores of the disco beach, replace the joystick with a fly rod and a tiny bundle of lead in mylar. Emplace a rhythmic throbbing beat, and whip the air with your sparkle-ball.

Sunday, January 3, 2021

Noise Music

We could say that there are two kinds of noise music: making music out of noise, and making noise out of music. The first is a standard media model of co-opting the unknown into a programmed channel -- pop songs now heavily employ noise and hacking sounds. The second option is more esoteric, as it involves jamming communication.

The 1948 theory of communication (Claude Shannon) specifies noise as a blockage perpendicular to the narrative flow from transmitter to receiver. In paper circuits, however, noises are central; they are the cellular signal sources, interlocked rhizomally. It is a philosophical leap to shun information and communicate with alingual noises. The ideal circuit board limits noise, but in paper circuits, noise is unlimited.

In the Shannon’s 1948 model, the ideal synthesizer has a “silent channel”: a path of communication insulated from outside interference. In a paper circuit, there is no silence and there is no single channel; variously connected noises are like landmarks on its map.

John Cage wrote “4’33”, his infamous “silent piece”, to draw attention to the often ignored noises in the concert hall - a cough, a shuffle. Schematized as an imaginary synthesizer, the hall is full of nodes twittering in relation to each other. The typical modern synthesizer abstracts electronic sound shapes and places them against silence. In contrast, the handmade paper circuit is defined by its materials. Rather than the interaction of shapes and silence, it is a rich mulch of noises interlocking with other noises.

Monday, December 28, 2020

HALCs

Some thoughts on the transition from 2020 to 2021, happy new year and new global warmings! Furthermore, the numbers symbolize the transition from the 20th century to the 21st, and this will mark drastic changes. One drastic change that has long been coming has been the recognition of disc golf as the one true golf.

Scottish golf as expressed in America, became a sadist exploitation of nature, just ask the creeks next to golf cemeteries. Halogenated aromatic lawn chemicals (HALCs) persist; they never go away. They wash into the creek generating an unnatural ressish stinking slime. This golf symbolizes the 20th century exploitation of nature for the sake of made-up traditions. Greenwashing is a corporate information system of exploiting the goodwill generated by grassroots environmental movements.

The disc golf course is another made-up tradition, but it seeks harmony within the natural environment. Take Portland, Oregon, home of giant fir trees. Disc golf accomodates them, and protexts their bark, and allows casts and curves among their trunks. This course requires no chemicals, and adapots to any location, sonoran desert or eastern beech forest.

An amateur disc golfer putters about in the woods. It is an urban forest dérive, a drift among the pines. My cast always becomes a bonk, and I wander into some mushrooms. Like the STALKER, who throws nuts into the high grass to dictate his chaotic destination, a random cast is my path through the loamy woods.

The original Americo-Scots misinterpreted the game to think it was timed; you drive to your target and run, hustling over the dunes, to achieve a timed par: with two dimensions of success, how few and how fast. Try the timed par, recognize the chaos magic of the true golf: pay tribute to the flying saucers of our alien friends with your disc.