Keep up the good work!

The conversation got me thinking about the state of contemporary big-A Audio. Do any of the following perk your interest, for whatever creative or industrial reason?
- proper speech recognition software is nearing consumer affordable levels… what next?
- rising sales of audiobooks? would we rather be told stories than read?
- chic of voice over work by recognizable celebrities, it’s no longer a sign of a dead career to narrate commercials or documentaries
- slydial: skip possibility of talking to someone, go straight to their phone’s voicemail. or, how rampant is use of phones’ features to send someone a recorded message rather than call them?
- jott or phonetag: programs which translate voice messages (automatically or transcribed by third party) to text? we’d rather read than listen?
- seesmic: it’s video/audio, but essentially sets out to improve the vaguely floating reply video conversations from youtube, and organizes them sequentially. an intentionally communal blog or chatroom with webcam as delivery.
- when will analog and scotch tape splicing revive as media for creativity? like vinyl and turntablism did on a massive scale? cassette tapes are already fashion fetish items and icons.

please do keep it, whatever it will be, up.

Been following Chris on-line since his arrival at RISD. I don’t know you Chris, but I am looking forward to learning more about you.

I have been interested in exploring the idea of creating an entity, similar to ParqueSoft in Columbia, and the work of Orlando Rincon. The idea would be to create a non-profit that facilatates the development of artisitc entreprenuers in industries in Rhode Island/New England which merege art and design with manufacturing, science and technology and perhaps other industries. I have long thought that RISD could should/could help develop artist/entrepenuers. Such an entity may be the way to go. What do you think?

I look forward to getting to know you both through this blog.

Great work. I enjoyed it. As a Providence based lamb-loving-Armenian-techno-art-programmer-musician-foody, the topics obviously spoke to me. I think food is a HUGE part of creativity as a whole and it helps ground me in my very nebulous and virtual life. In similar fashion to “Jogging w/ John,” I think dining with John and Chris would be an amazing event. Armenian food for the first go?

Can’t wait to hear more!

(1)”Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance man makes himself the measure of all things.”

(2)”It is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar and at hand.”

To these, the next two axioms of Vico’s New Science follow, describing the “conceit (’boria’) of nations” and then the “conceit of scholars”:

(3)”that it before all other nations invented the comforts of human life and that its remembered history goes back to the very beginning of the world.”

(4)”who would have it that what they know is as old as the world.”

-quoted from ‘Vico’s Science of Imagination’ by Donald Phillip Verene

‘Proximity is a curse sometimes. Why is it Josef Albers does not bring up the strains of Chinese or African or other Asian, tribal or sub-cultural strains of musical equivalents? This is precisely a philosophical and perhaps neurological or mnemonic problem that worries me. The resonances that rise up first in our mind are those that are most familiar to us and we force-fit or associate things directly with that which is familiar to us. In doing so, we forget that we create something dominant - a dominant association, a dominant point of view, a dominant ideology! How does one work against such a dominant consciousness that is so “me”-oriented and me-based? One way is to increasingly share various points of view with one another and then seek to enter the other point of view somehow experientially and intellectually. Does that sound like too much complexity knocking at one’s door?’

I find it fascinating that you are working with John Maeda who has been sort of bright light in the dark for Srishti where I work and is a close friend of my director Geetha Narayanan. We have used his book “Design by Numbers” sometime and more recently I have become familiar with his Laws of Simplicity ever since his famous lecture on it at Ars Electronica 2006. Srishti had the privilege of being the first-ever Indian art and design college to put up its work at Ars Electronica in 2005. As soon as I return from Singapore, I will mail you a copy of our performance Anahat Naad (Unstruck Sound) in Linz plaza at Ars Electronica.
I listened to the conversation with John Maeda on RadioOpenSource yesterday (George had sent me the link but thank you too!) and will comment on it in my next email.
The audio equivalent of Josef Albers? I would be thinking of the likes of the great Indian classical singer Kumar Gandharv. Why is it that Josef Albers brings ups connections with music that are purely Western? Proximity is a curse sometimes. Why is it Josef Albers does not bring up the strains of Chinese or African or other Asian, tribal or sub-cultural strains of musical equivalents? This is precisely a philosophical and perhaps neurological or mnemonic problem that worries me. The resonances that rise up first in our mind are those that are most familiar to us and we force-fit or associate things directly with that which is familiar to us. In doing so, we forget that we create something dominant - a dominant association, a dominant point of view, a dominant ideology! How does one work against such a dominant consciousness that is so “me”-oriented and me-based? One way is to increasingly share various points of view with one another and then seek to enter the other point of view somehow experientially and intellectually. Does that sound like too much complexity knocking at one’s door? It excites me, this possibility. And this possibility also stems from an echo from that master philosopher J. Krishnamurti, who once said “It is not the unknown that we fear, it is the leaving behind of the known that we fear.”

Dear ROS, the ‘Pitch us a show’-thread seems to have fallen off… at least the green-boxed, in-text replies you projected last year; and, sadly, there is nothing under the ‘Warming Up’-bar. So I find a curious mixture of ‘distracted and understaffed’ and very current multi-media engagement here - curiosity, happily, persists. I’m getting the sense that much depends on whom you can enchant, Chris, to enter into interview with you. The point, after all, is that you do this so well; I’ve thought so for years, and missed your voice specifically, when you left public radio. And so I followed you to ROS in the first incarnation, through to the pleasant surprise of the current anabiosis.

All of which is to say that I finished the podcast, and my reply/plea stands. I’ve subscribed for the sake of my iPod, which I use on a daily basis in my capacity as an employee. My eyes and ears are ‘on’, and I have you to thank. Thank you.

And John Maeda. How will this site act as an alternative to the OpenSource blogsite? This was my introduction to your work (TED-talk, et al). I’m curious, what do *you* mean when you say you want to take the conversation global? As an artist, can you imagine the creative process directed democratically? Maybe ‘dialectically’ is different. You I’d like to thank for suggesting that there is something behind those who keep a sense of play alive. To raise the question, in any event, is playful indeed.

I enjoyed hearing the comment that the ear doesn’t blink. While I think that the synesthetic possibilities certainly do and will open up with portable media (iPhone, et al.), what really grabs me is the emergent sense of ‘locative media’. ‘Augmented reality’ is on the horizon, in which virtual reality may be interacted with/experienced in-tandem/overlay with ‘primary’, ‘local’, ‘tangible’ reality. That is a synesthesia I am eagerly anticipating and would like to know more about - that is, between virtual and tangible worlds. It reminds me of John’s comment about the reformulation of content, or the iconicity of media being recycled through the narrowing and broadening of bandwidth, whereby new limitations might be leveraged into creative constraints…

So, consider this a preliminary plea; Christopher, John: won’t you please take up the topic of locative media as it bears on the dawning of augmented reality, please? I’ll cross-post this as seems appropriate. And thank you, for persisting in such a way that I’m encouraged to contribute; long-time audient/visient, first-time reply.