New Genre F10

11/15/10 On Cage

The organization of sounds over time.  That’s what John Cage is concerned with.  Or rather, he is perturbed by the organization of sounds; randomness or “indeterminacy” is his deity.  Order and sequence is intrusive.  He sees no need for it.  But just as music needs beats and rhythms to communicate a feeling, so do his words, or they become meaningless.  And thus they are structured with sentences and grammatical form. 

Is randomness, being futile, really his objective?  Or is it mere perversion of order?  “On Indeterminacy” is written in tiny letters, with little leading, in columns way to wide to facilitate readability.  Does Cage want a reader to lose her place and repeat a line or two here and there?  It seems that what he is truly interested in is not the arbitrary but the accident.

the world’s most famous fractal: now in 3D!

Thanks to some very smart people, the formula behind the Mandelbrot set has been reconfigured to produce a 3D version, dubbed the Mandelbulb.  (Sidenote: the Mandelbrot set was created by famous mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot, who died last week.)

Wired.com article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/12/mandelbulb-gallery/all/1

article by the creator: http://www.skytopia.com/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html 
(warning: this site is ugly) 

A great example of how a single mathematical formula (the most basic form of computer programming) can be reinterpreted into a visual form of great beauty.  I’m particularly drawn to how bizarre and unearthly the resulting landscape is. The 3D fractal’s repetitive, but still feels organic and random in a way a lot of my processing experiments have not. I wonder about the capability of programming and Processing to aid artists in discovering new forms.  It seems that this type of rule-based, repetitive algorithm might have the potential to help free us humans of the conceptual schema that usually fetter our imaginations.

these things are interesting

1. humans
2. the internet
3. the computer
4. artificial intelligence
5. cyborgs
6. artificial reality
7. the future
8. multiculturalism & globalism
9. human ego
10. self-consciousness
11. abstraction
12. the grand scheme of things
13. airplanes
14. lava lamps
15. perfect forms
16. design
17. color
18. music
19. artificial textures
20. silly putty
21. perfection
22. the nature of beautiful things
23. sex
24. the grotesque
25. creation and destruction
26. time
27. childhood
28. stories
29. wikipedia
30. human motivation
31. blogging & social networking
32. intellectual property & file sharing
33. democratization and the internet and the notion of ‘free’
34. privacy rights
35. journalism
36. marketing
37. usability
38. interface design / user experience
39. aesthetics
40. museums
41. magic
42. porn
43. dollhouses
44. war-reenactments
45. mental diseases
46. patterns
47. what is weird
48. what is taboo
49. what creates happiness
50. the role of media
51. addiction
52. cultural differences
53. the creator/spectator relationship
54. how words shape the nature of things
55. alternate forms of consciousness
56. the nature of sense data
57. hallucinogens
58. the nonexistence of categories
59. the nonexistence of ‘natural’
60. outer space
61. infinities
62. what is important
63. is anything important
64. stories
65. celebrity
66. death
67. systems
68. the desire for habit
69. creativity
70. mental schema
71. stereotypes
72. identity and names
73. genders & sexualities
74. little people
75. oddities
76. brains
77. machines
78. the expected and the unexpected
79. superheroes
80. clocks
81. war
82. cute
83. neon lights
84. toys and gadgets
85. philosophical puzzles
86. photography
87. art
88. computer programming
89. human relationships
90. Wired magazine
91. animation
92. 3D modeling
93. film
94. time-based media
95. context and
96. the order of this list
97. what is pretentiousness
98. what is profundity
99. intellectualism
100. that these things are interesting