Cryptoanarchism

See Enpersonator in action here: http://soniayuditskaya.tumblr.com/

Enpersonator is in development here: http://github.com/virgildisgr4ce/Enpersonator.  It requires the Python Tumblr library, which requires Django for its utilities.  The Markov Generator is modified from Adam Parrish’s.

The current version uses all 5 of the blogs in the Political Blog Corpora, comprising 133,953 tokens.  Not too shabby, but still not enough to avoid lots of wholesale reproductions.

3  * * *
4  * * *
5  * * *
6  * * *

Furthermore, you may have also noticed that Windows’ tracert program doesn’t have this problem. The Unix traceroute program uses a bunch of UDP packets on a bunch of client ports to do its magic, whereas tracert uses ICMP packets, which I guess would have to be port forwarded on your router normally. Regardless, the solution is to use:

traceroute -I targethost.com

This forces traceroute to use ICMP packets the way the Windows program does. Amazing! I’m sure there’s a downside to this approach, but so far it works like a charm.

And here it is!  Download the python script (v. 1.0)(rename it to .py…thanks for nothing, WordPress), or clone it from the git repo.  If you have python installed (OS X and Unix users already do), just jump into a shell and type

python eros.py

…in the directory you downloaded the script and enjoy!  Otherwise… install python I will try to find a way to implement the script interactively in a web browser.

I discovered much to my delight that a rudimentary text-adventure parser could be accomplished in one class and only a few dozen lines of code!  This script should be an excellent learning example of an object-oriented approach and is very easily extensible.  Feel free to modify away, but try to credit my writing!

A room-based text adventure like this one has some interesting mathematical properties, since the network of rooms is essentially an acyclic directed graph.  The poem/game is in sonnet form: three quatrains and a couplet.  Each quatrain contains two pairs of rhymes, and the couplet rhymes.  This form is clear in the network diagram.

Traditionally, entering a room in a text-adventure game would display a prose description of the room.  Here, each room is a line of the poem.  Ideally each line in the poem would only be read once, but there’s no simple way to achieve this with the spatial, room-oriented metaphor of the adventure game.  It would have to involve some kind of key object game mechanic, such as requiring the two keys before being able to proceed past a locked door, but then you’d still be repeating lines if you have to backtrack.  A better, but less interactive (and probably less interesting) approach would be to have doors magically lock and unlock so as to constrain exactly the procession of the lines of the poem.  But I’m not very concerned about that, I very much like the idea of literally exploring the poem and playing and replaying the game until one finds “just the right” order they like.

I consider the game experience as a whole the actual poem.  For reference, however, here are the lines in an arbitrary (but still constrained to the game graph) order:

rooms[0].line  = "When we had opened all the doors"
rooms[1].line  = "When we had broken every window"
rooms[2].line  = "The vesper-bells had rattled like the floors"
rooms[3].line  = "And the dust had settled on the lintel"
rooms[4].line  = "When we first met the image of the other"
rooms[5].line  = "And the mirrors danced so brightly"
rooms[6].line  = "The crows had fled the gables nightly"
rooms[7].line  = "And the love between the seedling was the mother of the moon"
rooms[8].line  = "The house had crumbled from the rust"
rooms[9].line  = "And the silence grew in anger"
rooms[10].line = "As the host redoubled with a clangor"
rooms[11].line = "And our trust had all the force of a typhoon"
rooms[12].line = "And in the Labyrinth of Eros, a time became a turning"
rooms[13].line = "For the blankness in the sky was a fire, and a yearning"

A principal concern while writing the poem, of course, was that it would be a good and interesting poem in any of the possible constrained patterns.  I’ll leave that to you to decide.

There’s also a little easter egg—see here for more details

Sound prototyping: A short composition of 4-7 sine wave oscillators harmonizing and disharmonizing:

Two videos of synth design approaches: 8-bit R2R DAC and Schmidt trigger oscillator.

The machine utilizes two hacked hard drives, a method originally inspired by this hard-drive laser oscilloscope.  The drives are fed by a 30W stereo amp kit, into which is fed a stereo sound signal generated in Puredata.

Lux Vocis works like so: a user speaks into a microphone and my puredata patch picks out the most commonly recurring spectral peaks of the voice.  These frequencies are then used as seeds for a Lissajous figure, which is then drawn on the surface by oscillating the two mirrors attached to the hard drive voice coils.

Here’s another informative video:

And some selected drawings:

Traditional music sequencers are designed fundamentally around predictability and repetition, and these are powerful elements that make them so ubiquitous.  More modern approaches to algorithmic composition heavily involve unpredictability and randomness that is then (sometimes) tamed and manipulated by the composer, resulting in a nonlinear compositional and performative process.

The Neurohedron is a novel music instrument and modal software controller that I conceived of as a nonlinear sequencer.  The simplest traditional sequencers may employ eight steps that return to the first step after reaching the last step; in contrast, the Neurohedron is a three dimensional sequencer with twelve nodes arranged as a dodecahedron.  With this structure, there is no clear or de facto path that the progression from one node to the next may take, unlike the linear and prescribed nature of a traditional sequencer.

Each face on the device is both a touch-switch that sends input triggers to software as well as an electroluminescent panel that displays feedback from the software.  While the platform could be used in a huge variety of ways, my first inclination was to use the inputs as stimuli in a 12-node neural network, where each face is connected in a graph to the 5 faces adjacent to it.  Each of the edges between these faces is then weighted between 0 and 1, and the progression from one face to another follows the highest weighted edges.

Each node (face) in the network is then mapped to a MIDI note.  These mappings are described by a variety of musical modes.  Thus, a sequence on the Neurohedron will send patterns of MIDI notes to a synthesizer platform (Ableton Live, in this case).  This platform is wide open, of course, so anything could be triggered in principal.

Here’s a demonstration of the software model:

The interface is multi-modal, meaning that there are 5 states the interface can be in that determine what it does:

• Input: Pressing a face triggers an input stimulus to the neural network at that node
• Stop: Holding a face down stops any circuits that encounter that node
• Live-play: Sends MIDI notes pursuant to that face’s current mode-mapping
• (Musical) Mode: Changes the mode-mapping of the network
• Randomize: Randomizes all of the neural network’s weights

Here’s a little demo of Matt Boyle & I playing the Neurohedron in live-play mode.

Process & Production

The Neurohedron’s hardware consists of:

• Plexi & aluminum skeleton
• Laser-etched faces
  • Momentary switches
  • EL panels
• Logic Board
  • ATMEGA328PU Microcontroller
  • 2x shift-in registers
  • 2x shift-out registers
  • FTDI USB Interface
• AC Switching array
  • 12x Optoisolated triac & low-current triac pairs

This video demonstrates the shift-in and -out registers controlling switches and panels:

And this one detailing the AC switching:

And finally, a gallery of production photos:

CHRONOTRONIC WONDER TRANSDUCER is a miniature discollective of musick artists and poet-inventors.  Using a variety of means and methods, from hand-made electronics to custom-designed software, to conjure electromechanical invocations to dead gods and summon sound from the deep void of silence.  CWT’s lineup includes:

Ted Hayes presents Stan Breakhage, an ambient-industrial music & video performance that warps and manhandles Stan Brakhage’s venerable Dog Star Man into visual breakcore, aligned and controlled with custom-designed, live electronic instruments.  See a clip of Stan Breakhage’s premiere performance here.  Ted Hayes is a poet, inventor and composer whose work revolves around the concepts of the beautiful and the sublime, intersecting with desire and plummeting into stratospheres of bright noise and dark philosophy.  Combining both the arcane visions of structuralist film with a sincere sonic splendor, Stan Breakhage is not to be missed.  Read more about Ted’s work at http://log.liminastudio.com.

Joe Mariglio is a composer and artist whose practice spans many mediums.  He is often labeled an electronic musician, but does not really understand the term, since the vast majority of music has been electronic for some time.  Some of Joe’s work deals with problems surrounding the mediation of experiences.  Joe is also interested in networks, human and otherwise, structured improvisation, and narrative forms.  He enjoys baking bread, meditating, and building guitar pedals.  He documents his process at www.joemariglio.com.

And Um Yeah conjures a noisy electro–psychedelic swell and turns it into a song. Using handmade instruments, custom software, and creatively modified electronics, they will attempt to lure you in a world of fun and fear that you can only see by closing your eyes and pressing on your eyeballs. And Um Yeah isAmy Khoshbin and Michael Clemow, based in Brooklyn, NY.  Check them out at http://www.myspace.com/andumyeahmusic.

Steven Litt is a recent graduate of the Interactive Telecommunications Program of NYU. He is the creator of CrudBox, a robotic rhythm machine that controls electronic or electromechanical devices, amplifying their sounds in real time. His work mixes the raw, abrasive sounds of noise and electroacoustic music with the rhythms of electronic dance music. He is an artist, designer, and musician. He currently lives in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Lori Napoleon is an artist, mad-scientist and synthesist inspired by the physics of sound and light.  Her background in the hybrid art and science of holography fuels her continued explorations in process and material, and the creative potential intrinsic in challenging our assumptions about everyday objects, and repurposing obsolete technologies.  Spawned by her hybrid love of electronic music and the primordial urge to “build stuff,” Lori is currently focused on sound and instrument design, beating circuits into submission, and composition with analog electronics.

Proposal: This laser drawing machine uses an enclosed system of a low-powered green laser and voice-coil actuated mirrors to draw figures on a stationary or scrolling sheet of thermal fax paper, generating patterns of varying style and complexity. The patterns are generated algorithmically from the collapsed soundtracks of various experimental films.