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ParasiticProtocolPortfolio
Starting from the premise of techno-scientific knowledge and subsequent leaps in technological innovation, being guided at source by the military complex, the primary objective to conduct warfare. Or as Paul Virilio states in the Information Bomb, this anti-scientific environment is driven by the ‘operational reality of the technical instrument’, and ‘digital procedures’ that override the ‘analogue mental process’. This trajectory of adventurism ‘draws the various scientific disciplines on to the path of a ‘post-scientific extremism’ that exiles them from all reason. 1.
That these self same technologies eventually filter down into the public sphere is itself a process of entropy in the clear line of communication between sender and receiver, executor and target. This bifurcating exchange, pregnant with potentialities, can also become a catalytic engine of social change. Within this cycle, the drive of artistic creation also feeds back into the loop, towards a trajectory of relentless force. Who is the parasite and who the host?
In the ParasiticProtocolPortfolio, a parasitic position is assumed that attempts to subvert the hierarchy prevalent within this relationship. The host provides the source of energy, making the dynamic process of change possible, in a transient state of flux and becoming. The motor that drives the sound machine is provided by the data of monetary exchange within the financial markets, the flow of binary digits that continually transform the system. This ‘neutral’ data reflecting the decision making of profit and vested interests, the benign circulation of free floating data, belying its malignant and deadly effect in the jungles and deserts of ‘difference’.
In this given situation the spectacular effect of such causality is as an agent of sonic instigation. Its bang the interruptor that sets in motion, and transforms the system irrevocably, ‘the logic of irreversible time’, 2. that in this case modifes the system within the Max/MSP patch. In Noise, the Political Economy of Music, 3. Jacques Attali proposes the idea of noise as the herald of change, signifying a new political economy, in a future mode of deterritorialised composition. Here we create the conditions for the inversion of this proposition, with the economy signifying and bearing the message of noise. In this parasitic location noise is both receiver and transmitter, the carrier of informed sound, the intelligent communicator of signals or sound information.
The morse is a messenger, a translator, and sound source in its own right. A musical instrument of sound information, a transmitter of analogue voltages that enable its digital progenies, a decoder and agent of change. As telegraphy opened the wide spaces of the west to the ‘iron horse’ of communication, so morse signifies ‘the modern-post’ delivering the message that fires the drive to open the unknown spaces and territories of desire. The ADC converts the original binary of morse manifest in voltages to digital, and having used their neo binary information converts them back into analogue voltages, before sending them back into the aether.
The IcubeX digitizer box with its attached MoveOn proximity sensor tracks the audience up to a range of 10 metres. The input read as midi signal is sent to the Max application, where it is sent via the Rewire driver to the Propellerheads soft studio Reason. Here it triggers random oscillations in a sub bass patch of the Subtractor polyphonic synthesizer. (Due to conflicting driver problems it may not be possible to have the morse army trainer and the IcubeX running simultaneously).
The use of the sensor is part of a longstanding objective to have the user/activist ‘playing’ the acoustic properties of a space as a musical instrument through their movement. The activating of the acoustic space brings to mind Marshall Mac,Luhans comments regarding aural society and the electric retribalization of the western world.
The sensor for its part was engineered as a detective security device and deployed and tested in Vietnam to trace and make audible the ‘silent’enemy of the VietCong on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
If ‘war can never break free from the magical spectacle because its very purpose is to produce that spectacle…not so much to capture as to captivate…’ 4. then the utilisation of the same tools seeks to invoke that same spirit, if only for a very different rendering. The desire to demystify the concealed and guarded processes, whilst harnessing their tremendous power and potential.
Within this soundscape of generative noise, with its extreme frequencies of high and low, of infra and ultrasonic properties that arouse and repel, the siren sound of alarm can be heard, the warning of danger to the voyager. The laughter of the Valkyries, a playful Bakhtinian expression of the carnivalesque, of a low culture rising to the surface from an Orphean underworld and into consciousness. Or a mocking expression of overwhelming force, a signal of the victory of power and control, of the closure of the system over openness and interaction. ‘The parasite parasites the parasites’ – Michel Serres. 5.
Due to the extreme volatility of the situation it must be constantly managed, in a more sophisticated/’evolved’ system the error may be minimised. Certainly gates acting as gatekeepers can keep the excess of flow/force minimised but it is not desirable to do so. The collatoral damage of excess is held at a resonant point in its acoustic threshold, unpredictability the desired outcome. If the system blows apart it will hopefully need only a reboot.
Construction of the PPP is modular and adaptable it can equally be an interactive installation or semi installation, semi performance with live audio/visual mix.
Send Morse voltages as noisy catalysts of change.
Create your own market profile ‘My Nasdaq’ as a set of commands that change the parameters of the soundscape.
A Sonic Transmission and Projection of data in a Spectacularisation of the Banal.
ParasiticProtocolPortfolio - Business as Usual.
Notes
01. Virilio Paul. The Information Bomb, Verso 2000, London and New York. First published as La Bombe informatique, Editions Galilée, 1998.
02. Lechte, John. Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers, from structuralism to postmodernity, Michel Serres, P.82. Routledge, London and New York, 1994. According to the second law of thermodynamics, contingency and chance predominate, making it a system of irreversible time as opposed to the Newtonian mechanical model of reversible time. Bourdieu has called the logic of practice the logic of irreversible time.
03. Attali, Jacques. Noise - The Political Economy of Music, 1996, Minnesota University Press, USA.
04. Virilio Paul. War and Cinema, The Logistics of Perception, Verso 1989, London and New York. Translated by Patrick Camiller.
05. Serres, Michel, The Parasite, The John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Maryland and London, 1982.
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Image courtesy www.armyradio.com