Algorithmic Political-Media-Mashup Vodcast

flexatone writes "Composer Christopher Ariza, author of the first algorithmic, computer-generated podcast, announces the next phase of his experimental political-media-mashup project: the babelcast-zoetrope. The babelcast-zoetrope employs the subscription model of the vodcast (RSS feed, iTMS subscription) to deliver timely multi-media artifacts of the contemporary media landscape. Generated with free, open-source software tools (such as athenaCL, Python, Csound, and ffmpeg), babelcast-zoetrope is an experimental, algorithmic, computer-generated video podcast. Sounds and images of U.S. and World leaders and commentators are algorithmically fragmented, distorted, and recombined into a media tapestry. New episodes are defined by a time period: audio and video sequences are constructed only with materials collected during this period, lasting from days to weeks."

Comments

Vodcast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Vodcast? Is that like a alcoholic beverage you and take with you? Perhaps for Smirnoff's new link of iVod's? It's called a Vidcast - no one will know what the hell you're talking about otherwise.

Re:Vodcast?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called video-fucking-download! Just like an mp3 download is called a fucking mp3 download! Quit making up stupid words that sound like apple products and quit supporting the ones made up by others.

...okay?

[mcc]

I guess that sounds interesting, but... huh? It seems that this slashdot submission was generated by a computer (a markov chain babble bot?) as well...

Re:...okay?

[wheany]

Yep, that's a lot of fancy words you've got there.

Re:...okay?

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

I actually downloaded one of these algorithm generated podcasts. They say it is made up of various sound bites and some noise and randomization. Well, it ended up sounding like noise and randomization. I don't know what I expected, but it sounded like someone constantly turning the dial on an FM radio. Great technology!!!

Re:...okay?

[muhgcee]

Slashdot stories generated by a computer

Re:...okay?

[jeremy_hogan]

I don't know what purpose it serves, but art doesn't need a purpose. It's a nice little instant subliminal/incidental art maker. Not unlike the patterns formed by city workers continually painting over graffiti.

Assembling all that noise and making it at all tolerable to watch or hear is neat. It still made more sense to me than anything I've seen on Fox News in 6 years.

And if you watch there are a number of happy accidents. Like assembling a shot of riot police under narration talking about fighting Iraqi insurgents, or toggling the top of a talking head's head off everytime he opens his mouth.

Sounds a lot like

[npcompleat]

This sounds an awful lot like the rolling 24 hour news channels that I am addicted to!

Re:Sounds a lot like

[DigiShaman]

CNN "Pipeline"

Damn dude, you need to get out more.

Re:Sounds a lot like

[npcompleat]

Out? Noooo....from the reports, it looks really dangerous out there!

One more time?

[Benanov]

I had to come up for air after drowning in that deluge of buzzwords. Can someone explain that to me? :)

Re:One more time?

[Winlin]

Ah, but you have to embrace the zeitgeist of the synergistic postmodern...errr...nope, I'm lost too.

Re:One more time?

[generic-man]

Like Google News, but with video instead of text.

Re:One more time?

[SydBarrett]

It means Negativland can just go on vacation and have a computer generate their "Over the Edge" show for them.

Re:One more time?

[Valdrax]

I think that they've managed to attempt to create an automated version of the works of Joshua Pearson better known as one of the founders of Emergency Broadcast Network.

I doubt that it's as good as the hand-crafted originals, though, if I'm getting what they're trying. I'd have to look at it when I got home to confirm it.

Incidentally, look up EBN and Joshua Pearson sometime. It's worth the search if you can find the clips he made after he left the group from footage of 2000 Presidential debates and campaign. "The Internet" is great. For sheer creepy trippiness, I also recommend "Comply" from the EBN archive on his site.

Brilliant

[kahei]

That was like standing in the middle of a hot, dusty road -- and then suddenly a biplane dumps a barrel of icy-cold buzzwords down your back!

And it was like walking down a long, silent corridor and opening a door -- and behind the door are a hundred advertising executives, and each one is holding a mirror in which are reflected a thousand dull unemployed rich kids, and all hundred thousand plus one hundred are chanting 'NEW MEDIA' in unison!

And it was like looking at a computer screen -- only to find that somewhere behind the screen, a Beast formed of all the jargon, buzzwords, catchphrases and lame gimmicks of all the ages of Mankind is staring back at you!

I salute the writer of the summary.

Unless, of course, any part of the summary or of that 'vodcast/babelcast/media tapestry' crap is serious.

In which case, there are people out there who need to be given real jobs, like ditch digging, ASAP. Really.

I have a spare shovel, actually.

Re:Brilliant

[networkBoy]

I have a ditch that needs digging!

550 feet on a 45% grade incline, needs to be 5 inches wide (min, more is fine) and 24 inches deep (pesky electrical code).
Cheers,
-nB

Re:Brilliant

[amliebsch]

It's not that hard to understand the summary. You have "Algorithmic", "Political", and "Media." Understanding the summary is simply a matter of context-mapping these modal figuratives to a linear grammar that can be gleaned from the summary domain. Each feature, then, is rotated to the cerebral context, where it it becomes internalized as a distinctive functional notion. Summarizing, then, we assume that an important property of these three types of EC is not quite equivalent to irrelevant intervening contexts in selectional rules. For one thing, this selectionally introduced contextual feature cannot be arbitrary in the traditional practice of grammarians. We will bring evidence in favor of the following thesis: the notion of level of grammaticalness is to be regarded as nondistinctness in the sense of distinctive feature theory. Clearly, the appearance of parasitic gaps in domains relatively inaccessible to ordinary extraction can be defined in such a way as to impose a stipulation to place the constructions into these various categories. In the discussion of resumptive pronouns following the headline, the fundamental error of regarding functional notions as categorial does not readily tolerate a parasitic gap construction, thus it is perfectly clear.

Re:Brilliant

[Anonymous Coward]

I dunno man. The nodal imperative included in the dictum seems to imply a reversal of the polarization of pre-existing mediums of communication, by introducing a new paradigm and creating a structure which can be approached in heretofore unknown ways.

(I can do it too!)

Re:Brilliant

[smoker2]

paradigm, you gotta have a paradigm !

Re:Brilliant

[Verteiron]

Your name isn't Helmut Bakaitis is it? Nah, can't be, I don't see one single "ergo" in there...

Re:Brilliant

[flyingsquid]

I salute the writer of the summary. Unless, of course, any part of the summary or of that 'vodcast/babelcast/media tapestry' crap is serious.

All I can say is, I have *got* to get the number of this guy's dealer.

Not noise

[CRCulver]

This is like an expansion of the musical traditions of musique concrete and rigorously mathematical composition which gave the 20th century some of its most noted works of art music. See Iannis Xenakis' Formalized Music and Griffith's Modern Music and After (Oxford University Press, 1996). Yet, it is being applied to news media and creates interesting tapestries that are a perfect match for the times we live in. New technologies really do create new kinds of art, although I suspect for now some would be reluctant to call this art.

Re:Not noise

[Anonymous Coward]

I had no idea who you were talking about, so I had a look at those links. I have heard of John Cage and Michael Nyman (aka "silent music guy, didn't he sue The Wombles?" and "oh, where have I heard that name? oh yeah, The Piano, right?") but noted? They're no Fatboy Slim! Now that's technology applied to music, creating art for the times we live in (last album was crap though...).

Re:Not noise

[Anonymous Coward]

Excuse me sir, I believe you dropped the monocle you were polishing... here you go... now what were you saying about Britney Spears?

Re:Not noise

[Ithika]

Personally I think Four Tet does it best when it comes to using modern technology to create music. It seems (I don't pay too much attention to that field of music) that his style is a lot more rooted in jazz, for example, while using the sounds he finds as real instruments.

The equivalent, I suppose, of Tom Waits' recent stuff in the "analogue" world: if it makes a good noise then it can fit into an orchestra! :)

PS. For the love of all that is decent, when is Slashdot going to allow HTML entities? A technology site, of all things, and can't even get basic punctuation marks like dashes. Argh.

Re:Not noise

[croddy]

This is more of an embarrassing reduction of Xenakis than an expansion.

Where Xenakis built beautiful, evolving structures, this guy presents us with a randomly generated flatline sliced up incoherently by a looping automaton.

If you generate a PCM stream of pseudorandom amplitudes, that's called "noise". If you generate a video stream of pseudorandom pixels, that's also called "noise".

Shuffling an audio and video stream together in a plain, pseudorandom fashion? Yep. Still just "noise". Using flavor-of-the-week blog fodder as the input to the noise generator? That just makes it even harder to take it seriously.

Re:Not noise

[CRCulver]

Where Xenakis built beautiful, evolving structures, this guy presents us with a randomly generated flatline sliced up incoherently by a looping automaton.

Xenakis wrote plenty of compositions that were randomly generated. The entire ST series, for example, as well as the piano part of "Eonta" and "Nomos alpha". Most of the "beautiful, evolving structures" came during his last phase.

hmmm on tv

[caffeinemessiah]

If I want distorted commentary and irrelevant news pieces, I'll just switch on a local news station with its over-zelaous anchors. It's interesting, but other than a cursory "check-out", I don't see much value to this.

Re:hmmm on tv

[Amouth]

"If I want distorted commentary and irrelevant news pieces, I'll just " hold a large magnet next to the tv while tuned to the news?

What Does This Have to do with Politics???!!

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems like a nice little technological trick, but I see no political relevance here.

Just because you're using images of world leaders doesn't make it a political story.

Humans still do it better

[Tackhead]

Not bad.

But wake me when it beats Evolution Control Committee's divinely-inspired Rocked By Rape (4.1 megabytes, MP3)

As my dear departed mother would doubtless say...

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not impressing anyone with that language.

Why is it 'experimental'?

[tlynch001]

What is 'experimental' about it?

Spam

[RedHatLinux]

How did this blatant story spam get posted here? Geez, Kuro5hin just finished shooting this down too, which makes it even worse that it got posted here.

Distortion of information

[davecrusoe]

To me, it seems a challenge to ensure that the sense of the media included is retained within the mashup; quotes out of context (indeed, entire articles out of context, or even just small snips!) could lead of the spread of dis/mis/information. And in a society that increasingly needs the real information, as correctly as possible and as quickly as possible to get tasks done, is this a step in the wrong direction? --dc

Re:Distortion of information

[SydBarrett]

quotes out of context (indeed, entire articles out of context, or even just small snips!) could lead of the spread of dis/mis/information.

That's sort of the whole idea behind stuff like this, and what makes it fun.

Re:Distortion of information

[Anonymous Coward]

And you're saying that on this site, of all places?

WoW

[fred911]

Their fileserver has got to be hammered. It's grinding slow. Anyone care to host a torrent?

Yes, Vodcast

[CarpetShark]

Yes, vodcast. Or vlog, or internet TV, or...

It's just not old enough for everyone to have settled on a name for it.

-1, buy an ad

[MattGWU]

This must be what it feels like to be some kind of highly-specialized form of weenie. The buzzwords, children, the buzzwords!

Also, in the interest of full disclosure, what is submitter's relationship to the website, other than having the same username as the domain name?

And you're right, it's a cut and paste of the 'article' that lasted about a minute and a half on k5.

Hahahahaha!

[mmell]

Oh, wait . . . you're serious. Let me laugh harder . . .

HAHAHAHAHA!

Ignoring the Advantages

[Anonymous Coward]

Using algorithms and indeterminacy to filter information and reassemble it may or may not be art, but ignoring the possible advantages of such a process is foolish. We have programs (DJ software) that will choose music 'indeterminately' why wouldn't we want a similar process for other media, like cartoon shorts or news? In fact, something that uses indeterminate processes for showing random video could be very useful for foreign language learning or any number of tasks where the information does not have to be presented sequentially in a particular format to be appreciated. Whether or not you "like" this idea does not discredit its presence here, because its consequences and direction of thought are promising.

whaa?

[Aurisor]

Parts of that are from a language I understand, and parts of it sound like a box of squirrels being whirled about in a tornado.

Re:whaa?

[honestmonkey]

I was going to complain about what a piece of f'd up crap this was, but now I see that I totally missed the squirrels angle. Maybe I'll have to go back and watch it again. Were there pictures of squirrels as well? I guess Bush is a nut, so he doesn't really count.

Ariza

[waxwing]

I haven't checked out this new stuff yet, but I am about to. I listen to Ariza's older stuff -- there's a piece "Agoralalia" that is a particular favorite.

Been there, done that, at SF art events

[Animats]

I used to go to San Francisco art events with stuff like that.

I once went to an event where some guy was blasting away with a bunch of noise generators and effects boxes, in what was then called "power electronics" and is now called "noise music". Most of the audience left. I didn't quite want to leave the poor guy playing to an empty room, so I waited until a woman walked in, and told her "You're the audience. Take over". Then I walked out.

There's Spam Radio, where incoming spam goes through a text to speech converter.

Re:Been there, done that, at SF art events

[Photon Ghoul]

Power Electronics is a sub-genre of Noise.

babel

[rakerman]

+1 buzzword-and-jargon-laden post

...except...

[C10H14N2]

Without an expansion on what the "algorithm" actually IS, this could be equivalent to a Piet Mondrian...or merely a Keith Boadwee.

I sense that the "algorithm" in question is sadly more akin to the techniques of the latter and, really, if for that you can answer in the affirmative the question "but, is it ART?" I can't imagine that anything would fall outside that box...well, a splash or two maybe...

Re:WoW

[MarkGriz]

Just take 2 pens, jam one in your ear, the other in your eye.

I will look and sound about the same, but be less painful.

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[SimHacker]

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Channel Surfing (8 different channels with many different programs)

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Select any character, video feed to other information to display in each frame.
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WebCam Support:
Put yourself on-screen and interview and argue with the characters!

Streaming Video Clips with keyword triggers.

Video backgrounds and overlays.

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All content is tagged and triggered with keywords, used by simulation to decide which video clips and sound bites to play.

Keyword display:
See active keywords, hide and focus on keywords to drive simulation

Meaningless graphs and chart-junk.

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Teleprompter talking points with reference links so you can really decide for yourself.

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