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.

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

[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.

Hahahahaha!

[mmell]

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

HAHAHAHAHA!