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

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.

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.

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.

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)

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.

-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!

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.