I think the first album I ever bought as a kid was “Meet the Beatles.” It was a hit record and was featured at the checkout stand at the large market where my family did our shopping. Over the years I collected all of their records.
The record player in our house was an all-in-one job, it was before stereo components were common. My favorite feature was that you could stack record albums and as one would finish, the next would automatically drop down and start to play. I particularly liked stacking ‘Rubber Soul,’ ‘Revolver‘ and ‘Sgt. Pepper.’ The spindle’s stacking limit was five records.
Much later I had a fondness for the mix tape. My music library had expanded by that time. The 90 minute tape allowed 45 minutes of music per side. Putting together a good mix tape was a badge of honor. Getting the perfect songs and sequence, and then making everything fit perfectly required a lot of effort — adding up song durations, pulling songs from multiple albums, starting and stopping the tape to create the perfect flow.
If we skip ahead to the present day, we have the playlist — a drag and drop affair. My iPod has a couple of playlists with well over 100 songs. Generally I use them for background music for dinner parties.
The digital removes all boundaries, the records can now be stacked all the way to the sky. We can collect so much more digital media than we can consume. In an era of human proportions, we could say a person’s eyes were bigger than their stomach. Now our our eyes can scan through thousands of pointers to digital files containing all kinds of media. Since we can’t actually experience it, we consume it through an abstraction layer only through our eyes.
Hugh McCloud once said, “Human attention doesn’t scale.” How do we bring human proportions to the limitlessness of the digital? What is the moral and mortal force that moderates the infinite?
There’s a sense in which the digital is a copy at its origin. It has no uniqueness, no originality. The difference between the first copy and subsequent copies is just a time stamp in the file system.
That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the ‘aura’ of the work of art. The technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition and substitutes plurality of copies for a unique existence.
The digital seems like a black hole, a format that is non-auratic at its core. While digital files can be very amusing, can they ever have the ‘aura’ and unique presence of the original work of art? As we look at the digital objects surrounding us, it seems as though we could be having one of Phillip K. Dick’snightmares.
Layering the digital on top of the digital, mashing up a new media venue reveals a real time moment that has an originality at the point of contact. Live radio broadcast over the real time web creates a moment of danger, imperfection and improvisation. I’m not talking about commercial radio stuffed down another channel, but the kind of stuff that is emerging from micro-communities within the social web. While these files can be consumed on a digital delay, at the present moment of their creation they show every sign of having an ‘aura.’ You can see it happen sometimes with live music, and in rare cases with comedy. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It’s a kind of spark or electricity that happens when you can actually hear people listening to each other. The members of the Firesign Theater are eloquent on this point:
“There was no leader,” Bergman says. “Everything was communally written, and if one person didn’t agree about something, no matter how strongly the other three felt about it, it didn’t go in.” This principle was to hold true with each subsequent Firesign effort because, as Bergman explains, “If one of us doesn’t get it then something’s wrong. But if we get it, then it doesn’t matter who else does.” All the Firesigns agree, however, that a mysterious synergy took place whenever the four of them got together. “It’s like, suddenly there is this fifth guy that actually does the writing,” Austin says. “We all vaguely sort of know him, and a lot of the time take credit for him.”
The real time web has the potential to offer redemption to the digital, the return of the detached aura in that moment of creation. While the digital has proven itself as a bread winner, it’s only just now learning how to dance.
What must the world be like in order for a person to understand what the phrase “copy and paste” means? As we look about us, we can distinguish between those things that can be “copied and pasted,” and those things that cannot. That bunch of flowers growing in the pot in my garden cannot be copied. I can grow similar flowers, but I can’t grow identical flowers.
While mechanical reproduction at the industrial level creates many seemingly identical products, the pen I write with, or the coffee mug from which I’m sipping– these things cannot be “copied and pasted.” As we continue to look about, our inclination would be to skip directly to the digital; for surely that’s the world from which “copy and paste” comes. But in our haste, we would be passing over vast continents.
“Copy and paste” makes sense to us because its most common usage is not digital. Its basis is in our language– both spoken and written. Language, words, can be quoted. I can copy a phrase, a prayer, a poem, a joke, a hint, an expression of emotion that I overhear somewhere and paste it into my speech. I can copy something identically, or I can make it my own by saying something similar. Our laws regarding copyright establish a legal and economic framework for the copying of language.
One of our primary activities as humans is to pass along news. “What’s going on in the world of politics today?” We scan through all the news we’ve consumed during the day– copying and pasting to create the story we want to tell. The filtering that takes place as we scan is both the discovery and creation of the value of information in the context of specific audiences.
As we turn to the digital, the obvious first stop is the editing program– the word processor. This tool augmented our ability to copy and paste text, to rearrange it, to treat it as a plastic medium. There’s a kind of flow to building and constructing that text editors make possible. Think about the much more mechanical process involved with using a fountain pen, typewriter, scissors and a glue pot.
The metaphor of editing has been extended to image, video and sound manipulation; and if we think about it, to the local file system itself. The desktop is an editor for pointers to files– here also, we copy, paste and delete. It’s with that editor that we’ve created ambiguity around the ownership status of digital media.
To preserve a particular economic algorithm, there’s an attempt to limit the file-system editor’s ability to “copy and paste” certain kinds of files. These kinds of limitations don’t exist with any other editor. Imagine a text editor that was prohibited from copying and pasting copyrighted material. Imagine a language that didn’t allow quotation.
When Ray Ozzie surfaced for a moment before being consumed by the organizational, political and directional turmoil of Microsoft, he developed and demo’d “copy and paste” at the level of the web. Live Clipboard was aimed at employing a simple metaphor for moving microformatted data from one place to another. Programs like Evernote allow me to copy sections of a web page with very loose HTML formatting, and paste them into my digital notebooks. In the world of social media we look at the social graph we’ve built and we’d like to copy it from this service and paste it into that service. Instead we find ourselves in the position of Medieval monk copying a manuscript with a quill pen.
We capture our thoughts and impressions through text, we scribble it in notebooks, we type it on sheets of paper and on to glowing screens. Our text becomes hypertext and the exoskeleton of structured markup encapsulates our language. Capturing sound, image and video used to be the province of professionals, but now most “telephones” can do this. Body language, gestures and intonation can now provide color to the messages we pass back and forth.
This is the point in time we need the pencil that Marc Canter created. Copy and paste are functions of an editor and they operate on pointers and abstractions to the world around us. We now have the Network and bandwidth to return to early days of multimedia and the toolsets that were developed for the production of CD-ROMs.
On the professional end, these tools have become more and more sophisticated. Apple has done a nice job providing tools for the consumer. Where Brian Eno had the insight that the recording studio could be a compositional tool, we now need a recording studio we can carry around with us and that resides on our (i)Phones. An initial model is the way the Flip Video Camera includes editing software on the hardware device. As we capture sound, narration, and still/moving images with our “telephones,” we need to be able to dash off a note in a picture/sound language. That device we carry around should be able to read, write and transmit over the Network. Actually, it already can. It already does. But there’s so much more.
Of course, literacy will always be an issue. But that’s why there are pirates:
I downloaded the TwitterVision app for the iPhone last week. But I didn’t really get a chance to look at it until I had an in-between moment last night while visiting a friend’s new house up on a hill in Fairfax. Left to my own devices for a few minutes, I pulled out my iPhone and touched the TwitterVision icon. Suddenly I was seeing a stream of Tweets from people I didn’t know from all over the world. Seeing those personal moments, many of them in-between moments, brought a smile to my lips– and, of course, started a train of thought.
This kind of engagement brought to mind what’s variously been called furniture music, discreet music or ambient music. This kind of music has many origins, I first became aware of it through the music of Erik Satie and Brian Eno. Eno first discussed the concept in the liner notes to his album Discreet Music.
In January this year I had an accident. I was not seriously hurt, but I was confined to bed in a stiff and static position. My friend Judy Nylon visited me and brought me a record of 18th century harp music. After she had gone, and with some considerable difficulty, I put on the record. Having laid down, I realized that the amplifier was set at an extremely low level, and that one channel of the stereo had failed completely. Since I hadn’t the energy to get up and improve matters, the record played on almost inaudibly. This presented what was for me a new way of hearing music – as part of the ambience of the environment just as the colour of the light and the sound of the rain were parts of that ambience. It is for this reason that I suggest listening to the piece at comparatively low levels, even to the extent that it frequently falls below the threshold of audibility.
In the liner notes to Music for Airports, the concepts had become more refined:
Ambient Music must be able to accomodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting.
TwitterVision strikes me as this same kind of engagement. It accommodates many different levels of engagement. There’s a sense in which it’s always on, and always changing, much in the way that generative music can create music algorithmically that can have a duration of 1 year or 10,000 years. It’s a kind of engagement that works very well for our in-between moments, the moments where the system puts us in a holding pattern. We provide our own hold music.
The pertinent correlation is the input that Twitter provides and the way that it’s incorporated into the loop. This area of exploration was opened by Terry Riley and his Time Lag Accumulator and by Brian Eno’s Frippertronics, signal delay processor. The cowpaths and paved roads from experimental music seem to point to the future layers that will be built out on top of Twitter. Stay tuned.
