The Archipelago of Culture

Cultural preferences are given a geography in this visualization of the data for the Netflix Prize. The distance between two movies on the map represents the degree of similarity between their ratings by Netflix users. Note that the green Sci-Fi Island to the southeast is quite far away from the "Crocodile"/"Arachnid"/"Leprechaun 4: In Space" cluster, but rather close to the large blue Critically Acclaimed Island.

Xculture Tumblelog

After seeing a link to tumblelog service Tumblr on 43 Folders, I tried it out for myself. A tumblelog is like a cross between a blog and a scrapbook: a place to quickly post random images, quotes, links, or whatever catches your fancy. My original intention was to use it as a place to quickly store (and publish) material that had some sort of resonance for me, partly in preparation for a specific creative project and partly just to spark general creativity. Tumblr definitely worked well for those purposes: the Tumblr bookmarklet can automatically turn selected text on a web page into an appropriately credited and linked quotation post, and if you are on a Flickr image page it will automatically grab and credit the image. But as I got addicted to tumblelogging stuff, it quickly became a slightly more structured kind of game. I started trying to maintain a chain of visual or conceptual links between the posts. Whether I'll keep this up or not I don't know, but you can view the game in progress here, or subscribe to this feed.

Little Booklets

Printing and assembling the mini-comic version of Cory Doctorow's story "Printcrime" (from his new collection Overclocked) was so much fun that I had to make my own origami booklet. So here it is: eight poems by W. B. Yeats, including my personal favorite "The Song of Wandering Aengus," in a pocket-sized booklet produced with PagePacker. Open the .pp document in PagePacker, print it, and follow the directions on the PagePacker page to fold and cut the sheet into booklet form. Then put it in your pocket and read it on the subway, bus, in the cafe, etc. (Note: PagePacker is a Mac application. Windows users might try converting the original PDF into a booklet using the PDF-to-PocketMod converter from PocketMod I haven't tested this, however.)

Here's how I made it: First I copied the text of the poems from www.bartleby.com and formatted it into an eight-page document in my word processor (NeoOfficeJ). Then I exported the document as a pdf. Finally, I dropped the pdf into the PagePacker document window. PagePacker handled the rest.

A note on "Printcrime" itself: as usual, Doctorow wraps a healthy dose of geek ideology in an imagined world that's concrete enough to help the pointedness go down. In this case the point is one that's often missed by post-scarcity extropian futures. Intellectual property clearly shows that the absence of scarcity is no guarantee against a world of haves and have-nots. So even if we can conquer matter, how do we get from where we are now to the bitchun/star trek world of universally shared abundance?

At the Sonic Zoo

Much electronic music aims to create a sense of navigable sonic space, but that's not the only sort of world-creation available to laptop deities. I'm particularly fond of works that create musical ecosystems populated with alien creatures. Three come to mind in particular. Most recently, there's "Creatures" from Black Dice's "Creature Comforts." But then in the Mesozoic era of electronic music we have the "Forbidden Planet Soundtrack" by Louis and Bebe Barron, and Iannis Xenakis's Gendy compositions. The Barrons' (analog!) work provides both background music and sound effects for the movie -- titles like "Battle with Invisible Monster" and "Nothing Like This Claw Found in Nature" say it all. Xenakis's "Gendy3" is algorithmically generated, so you could argue that it creates a kind of musical artificial life. The timbres themselves are generated on the fly, resulting in a biodiversity that is occasonally painful but always interesting.

Get Your Bleep On

If you enjoy the work of Black Dice, autechre, Phoenecia, Eno, or others who build sound waves from scratch with electronic tools, here's a recommendation you aren't likely to get from Pandora or last.fm: pick up a copy of The Csound Book, just for the accompanying CD-ROM. Csound is a standard tool for digital synthesis--essentially a programming language for sound processing--and the book provides an excellent introduction to it. But if you just want to consume sound, not produce it, ignore the book. For a mere $60 you get almost 8 hours of mp3 music from masters of academic computer music and their students. Even if you find only 6 hours to be listenable (not everyone can appreciate pure sine waves), it's a bargain. If you've ever struggled to find computer-generated blurbles that are unpolluted by techno beats but still spicier than new-age ambient, this will be your mother lode. And who knows: if you find Csound itself intriguing and decide to start doing a little experimentation, you may even turn into one of those "laptop musicians" that the real musicians love to hate.