Paul D. Miller, aka DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid: Rhythm Science (2004)

“Once you get into the flow of things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together, and that’s what I’m going to talk about.”
—Rhythm Science

The conceptual artist Paul Miller, also known as Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, delivers a manifesto for rhythm science—the creation of art from the flow of patterns in sound and culture, “the changing same.” Taking the Dj’s mix as template, he describes how the artist, navigating the innumerable ways to arrange the mix of cultural ideas and objects that bombard us, uses technology and art to create something new and expressive and endlessly variable. Technology provides the method and model; information on the web, like the elements of a mix, doesn’t stay in one place. And technology is the medium, bridging the artist’s consciousness and the outside world.

Miller constructed his Dj Spooky persona (“spooky” from the eerie sounds of hip-hop, techno, ambient, and the other music that he plays) as a conceptual art project, but then came to see it as the opportunity for “coding a generative syntax for new languages of creativity.” For example: “Start with the inspiration of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat comic strip. Make a track invoking his absurd landscapes… What do tons and tons of air pressure moving in the atmosphere sound like? Make music that acts a metaphor for that kind of immersion or density.” Or, for an online “remix” of two works by Marcel Duchamp: “I took a lot of his material written on music and flipped it into a DJ mix of his visual material—with him rhyming!”

Tracing the genealogy of rhythm science, Miller cites sources and influences as varied as Ralph Waldo Emerson (“all minds quote”), Grandmaster Flash, W. E. B Dubois, James Joyce, and Eminem. “The story unfolds while the fragments coalesce,” he writes.

Miller’s textual provocations are designed for maximum visual and tactile seduction by the international studio COMA (Cornelia Blatter and Marcel Hermans). They sustain the book’s motifs of recontextualizing and relayering, texts and images bleed through from page to page, creating what amount to 2.5 dimensional vectors. From its remarkable velvet flesh cover, to the die cut hole through the center of the book, which reveals the colored nub holding in place the included audio CD, Rhythm Science: Excerpts and Allegories from the Sub Rosa Archives, this pamphlet truly lives up to Editorial Director Peter Lunenfeld’s claim that the Mediawork Pamphlets are “theoretical fetish objects . . . ‘zines for grown-ups.”

Publisher MIT Press, 2004
A Mediawork pamphlet
ISBN 026263287X, 9780262632874
128 pages

Hypnotext (Rhythm Science’s webtake by Peter Halley)

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Adrian Mackenzie: Cutting Code: Software and Sociality (2006)

“Software has often been marginalized in accounts of digital cultures and network societies. Although software is everywhere, it is hard to say what it actually is. Cutting Code: Software and Sociality is one of the first books to treat software seriously as a full-blown cultural process, and as a subtly powerful material in contemporary communication. From deCSS to Java, from Linux to Extreme Programming, this book analyses software artworks, operating systems, commercial products, infrastructures and programming practices. It explores social forms, identities, materialities and power relations associated with software, and it asks how software provokes the re-thinking of production, consumption and distribution as entwined cultural processes. Cutting Code argues that analysis of code as a mosaic of algorithms, protocols, infrastructures, and programming conventions offers valuable insights into how contemporary social formations invent new kinds of personhood and new ways of acting.”

Publisher Peter Lang, 2006
ISBN 0820478237, 9780820478234
215 pages

Keywords and phrases
bioinformatics, Linux kernel, Java Virtual Machine, deCSS, extreme programming, JUnit, operating system, Sun Microsystems, CORBA, open-source software, software art, Java programming language, ontology, software development, unit tests, Linus Torvalds, RAMOSS, source code, Perl poetry, Unix philosophy

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Tom Igoe: Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects (2007)

Building electronic projects that interact with the physical world is good fun. But when devices that you’ve built start to talk to each other, things really start to get interesting. Through a series of simple projects, you’ll learn how to get your creations to communicate with one another by forming networks of smart devices that carry on conversations with you and your environment. Whether you need to plug some sensors in your home to the Internet or create a device that can interact wirelessly with other creations, Making Things Talk explains exactly what you need.

This book is perfect for people with little technical training but a lot of interest. Maybe you’re a science teacher who wants to show students how to monitor weather conditions at several locations at once, or a sculptor who wants to stage a room of choreographed mechanical sculptures. Making Things Talk demonstrates that once you figure out how objects communicate — whether they’re microcontroller-powered devices, email programs, or networked databases — you can get them to interact.

Each chapter in contains instructions on how to build working projects that help you do just that. You will:
* Make your pet’s bed send you email
* Make your own seesaw game controller that communicates over the Internet
* Learn how to use ZigBee and Bluetooth radios to transmit sensor data wirelessly
* Set up communication between microcontrollers, personal computers, and web servers using three easy-to-program, open source environments: Arduino/Wiring, Processing, and PHP.
* Write programs to send data across the Internet based on physical activity in your home, office, or backyard
* And much more

With a little electronics know-how, basic (not necessarily in BASIC) programming skills, a couple of inexpensive microcontroller kits and some network modules to make them communicate using Ethernet, ZigBee, and Bluetooth, you can get started on these projects right away. With Making Things Talk, the possibilities are practically endless.

Published by O’Reilly, 2007
ISBN 0596510519, 9780596510510
426 pages

Key terms:
serial port, Bluetooth, RFID, Digi-Key, ASCII, Mac OS X, Arduino, serial communication, telnet, ZigBee, personal computer, breadboard, HTTP, Ethernet, myFont, Linux, accelerometer, rssi, sensor, potentiometer

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