NMA 2050

These articles and noises were very interesting because although sound is an art form, it’s usually looked past, and is integrated in other art forms. For example, museums and concerts both use sound (obviously), but what is important is what is coming out of the instruments, rather than whether or not something is coming out of it.

http://www.ubu.com/sound/fluxsweet.html

I really enjoyed the music piece from above. Even though it was kind of gross and disturbing (fingers cracking), it helped remind me that almost everything produces sound. Or at least everything I can think of….except for air. This particular sound intrigued me because it is a body part, and to be able to make that type of sound with your body is creepy yet interesting. It was definitely loud enough for me to hear well, and upon listening, I automatically knew it was fingers cracking.

The other noises in this series, including the onion skins and the lotion used to massage hands, were also very interesting because they make you think about these sounds, when in everyday life, they do not affect you at all. As cool as it may be to finally be aware of these sounds, there is also a downside: Now I find myself looking out for the noises the types of noises that everyday sound make. It helps because I like to put the noise with the object, helping to understand the object more. I also agree with and enjoyed reading Julia Gerlach’s “The Asthetic Potential of Sound” because she stated “Sound art is situated between the aural and the visual, subtly linking the two.” It’s like she took the words right out of my mouth.

If only Trump didn’t have such a problematic face

they’re both terrible ouch

McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Massage” introduces the idea that “until writing was invented, men lived in acoustic place” (48) really caught my interest. As he discusses the many things that have developed over time because of writing, it makes me think about the many inventions that we have today and what they could possibly all link back to. Could they all link back to the same thing? Could that thing be writing?

You see, it’s interesting because I think they can. Off of the top of my head, I think of computers, ice cream, and public transportation in New York City (I guess that shows what’s on my mind lately haha). When I think about each of these things individually, I trace back to where and how they possibly could have started, and I trace them all back to writing, or at least some form of it. Computers, for example, are made up of code, at least internally. If it weren’t for writing, how would code even exist? And with ice cream, you have to pay for ice cream at the store, so how do numbers exist? Surely, they were invented with a language, which came from writing. With ice cream you, just as anything else that involves cooking, you have to measure out all of the right ingredients…and you know where I’m going with that one. For public transportation, the mechanics behind it all involves numbers and blueprints, all made up of writing, as well as train schedules and train station names. We are surrounded by things that would not be possible if it weren’t for writing.

And maybe this sounds dumb to you reading it right now, but I’ve never thought about writing in that aspect. I’ve always thought of writing as something I needed to do in school, or to do to get information conveyed to others. It really changes your perspective. And it makes me think about how writing has affected the art work. Not necessarily journalism, which requires writing of course, but about painting and drawing and acting and photography, and all of the other mediums I didn’t list. Writing is a basic core of many of the things we have and express today, but it isn’t, in my eyes, given the credit it deserves.

While reading through this chapter about new media, all I could think about was how this is common knowledge of everyday life that people don’t think twice about, yet was such a big breakthrough back then. Things like the computer and the photograph are normal parts of our society – Hell, every single phone has a camera in it now – so it’s a weird feeling, reading about something that was so new at the time that is so common today.

What stuck out to me the most was Manovich’s second principle of new media – the idea of modularity, or the idea that media elements when put together can create something bigger than them, like a computer, or the World Wide Web. This really caught my attention because I used to teach kids how to code on the computer, and one of the first things I had to teach them was that these small parts that we were working on every day would come out to create a bigger, meaningful whole. Manovich states that “If a particular module of a computer program is deleted, the program will not run.” That sentence in particular really stuck out to me because I would always have to troubleshoot when helping kids create websites, games, or whatever they desired, and many times it was because they accidentally forgot or deleted a part of their code. This makes me think about the physical pieces of a computer as well as the internal codes that are used to create websites and more. If you don’t have a mouse or a speaker, you are missing a huge component to a computer, or at least in our society. Back then, they weren’t even worried about those things – they were just trying to build it and code computer programs. I just think this passage is very eye-opening in the sense that things that we overlook and take for granted today were once either greatly desired by society, or not even invented yet!

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