welp, i’m working on another internet thing. it's called channel2014.com. in the grand old tradition of conferencecall.biz and introspections.me, i’m looking for suggestions and advice as well as a small amount of voice contributions. my goal is get this thing out during the holiday season in december 2014.
the idea is to create a subjective time capsule of 2014. similar to my earlier projects, the structure involves a randomized curated collection of audio clips and GIFs, though there will be some slight modifications to the template. as i imagine it, it will be sort of like a rhythmic waking dream.
i’m looking for help in thinking of things that somehow seem like the “essence” of 2014, encompassing everything from very literal 2014 (sounds of ferguson protesters, snippets of contemporary advertisements) to more abstract things (visuals of distraction, the feeling of ’headlines yelling at each other’).
i know that’s laughably vague, and i’ve spent the last several months going back and forth on the entire idea. but i think that i’ll be able to curate the content in ways that lead to interesting juxtapositions when they’re randomized. a big moment for me, personally, was watching chris marker’s Sans Soleil for the first time the other night. the way the film builds a gigantic web of self-references and is somehow both intensely personal and universal was really inspiring.
i’m open to changes in direction (that’s part of why i started this thread!) but right now the “channels” consist of the following groups of audio/visuals:
TV (laugh track, talk shows, late-night monologues, nature docs, ads)
Devices (hold music, alerts, vibrations, electromagnetic interference, sound of keypad, ringtones, automated announcements from buses/airports)
Speech (sentence fragments, repeated syllables, middle 1/3s of sentences, interruptions)
Celebrity
News
Persuasion (speeches, sermons, new age, pundits, more ads)
Work (lol conference calls, meetings, office gossip)
the default channel would mingle all of these elements together, but the user would also have the option to change the “channel” to limit the content to a specific theme. i hope to gather a lot of the content by goofing off on the internet, but there will also be some audio that i’ll need to create from scratch. similar to conferencecall.biz, i’m planning on coming up with some lines and then asking people to record them and/or improvise other material, then edit the recordings so that they’re combined with other sounds in a way that hopefully sounds natural.
foolishly, i’m again thinking of the final product as neverending chance music, in a way. i attempted this with introspections.me (where the musical accompaniment in each of the 48 clips was unique and played in a randomized order) but wasn’t happy with the result for reasons that are so self-indulgent to explain that i can’t even manage to do it in this, the most self-indulgent thread of all time. this time, my plan is to establish a rhythmic piece of music that will constantly play in the background. the randomized content will play on top of that, but i’ll edit each bit so that it’s at the same BPM (and where possible, the same key) as the background music. it’s really hard to explain, but imagine an edited a spoken sentence with emphasized syllables that line up with a beat, and certain other syllables occasionally break out into an echo effect that also aligns with the music. i know my description sounds idiotic but i think i know how to do it in a way that will be very listenable and endlessly generative and new sounding, no matter how long you listen. also sort of lucid dreamy. combined with the content of the audio and visuals, i hope to convey a feeling of dystopian propulsion, like you can’t stop moving and can’t reflect on meaning even though theoretically you understand more than you ever have before.
again, sorry for the self-indulgence but for better or worse, soliciting the advice of internet people early on is part of my process. i realize that if i started a thread called “what is the essence of 2014?” i’d get fp’d within half an hour, but i really am looking for both general thoughts on whatever it means to live in this year + ideas/examples of specific audio/visuals that could be referenced.
― Karl Malone, Monday, 20 October 2014 21:26 (nine years ago) link
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