SoundWalk 2012: crowdsourcing the post-production

Posted on 2013/02/23 by gongMaster

What people see and capture they sometimes post, some more quickly than others. Here’s a little compendium of links to Long Beach SoudWalk 2012 videos we’ve run across, almost all appearing within thirty days of the event. Our own post-production clean-up continues to lag behind. (Those pesky day gigs! You try washing them out….)

We’re not in most of these. All works are copyright their respective creators/owners (contact us if you want these taken down).

Long Beach SoundWalk 2012 by Brucex8, 2012-09-02

Long Beach SOUNDWALK 2012 by lbreport, 2012-09-02

phog masheeen @ 2012 Soundwalk by wm almas, 2012-09-06

We do help close this one….
2012 Long Beach Sound Walk by Boots Bryant, 2012-09-03

Motor Rhythms at SoundWalk 2012 by motorrhythms, 2012-09-24

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dowsing ccMixter

Posted on 2012/10/12 by gongMaster

…in which we continue the search for our lost tribe….

Dave’s been cross-posting wikiGong.com material to ccMixter.org for the past week or so and is planning to push out a bit more. Presenting our compiled efforts here, at our Sounds site, is great—we reuse the ccHost technology, demonstrate its power, get our own stuff out there (in theory)—but the increasingly unavoidable conclusion of two years’ obscurity is that we have failed to connect. Or maybe, to promote. The old waiting-to-be-discovered trap, still alive and well.

Time to change the broadcast channel.

We’re starting with the samples—we do have some good recording tech, striving to be photographers of sound—and the initial reaction is OK. We’ll push some more. Content!

In the land of the blind….

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Friday Night in Stockholm, with Super Fly: Trolling for Memes

Posted on 2012/09/14 by gongMaster

…in which we note 304 trackback spams since August 29….

OK, once in a great while we still get to travel on business and then end up in the hotel checking email and the state of the web site on a Friday night because that’s just how it is. And the spam keeps on coming!

Since we stopped monitoring during the runup to SoundWalk 2012, 304 additional candidates for our composition perpétuel “Oracle du Jour” have been deposited at wikiGong.com. Nothing to compare with the “images of” meme late July and its echoes into early August, alas. Our current favorite:

You are my inhalation , I own few blogs and very sporadically run out from to post .
—Cheap Auto Insurance In South Carolina

It’s clear that trolling for memes is a long-term effort. Some days (weeks?) it will rain gold, some salt, and others the usual spamphish product. Apparently we got lucky with “brineshrimp image” and “Asshead will be camouflaged despite the briskly cnditional jasper.” Just lucky.

But it’s Friday night in Stockholm and we have yet to post much from SoundWalk. The DJ just played “Super Fly”—have we heard that since the ‘seventies?—and the availability of this free connection is fleeting. Just as we were wrapping up the SoundWalk videos last month, we got the invitation to update to WordPress 3.4.2. That wasn’t the time. But how about now?

The world spins faster some days than others. What the hell, why not….

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Morning after SoundWalk, with John Cage: Hair of the Dog

Posted on 2012/09/02 by songmaster

Yes, wikiGong performed at the 2012 Long Beach SoundWalk Saturday night, about which more later. It was a success, at least to the extent that we (well, mostly Dave, really) got set up in good time, and performed the pieces we’d planned on, more or less on schedule. Friends, family members, and strangers came and went during SoundWalk’s four-hour span, and many of them seemed to enjoy what they saw and heard.

Beyond that? We’re still sorting it out for ourselves. There have been isolated instances of solitary reflection, but no group assessment so far. Let the dust settle.

While last night was not the physical ordeal we experienced in 2011, it was a long, hot evening. For me and Dave, at least. A cold hit Becky as the day wore on, and she had it worse than we did.

In any case, we were content to take our time getting out of bed this morning, one by one, and to divert ourselves with other topics.

Given the performance last night, and our focus on Los Angeles history in “Looking Backward,” how apropos to see avant-garde composer John Cage spread out over most of the Los Angeles Times’ “Arts & Books” section. (The principal article in this cluster is at http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-john-cage,0,3501401.htmlstory.) I had not known that Cage was born in Los Angeles, and lived in Southern California for years; nor that September 5 will be his 100th birthday.

In a sidebar comment, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe wrote something insightful about Cage’s influence:

But whether artists were directly influenced, it’s hard to say. Being directly influenced by John Cage would be ridiculous, like being directly influenced by Warhol or Duchamp; you’d have to argue with it, subvert it.

Probably true. But indirect influence? Surely. Like the air we breathe. Happy birthday, John.

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now we are three

Posted on 2012/07/27 by gongMaster

…in which we bemoan current travel restrictions, and admit distraction.

Another year older, and a bit less to show for it, at least this side of 2011. wikiGong turned three July 26, 2012. Since last fall, we’ve had fewer travel opportunities—though audio recording gear has accompanied every trip we have managed—and have been a bit swept up in things besides audio capture:

Still, our collection grew even if we’re behind in the postings. Expect someday soon to hear:

We’ll add the links here once they’re up. As always, feel free to sign up, upload, remix, and contribute on our Sounds pages. That’s probably where we’ll point our newly earned CSS merit badge next….

Posted in blog, MediaWiki, site administration, site design, wikiGong wiki, WordPress | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

looking forward to 9/1/2012 Long Beach SoundWalk

Posted on 2012/07/18 by songmaster

Recently arrived via email, words we optimistically look forward to, but don’t dare assume:

This is official notification that you have been selected as
a participant in SoundWalk 2012 to take place on the evening
of September 1st (6PM-10PM).

Now begins the effort to create/design/constrain, which we hope will culminate in an interesting and stimulating evening for all involved that Saturday. One prediction would be safe, even if I knew less than I do about wikiGong ruminations so far: We will introduce some interesting new wrinkles. (That’s supposed to introduce a pleasant tingle of suspense. Did it work? Is additional emphasis required?)

Early wikiGong concept sketch for the 9/1/2012 Long Beach SoundWalk; by Dave Ayer.

As always, crucial details must be worked out. We don’t know where we’ll be, and experience shows that even when we think we know, we may be wrong.

Last time we checked, the SoundWalk site told us the event begins at 5:00 PM. 5:00 PM? 6:00 PM? It makes a difference to those of us with demanding schedules. Will we begin when the night is young, or even younger?

Ah, details.

These—and more—shall give way beneath the steaming pressure of the wikiGong iron (and its freight of metaphor)….

Stay tuned.

Posted in performance, projects | Tagged , | 2 Comments

the GGB turns seventy five

Posted on 2012/05/27 by gongMaster

…in which history repeats itself….

Couldn’t let the day go by without noting the event, though thousands of others have marked it already. A few of my favorites:

Posted in audio, blog, Golden Gate Bridge, history, site history, YouTube | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

raising the barn

Posted on 2012/01/20 by gongMaster

…in which I find some of the pieces are starting to feel a bit heavy

This post shares its title with the current task list over at dekalbowiki. My last two weeks have been largely devoted to the heavy lifting of whacking the MediaWiki installation into place, reimplementing the WordPress look and feel, and starting to upload the first content. Oh, and hacking my way through some css to implement the hoverable icon on the home page pointing to the Neoteric Ensemble “book” project.

Since I haven’t yet opened the wiki up (no robots.txt yet) or enabled Google stats the dekalbowiki site is spam free. I’m sure that won’t last long. The simple protections are in place, but there’s bound to be some door somewhere I haven’t nailed shut. The same goes for the blog pages, where I haven’t installed an Akismet key yet, so I’m expecting trackback spam any day. Still, everything is starting to gel.

There’s only one significant technical challenge left, which is figuring out how to do a common login between the wiki and blog pages. Maybe it’s enough to manage to allow users to create the separate entries in one shot, but I dream of a common database and single sign-on. Maybe when we get a real administrator….

I reckon in another month we’ll be ready to send out the invitations. Meanwhile if you have stumbled this far, check out the first collection.

—Cross-posted from dekalborama.com 2012-01-20

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ice fishing

Posted on 2012/01/09 by gongMaster

…in which I admit to moonlighting again

It’s been quite a week here for re-creation: that is, I am relearning the lessons of getting wikigong.com launched, reconfigured, and launched again, as I apply them to dekalborama.com. Now that we’re in that site’s third trimester, it seemed a little attention was in order, so on January 1 I sawed a big hole in my personal timescape and plunged in to see whether I can remember MediaWiki administration. At first, they were pretty slow to bite, but now the memories are practically jumping into the hut with me.

There’s still much to do. Wiki mechanics aside, there’s the whole invitations business. It’s been twenty years since the last Neoteric Ensemble performance—OK, Future Fellow Contributors, that’s a gimme: if I’m wrong, leave a comment!—and yours truly was only along for part of the ride. Back then, there was barely an Internet. Now, we’ll be lucky to get snail-mail forwarding for anyone Google can’t find. But first, to compile the names and then put the six-degrees phenomenon to work:

I’m starting to scan and upload graphics this weekend!

—Cross-posted from dekalborama.com 2012-01-09

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ringing out 2011…with a backlog

Posted on 2011/12/31 by gongMaster

…in which we contemplate our sense of time

Can’t say I’m sad to see this one in the rearview mirror. Conventional wisdom re: wishing one’s life away aside, I usually prefer forging ahead to looking back. 2011 started well enough—full of real accomplishments for me, and here at wikiGong—but it’s ended up over budget and way beyond schedule. I wish I’d gotten a few more loose ends wrapped up, and a bit more done.

That’s especially true of my sorry record of posting to this blog. Thinking about writing, planning to write, crafting catchy titles—even creating raw photos and video footage—all went very well. And the WordPress conversion really delivered mobility and convenience. But getting things typed in while they were still fresh just didn’t tend to happen. I haven’t established a rhythm, or developed a habit, of writing, of publishing.

Civilized ChaoyangFor example, I intended to post Barbie is alive and well…and she’s living in Beijing from China one Saturday, complete with the crummy cell-phone photos I made after my real camera jammed on a grain of sand. (The sand had been ingested weeks earlier while I was working on the GI Joe sequences for SoundWalk 2011. I’d even brought some of my post-production work with me to Beijing in case I found free time. Optimism!) Suffering from jetlag and still sleep-deprived from our October 1 performance, I’d wandered around the Chaoyang district most of the day, intrigued by the changes visible since March and the previous October, by how so many places lit by neon lights at night look like they’re about to fall apart in the daylight, by all the new and gaudy buildings, by young people’s displays of fashion.

Beijing FashionAnd I was in a mood. There was something artificial and weird about the whole Beijing experience this time around. Some Western sauce had been troweled over parts of the city, especially that triangle formed by the Olympic Park and the Airport Expressway. I’d ridden the subway—packed at five PM on that Saturday—and been struck by the faux nature of, well, just about everything. Wondering why everywhere wants to be like Las Vegas.

But having walking some nine miles and change around the city, I ate dinner and fell asleep. That needed to be a journal. If I write it now, it will be a memoir.

GI Joe on Mars (Long Beach)I have to admit the SoundWalk post-production effort has been a black hole. Lots of work has gone in, but after a while nothing seemed to come out. Perhaps my oh-so-serious ambition caused everything to crumple into a gravid little ball. Maybe not enough time has gone by for things to ripen, and certainly I haven’t been able to put enough time in to get any real quality out. But I expected at least I would have gotten up a post about the event. That’s another TBD.

So, here’s to 2012. May we all get more done. May I find a blogging tempo that works. May the SoundWalk 2011 project finally finish.

Here’s to a good New Year.

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