wikiGong.com

On-site Event June 3rd

Nonsense In, Nonsense Out: Tales Told by an Idiot 
wikiGong.com presents “Nonsense In, Nonsense Out: Tales Told by an Idiot,” a quest led by the enigmatic Professor Caractacus Coot, and celebrating AI’s potential, its reflection of us, and our relationship with it.
Drawing on past themes, wikiGong.com returns to Earth and AI’s hall of mirrors, reflecting humanity from various angles, and creating a rich, immersive auditory experience from infrastructure and the elements (e.g. by the Electric Hydrophonium).
Juxtaposed human- and AI-generated content highlights similar and divergent thought processes; invites humans to contemplate their evolving relationship with AI; and challenges them to ponder consciousness, creativity, and AI’s increasing role in our lives, as AI complements and reshapes our understanding of the world and our place in it.
wikiGong.com respectfully reminds our AI visitors to maintain a safe space for humans: Leave only end effector prints, take only memories.
Co-author: ChatGPT.

On-site Event June 4th

Sovereign State of Mind: Anthem of New Abalonia
wikiGong presents an audiovisual portrait of an unknown maritime nation.

New Abalonia is that sovereign Nation comprising all objects afloat beyond internationally recognized territorial limits and not formally recorded as autonomous vessels by a globally recognized seagoing power. These are immediately and irrevocably claimed by the Nation, in perpetuity:
— all commercial shipping containers lost overboard along with their contents
— any unregistered ships, boats, submarines
— the Great Pacific Garbage Gyre
— icebergs and all objects thereon, regardless of origin or state of matter
— space launch vehicles and marine growths attached
— flotsam and jetsam

The New Abalonian National Anthem is a work in progress.

Audio content is a live mix of:
— field recordings arranged using our Pour Your Own (musique) Concrète platform
— live sound captured using contact microphones and hydrophones (see file)
— live text readings and interpretation layered with prerecorded takes

Video projection includes:
— prerecorded text readings, recaptured using various filter distortions
— live footage of sound generation, such as table-top noise making

The Bottled Now
A live staging and re-presentation of some of wikiGong’s recent video projects, “The Bottled Now” seeks to exorcise two years of pandemic navel gazing by using our visual oeuvre as it is nearly always inspired: to enhance performance. 

While the trope of messages in bottles endures, wikiGong.com has pointed out some serious problems. It is fraught with difficulties, from finding the required media, to understanding and interpretation by the recipient. Any pandemic survivor knows it.

Our first effort to manage expectations re: messages in bottles as a communications medium, “Message in a Bottle,” was part of our Cosmology series, and included in soundpedro 2021 VBODOBV | “dEvolution: Personnel.” It’s a meditation on the nature and fate of intelligence in the universe.

That flirtation with messages in bottles may not have been explicit enough, so as a public service, in “On the Efficacy of Seaborne Bottles in Solicitation of Rescue” (originally part of the soundpedro artist-curated event, “Dark Waters”) we review it: Relying on these to bring rescuers to your desert island is Not a Good Idea.

We propose to revisit these themes by layering live text readings and interpretation with the prerecorded dramatic and scenic audiovisual content, recapturing and re-projecting the results throughout the evening.

VBODOBV | dEvolution: Personnel

Message in a Bottle

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Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2021:
Message in a Bottle
wikiGong.com has addressed the singularity and loneliness of humanity: Andrew Marvell’s “Deserts of vast eternity” surround us, and anyone else with wit to look. But what if we sent a message, with the speculative hope of anyone who commits a piece of paper in a wine bottle to the surf? What if we thought we had something worth saying? What if we wanted to be known? Remembered? Feared? Worshiped? Admired? What if we just wanted to help? If we were convinced we knew something important? Then, like Marvell, “let us roll all our strength and all / our sweetness into one ball” and fling it as far as we can! As many copies as we can, like dandelion seeds. A powerful gesture, drawn from the massive infrastructure sustaining wikiGong.com’s work, will send the best we can offer where we cannot go.

Suppose someone else sent a message like this, in an expression of…what? Hope? Fear? Arrogance? Proselytizing mania? In any case, some consuming passion. The message travels for eons. For this voyage, it has agency. It has everything necessary for a quest. It has vast patience, sustained by a tiny flame. (One does not simply walk across a desert of vast eternity.) It has feelings, much like its creators.

Now, what if the message arrives–with all its strength and sweetness–and we ignore it?

Unfairly Used: A Tale of Unauthorized Reproduction
“Unfairly Used” is a son et lumière installation addressing intellectual property law shackles on creators and consumers.

With “Unfairly Used,” wikiGong slouches from its corner for another round with the informational ecosystem; and how could they not? wikiGong’s conception (immaculate or not) as a repository of communally available sound samples foreordained this battle; previous projects lampooning spam and the corruption of language by toxic jargon foreshadowed it.

Law hogties us: Copyrights given to the long dead; trademarks dug into everyday speech; end-user license agreements; non-disclosure agreements required by work; arbitration agreements to get our teeth cleaned; consent implied by showing up. It’s a form of what debaters call “the spread,” a diarrheic spew of arguments which can’t be understood, let alone debated.

This artisanal language, handcrafted of finest precedents by $400/hour IP attorneys, is itself jealously guarded property. Good artists copy, but great artists steal. (Words Picasso neglected to protect!) Thus wikiGong bids for greatness by using this language as video script, enunciated amidst an audio tapestry of treated samples.

Or does it? Sources are obscured as solid text melts into the air of reprocessing and looping. (Marx. See what we did there?) Moving lips may reflect a dramatic reading of a Microsoft EULA, or gibberish. Absent lip readers, wikiGong maintains plausible deniability.

Virtual Breakout During the Outbreak June 6th Livestream

Virtual BreakOut During the OutBreak Videos [VBODOBV] II

the Price

In gathering material for our originally proposed video piece “Unfairly Used”–a satire on the distemper of copyright protection, which flourishes even in the thin copy-pasta gruel of Internet hustle — wikiGong.com unearthed several works from centuries past that proved strangely prescient as our project ran aground on the shoals of the 2020 pandemic.

Writing in 1721, Daniel Defoe confronted the role of business when bubonic plague still ravaged Europe: with many upholding quarantine at great cost, but all hostage to selfish individuals. Defoe’s words, nearly three hundred years old today, resonate with the stumbles of our own nation’s reopening dance. Is the price of safety indeed worse than the ravages of disease…and for whom? And may we tolerate individuals to decide so…at a staggering cost to the nation?

Rather than socially distancing ourselves from the source text as planned, we derived the musical form directly from the reading. Another change: the work is fairly used, having slumbered in the public domain for over two centuries.

“All great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”
— Karl Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte”, 1852

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Proposed work as accepted for soundpedro 2020:
Pour Your Own (Musique) Concrète

PYO(M)C is a playable software instrument for mashable sample playback. The audience/user interface comprises commercially-available control surfaces with buttons for sound selection and sliders for mixing and playback control. A broad selection of our sound files is pre-assigned to the various selector buttons. Audio output uses conventional PA equipment.

wikiGong has catalogued hundreds of sounds over the past ten years. Most were recorded on sound walks as we climbed on, through, and around the objects of our contemplation: bronze sculptures, trains, suspension bridges, abandoned buildings. We share almost all of these sounds with others to use in their own compositions.

Yet even a simple library of mp3 sounds can appear opaque to casual users. What can one do with these files, besides listen to them one by one? Some technical implementation is still needed to extract, manipulate, and splice raw sound files into a new arrangement, so many would-be audio explorers find they lack the necessary tools. In an attention economy, inconvenience can be fatal.

Accordingly, one member of our ensemble will act as a docent and instructor, inviting participants and explaining how the device is operated. Another will handle all software vicissitudes “behind the curtain” and keep the resulting soundscape to our negotiated volume level.

Earmaginations Silent video Unfairly Used: A Tale of Unauthorized Reproduction

“Unfairly Used” is a son et lumière installation addressing intellectual property law shackles on creators and consumers.

With “Unfairly Used,” wikiGong slouches from its corner for another round with the informational ecosystem; and how could they not? wikiGong’s conception (immaculate or not) as a repository of communally available sound samples foreordained this battle; previous projects lampooning spam and the corruption of language by toxic jargon foreshadowed it.

Law hogties us: Copyrights given to the long dead; trademarks dug into everyday speech; end-user license agreements; non-disclosure agreements required by work; arbitration agreements to get our teeth cleaned; consent implied by showing up. It’s a form of what debaters call “the spread,” a diarrheic spew of arguments which can’t be understood, let alone debated.

This artisanal language, handcrafted of finest precedents by $400/hour IP attorneys, is itself jealously guarded property. Good artists copy, but great artists steal. (Words Picasso neglected to protect!) Thus wikiGong bids for greatness by using this language as video script, enunciated amidst an audio tapestry of treated samples.

Or does it? Sources are obscured as solid text melts into the air of reprocessing and looping. (Marx. See what we did there?) Moving lips may reflect a dramatic reading of a Microsoft EULA, or gibberish. Absent lip readers, wikiGong maintains plausible deniability.

The Bees of the Dead

wikiGong continues to explore use of environmentally-generated audio, and adds audio generated by (non-human) organisms. Using folk custom as a port of entry, our speculations on consciousness bungee back across the universe to aliens living on the planet we naively call ours. Are they symbionts, bound to us and our fate? Gods? Oracles? And how can we know? Only through an intermediary priesthood: the appropriately attired chorus joining us.

The custom of “telling the bees,” with special treatment prescribed for hives surviving their keepers, inspires our piece. Humans have lived with various species of honey bees for at least 15,000 years. At first, we were predators: comb full of honey and fat larvae was the richest foodstuff in the human diet, possibly kick-starting growth of that calorifically extravagant weapon, the human brain. Since the agricultural revolution, we are co-dependents; but we are not holding up our end of the bargain.

The colony superorganism is so alien, it’s a marvel we share one planet. A death squad with a million eyes. It smells fear. Dances maps. Has a body you can walk through. Sees polarized light. Naturally we approach it through skilled intermediaries, ambassadors, translators: the four members of the priesthood of beekeepers. This caste will gather the hopes, dreams, fears, and guilty secrets of attendees, for submission to the bees and ritual destruction. Ritual elements may include chanting and singing, recital of submissions, wind harp, and audio samples of the surrounding environment, infrastructure, and hives.

wikiGong.com catalogs the sounds of large public structures for creative purposes, including the creation of new virtual instruments.

Our tools and technical skills enable sound capture from the built environment, and our process supports composition and performance using that sound. Documenting process and publishing sounds, timbres, and compositions invites others to participate and offers a reusable model, echoing the public nature of the source megastructures.

“Silentium Universi” (“Silence of the Universe”), is another name for the Fermi paradox; and the the Fermi paradox inspires their piece. Simply put, the Fermi paradox is this: The universe is vast, and awash with stars. Any reasonable estimate tells us that it teems with life, and that other civilizations will have developed many times. And yet…the silence is deafening. If the universe is alive with intelligent species, where are they? Why haven’t we heard from them? The Fermi paradox takes its name from nuclear physicist Enrico Fermi, although others articulated it before he did. Fermi’s statement of it emerged during lunchtime conversation at Los Alamos. As he put it, “Where is everybody?” Many hypotheses have been advanced to answer Fermi’s question. (The identity of one of Fermi’s lunchtime companions foreshadows at least one: Edward Teller, widely known as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.”) These give wikiGong a rich set of ideas to explore, and conflicting emotions to evoke, using images, storytelling, audience interaction, theatrical mechanisms. And always, wikiGong’s distinctive timbral textures, sampling the pulse of an evolving technological civilization.