Latest Tweets:
reviving this little blog for love and whimsy.
Likely to feature other useful things pertaining to classical music, cycling, databases, design, digital humanities, etools, food, librarianship, musicianship, piano, performance, social media, web development, yoga.
"
But the problem is that swarms are not only topologically complex, but phenomenally complex as well. For example, cicadas constitute a swarm, not because of their coordinated, bodily movements, but because of the collective sound they produce. In fact, cicadas are more often heard than seen – indeed, they are quite impossible to locate by sound. Even in cases where swarming is visually present – locusts or large-scale starling flocks – the swarm is a massive acoustic event as well. There is something ‘living’ here, but something that may have nothing to do with biology or the organic. The Hungarian composer György Ligeti cites cicadas as an influence on his work, but also the sound of raindrops on a roof, or even the sound of car horns in a traffic jam.[2]
This leads us to our opening question: How to think ‘swarming’ without an undue bias towards the logic of the visual and the representational? Let us first pause a bit on this idea of swarms-as-sound.
"CULTURE MACHINE:2007 Recordings: Journa
Pulse Demons, by Eugene Thacker
