I found the above Cinemassacre experiment via Make: an exercise in decaying video footage by redubbing it over and over.  Maybe I’m weird but I found the deterioration fascinating, watching the colors mutate and the details dropping out until I was following the action by the motion rather than the forms.

A similar tactic but an aesthetically different experience than watching Bill Morrison’s film Decasia, clip below.

You can also see echoes of both in the Very Small Array post where a picture is run through every (default?) Photoshop filter.  Shape and form decays while the decay produces accidental new forms.  Click here and look at the whole thing to see this man and this cat transform.

Just had my theremin lust reignited by this 3 minute history/build video from G4′s Attack of the Show, via Create Digital Music.  Oh man.  I’ve been planning to build one of these since a random reference on the Slanky-L* to a theremin sample sent me off in search of just what this weird musical instrument could do.

Turns out the history is just as fascinating as the ghost sound machine’s electronic guts.  Here’s an excerpt from the first interview with the Theremin’s inventor, Leon Theremin, after he first emerged from the U.S.S.R. after 51 years of state arrest:

Mattis: When did you first conceive of your instrument?

Theremin: The idea first came to me right after our Revolution, at the beginning of the Bolshevik state. I wanted to invent some kind of an instrument that would not operate mechanically, as does the piano, or the cello and the violin, whose bow movements can be compared to those of a saw. I conceived of an instrument that would created sound without using any mechanical energy, like the conductor of an orchestra. The orchestra plays mechanically, using mechanical energy; the conductor just moves his hands, and his movements have an effect on the music artistry [of the orchestra].

Mattis: Why did you make this instrument?

Theremin: I became interested in effectuating progress in music, so that there would be more [musical] resources. I was not satisfied with the mechanical instruments in existence, of which there were many. They were all built using elementary principles and were not physically well done. I was interested in making a different kind of instrument. And I wanted, of course, to make an apparatus that would be controlled in space, exploiting electrical fields, and that would use little energy. Therefore I transformed electronic [equipment] into a musical instrument that would provide greater resources.

Mattis: What did Lenin think of it, and why did you show it to him?

Theremin: In the Soviet Union at that time everyone was interested in new things, in particular all the new uses of electricity: for agriculture, for mechanical uses, for transport, for communication. And so then, at that time, when everyone was interested in these fields, I decided to create a musical use for electricity. I made a few first apparatuses that were made [based on principles of] the human interference of radio waves in space, at first used in [electronic] security systems, then applied to musical purposes. I made it, and I showed it at that time to the leaders. There was a big electronics conference in Moscow, and I showed my instruments there. It made a big splash. It was written up in the literature and the newspapers, of which we had many at that time, and many doors were opened [for me then] in the Soviet Union. And so Vladimir Il’yich Lenin, the leader of our state, learned that I had shown an interested thing at this conference, and he wanted to get acquainted with it himself. So they asked me to come with my apparatus, with my musical instrument, to his office, to show him. And I did so.

Mattis: What did Lenin think of it?

Theremin: I brought my apparatus and set it up in his large office in the Kremlin. He was not yet there because he was in a meeting. I waited with Fotiva, his secretary, who was a good pianist, a graduate of the conservatory. She said that a little piano would be brought into the office, and that she would accompany me on the music that I would play. So we prepared, and about an hour and a half later Vladimir Il’yich Lenin came with those people with whom he had been in conference in the Kremlin. He was very gracious; I was very pleased to meet him, and then I showed him the signaling system of my instrument, which I played by moving my hands in the air, and which was called at that time the thereminvox. I played a piece [of music]. After I played the piece they applauded, including Vladimir Il’yich [Lenin], who had been watching very attentively during my playing. I played Glinka’s “Skylark”, which he loved very much, and Vladimir Il’yich said, after all this applause, that I should show him, and he would try himself to play it. He stood up, moved to the instrument, stretched his hands out, left and right: right to the pitch and left to the volume. I took his hands from behind and helped him. He started to play “Skylark”. He had a very good ear, and he felt where to move his hands to get the sound: to lower them or to raise them. In the middle of this piece I thought that he could himself, independently, move his hands. So I took my hands off of his, and he completed the whole thing independently, by himself, with great success and with great applause following. He was very happy that he could play on this instrument all by himself.

Read the whole interview here.

A more thorough history can be had in the 1995 documentary Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey.  Oddly, I can’t find any video clips of it online, but if you’re dying to see it, I’ll gladly mail you my VHS copy.  Just leave a comment and I’ll email you for mailing details.

* remember listservs?  remember Soul Coughing?  that’s ok.

A lot of useless things get shoveled into the brain of a young inmate of the public education system.  Like factorials or peanut-based inventions numbers 4 – 2,000 of George Washington Carver.  One thing I am grateful to my middle school math classes for is a careful study of logic.  It helps me read the news and see little flashing bursts of color as brain cells seize, choke and blow up like a meth lab. (high school chemistry!)

Exhibit A, from the New York Post:

A Brooklyn grandma got more than she’d bargained for when she rented a copy of “Austin Powers” from her local library and found it spliced with long pornographic scenes.

…

Klein contacted her assemblyman, Dov Hikind — and he’s now demanding that local libraries ban all VHS tapes.

“This is unbelievable,” Hikind fumed. “The bottom line is that the local library can be unsafe for young children. It’s pretty sick stuff.”

Really, Dov?  Ban all VHS tapes?

Exhibit B, via a Wired blog post on pending Congressional legislation to allow prisons to jam cellphones used illegally by prisoners:

But public interest groups, including Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation, and the Main Street Project, told the committee in a letter that cited a Wired magazine story that blocking technology is unproven and that blocking is not possible without causing collateral damage.

“Allowing the legal manufacture, importation and sale of jamming equipment will create a loophole that history shows the FCC will find impossible to close,” the groups wrote.

“Jamming prison cellphones would jeopardize public safety because there is no way to jam only phones used by prisoners,” said Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge. “All wireless communications could be shut down within a prison.”

…

“Once such a jamming device is built, it will inevitably become available on a wider basis. Who knows what chaos that will cause?” Feld said.

So what do these two stories have in common?  A similar psuedo-logical leap that I like to call If X =>Then the Owls Will Surely Rape Our Faces as We Sleep.* This is a favored tactic of those we pay to freak out about things on our behalf (politicians, lawyers, PR, lobbyists) wherein the master logician in question takes scant evidence, an anecdotal isolated incident or something they hope the listener is ignorant about and label it the surest route to a doomsday of owl-on-face-sexual-assault proportions.

This is how Assemblyman Dov “Hey can we get some more racial profiling over here?” Hikind goes from a random porno dub on an Austin Powers tape to populist rage against an entire A/V format to protect the children from sexual relations.  (Of which there is no mention in Austin Powers, mind you)

And he even manages to get in a WTF-worthy dig at the wretched hive of scum and villiany, oh, and child seduction, that is the library.  Dammit, Dov, that’s the Queens Public Library System, get it straight.

Then we’ve got Harold Feld hearing the desperate hooting and mad sex-crazed flapping of some dystopic future where owls rule and cell phones are jammed everywhere, all because we tried to stop a few measly contract killings.  While it should be said that I support a lot of what Public Knowledge says they’re for, Feld is either banking on our ignorance and sitting in a warm puddle of his own.

Anyone with access to another dangerous technology, The Googles, can find plans and providers for exactly the sort of cell phone jammers (DIY here, commercial there) that he fears will lead to some kind of ambiguous large bad thing.

That’s another piece of this tactic: keep the threat ambiguously defined but big.  The human brain automatically fills that void with, you guessed it, feathers everywhere and a taste no amount of mouth wash will cleanse.

*Feel free to replace face rape by owls with the worst case scenario of your choice.  I spent a lot of my upbringing in a sleeping bag in the woods so y’know.