christmas on infinite earths

After figuring out the proper way to mount the springs for maximum ringatude, I went out and bought one more.  Older and wiser this time around, I was sure to get one that could easily be disassembled, and it also has 5 usable springs instead of 4, with some of them only about 10 inches long.  These will go on the second row of the instrument.  I’m gonna play around with it tonight and arrange them in some sort of intuitive order.

While picking through the pile of springs (conveniently shoved into a junker at the bottom of a pile of cars) the guy at the salvage yard found either the body or a husk of a tiny white scorpion.  I don’t know if it came with the junked out car or if the little sucker was a native to Austin in his life, but it was kind of cool and freaky at the same time.  Back to work now!

I just got the basic framework for the instrument built.  for the first time it is taking shape.

Unfortunately it is the wrong shape.  Up until now I have been operating under the assumption that the springs need to act like the tines on a kalimba, that is, be pinned down at one end while the rest is struck and vibrates.  This makes them easy to tune because you can just adjust where the spring is pinned down in order to adjust the length of the vibrating segment.  This has been entirely theoretical though.  I had been trying to find out what the springs sounded like when held and struck in this manner, but assumed that I needed the full frame set up with sound chamber in order to know.  Boy was I wrong.

I found out tonight that by holding the spring even loosely in one hand and striking it near the center with a mallet, you can make the entire spring vibrate and even fucking ring.  It’s a totally audible note with no sound chamber whatsoever.  If you touch that vibrating spring against something, anything, it amplifies the noise.  I was floored.  Finally I know what I have to do, unfortunately it means a lot of my work so far has been in the wrong direction.  We’ll see what I can salvage and what needs to be scrapped.

Got my leaf springs from Ace Salvage on Friday, got them all taken apart and stuff and spread out on a big canvas dropcloth all over my poor living room.  I’ve got a decent little supply of lumber and nails and shit, so I’m finally leaving the conceptual phase and actually putting stuff together.  The deathphone is finally getting off the ground, so to speak.

I need a name for the contraption though.  Here’s a short list that springs to mind:

• Deathtrap Calliope
• Wreck of the Edward R. Murrow
• Electric Heap (it’s probably not actually going to be electric at all)
• Skeletor
• Optimus Prime Ribcage

I have been pretty remiss in updating this website, which is bad, I know.  But I have finally settled on the major cause:  wordpress is terrible for me to use.  I understand it’s supposed to be super easy, but I’m getting absolutely fed up with it.  I can’t change the width of my pages, something I could figure out in my sleep with regular html, but can’t do here.  I can’t figure out how to update to the latest version of wp because my ftp client won’t delete the old files, and also I can’t backup my current files the way it says to.  Everytime I try to get in here and work on this (because it’s, like, a grade), I have to reteach myself every step of it.

Meanwhile, Wordpress is sitting and waving this little “easy” flag around smiling at me and laughing condescendingly at every trip I make.  I am being humiliated by a blogging platform.  I guess the problem is that I cut my coding teeth on several angelfire websites back in the day, and learned to wrangle html code with my bare hands.  It wasn’t fancy, but I could usually get what I wanted through brute force.  So now it’s many years past and not only am I dealing with a differnt coding system and different expectations about how a website should and shouldn’t look, but I’m also messing with a system that jerks the website from my big clumsy hands, mumbling “here just let me… idiot, dumbass…” then gives me back a page that still doesn’t do what I want.

For the sake of keeping this somewhat up to date I think I need to just accept the limitations of Wordpress.  I don’t have the time to relearn how to make pages when I don’t even know what my second project is.

The fake band project has been seen to completion.  In the end, I was not able to produce photos of the fake band playing a fake show at a fake bar (FauxBar, hurr hurr), but I still had a good amount of material to present.

Exhibit A is the myspace page, of course.  This page has access to nearly all the material I created for the project, most of it simply being backstory and bogus information.  The info names the band members as Malik Vasquez, Vlad Dragos, and Kurt Jaegger, the bio has a blurb about supporting live music, and the show listing has a set of tour dates in fake bars all over the region.

The only thing missing from the page is, of course, music.  Myspace allows you put your own music tracks up on your page if you are a band, but Skinny Factory has none.  The reason for this is that producing music would actual constitute real content from the band, in which case it would cease to be fake.  Bands like the Gorillaz have “virtual” band members who don’t necessarily correspond with real-life counterparts, but they produce albums and even tour.  So, conceptually speaking, in order for Skinny Factory to stay a “fake” band, it can’t make any real music.  Also, making music is hard and I didn’t have time.

The myspace account also features a blog.  Because the list of show dates updates itself according to real dates, the past shows dissappear as their date passes; only upcoming shows are visible to others.  Therefore, the only means of creating the evidence of performances like I intended is through bogus pictures (unable to attain thus far), bogus comments from other myspace users (several friends have been very helpful in this regard) blog entries.  To this end, after certain “big” shows, I will post a Skinny Parade blog chronicling their experience and how they felt about the show, and what they are looking forward to it.  The blogs are written from a group perspective, occassionally mentioning individual members in third person.  One would have to assume that one of the band members drags his laptop along with him and speaks on behalf of the band as a whole.  It might be rewarding to explore whose voice it is behind the blog and his relationship to the whole.

Another component to Skinny Factory’s fake existence is the groups of photos available through the myspace account.  I used an afternoon at work to get photos of my coworkers hanging out in the alley next the building, in the back hallway, and exit stairs.  The three are naturally photogenic and a little staging and directing were all it took to make them look like a band.  The picture I chose for the main band image is one of the guys standing in the stairwell.  I played with the light levels a bit to make it more dramatic, here are the results:

Left to Right: Malik, Vlad and Kurt

Stairway to heaven?

I chose to use one of the other pictures of the band in a hallway for the flier image.  The inspiration/guiding principles for the flier came from the copious amount of low quality xeroxed band adverts posted on kiosks and left on countertops all over the city.  I took inspiration from Kris Straub’s work on F Chords, a webcomic about a fictional Austin band.  Straub invited fans to download and print out his phony flier in whatever town they live in.  The Skinny Factory website encourages fans to do the same.  Below is the original image, my color manipulation of it, and the final version of the flier:

Original photo

Hideous 90's Alternative Rock coloration

Flier with logo and vague show information

The flier lacks any information about specific chows, serving instead as a sort of advertisement for the website. This is so that the same flier can be put up at any time, anywhere, and not seem out of date or out of place. I gave a number of copies to the band members to circulate downtown, and few went up on campus. Hopefully a few fans out of town will distribute these as well.

That concludes the content created for this project. It was moderately successful, even if it didn’t quite reach my ambitions. I don’t know if I was able to fool anybody in class when I introduced the band as legitimate, since I quickly revealed the scam. Most people who I have shown the site to are in on the project, but there are several friends on myspace who don’t know the band is fake and added them just to be friends. For me, that’s a sign that this project is a success.

I have given the password for the account to the members, and a couple are interested in actually creating music for the myspace page. While this clashes with the conceptual founding of Skinny Factory as a fake band, I’m looking forward to seeing what they come up with.

Acknowledgments: Band members Ted Powers, Julio Fernandez, and Benjamin Haskil, photos by Donovan Gentry

I just realized that I can write a post and save it without publishing it, and what that entails for my project. Okay, even though a lot of this is going to be after the fact, let me lay out the progress on project one so far:

Friday/Saturday 9-26/27

Project One: “Man, you missed it!?” OR “The Most Obscure Indie Band Performance Ever.”

Goal: To create a convincing enough facade using Myspace and random artifacts to convince a casual observer that a rare performance by an obscure local band took place at Austin City Limits Music Festival, as well as an aftershow. In reality, the band does not exist and the shows never took place, but significant evidence exists to suggest that it did.

Theory: This project exploits the nature of ACL in that the festival is so large and there are multiple bands playing simultaneously, so it’s entirely plausible that a person in attendance could miss an actual show and know neither that they missed it nor the band in question. This also hacks the much abused system of myspace, specifically its music subsection, and its ability to document bands and performances through pictures, comments, show dates, and music tracks. The final intended hack is to actually hack the expectations of the class and the presentation space by presenting the band and the concerts as real, with the “joke” revealed toward the end. In order for this hack to be successful, the presentation needs to be delivered under the pretense that it serves another decoy hack. I have yet to figure out what this false hack is.

Method: using photographs of some random individuals (my coworkers), I will create a myspace band page and cast them as an obscure Austin indie band [step completed]. The myspace bulletins and blog and show dates will reflect an active performing schedule, including a last minute gig at ACL on the final day of the concert. I will present myself to the class as a big follower of the band, and to that effect will display a t shirt with the band’s name, signed by the “lead singer and guitarist” with a photo of the fake lead singer actually signing the shirt at ACL on Sunday, where I will have alledgedly met him by chance. After retelling the amazing concert they put on, I will then tell the class about the aftershow I attended and display a trampled flyer “found” at ACL as another artifact.

The guiding concept is to produce as many “real” artifacts or evidence as possible without resorting to digital manipulation of pictures or video in order to create a web of evidence supporting the make believe band and concerts simply by putting that evidence out of context (the photo of the t shirt signing will really just be my corworker signing the t shirt I made for myself while we are at ACL on Sunday; the location, time and event are real, but the meaning is altered by the context).

Long term goals: The band website and the fake ACL show provides a foundation to continue the exploration of just how far can a nonexistant band go without actually existing? I could send them on tour, hitting made up clubs and locations across the country with willing friends providing comments and messages supporting the tour. If I limit the adventures of the band to the scenes I can capture on camera and recontextulize, the nation wide tour is less likely. Another issue is the actual music of the band. Myspace allows you to put tracks of your music up for streaming audio listening on your page, and it is normal practice for bands to do so, but what kind of music does a nonexistant band make? I’ve condisered making the traks entirely by myself, but i’m not sure if i possess the talent or time to do so. Maybe this is a job for fellow musically inclined hackers.

UPDATE 2:30 9/27: Skinny Factory has just received its first random friends. Someone I don’t know as a friend on my own myspace account has added them as a friend, and it is another band. The more the friends list gets fleshed out, the more legitimate the band seems to onlookers. Like Santa, it becomes more real with each new believer.

Okay, so the reason I’m still up at 3:40 in the morning when I have to be at work by 9 is because I volunteered to be a moderator for two panels for the upcoming Flow Conference, seeing as how I didn’t get involved with it at the actual, hands on level. The papers for my panels had to be converted to pdfs and uploaded to the site as clickable links, blah blah blah. I had been putting it off all week because I thought it would be hard, which it wasn’t, but it did take me from working on my project.

After Monday, I decided I needed to find an efficient way to get the most out of this weekend. I work in the hat store on Sixth street and we have a kiosk at ACL, and I am obligated to work there Friday and Sunday, with Saturday seeing me in the store on sixth, so I’m not going to have a lot of free time outside of the festival. The plan now is to try and sneak in a video camera (no video cams or cameras with detachable lense allowed, what??) and see if I can’t get some material in there. There’s a couple bands I’m really looking forward to.

I have just set up my site (via wordpress) on the ACTLab server and I am tweaking the theme and stuff as we speak. Wordpress feels like my natural element now that I’m here, accessing the server was the big hurdle. Of course I don’t really have anything to put up here yet, seeing as how I’m one of those people who have no idea what their first project is yet, but hey, it’s a start.