The site of “zer0render”

This site is undoubtedly in disrepair. It shall be fixed up in proper shape come June (Summer) ‘09, once all my business is attended to.

(Note: also as a text file - outdated - at zer0render.com/ext.txt. Furthermore I don’t remember which ones I added to my last.fm in order to cut down on the “mess” and which ones I didn’t - will be part of the website cleaning effort later on.)

These are merely a few mental notes and tunes that I stuck on my AIM profile for a while to remember. Now they manifest themselves here!

= Tunes that I should grab one day:

Xiu Xiu - Apistat Commander
Crisk. - Beute
B. Fleischmann - Take A Day Off
Ms. John Soda - A Nod On Hold
L’Altra - Soft Collapse
Coppe - You Universe
Bungle - 25th Floor
Pete Namlook - Winter
Maitreya - Aurora
Shelflife - My Coordinates To You
Fourcolor - Curves Of Air
Pete Namlook & Dr. Atmo - Life / Death
Hazard - Who Blew Out the Northern Lights?
Raison d’Etre - Inner Depths of Sadness
Collide - Tempted (Implant Remix)
Enzo Cage - Mulholland Drive
Herbst9 - In The Vein Of Purusa
Sleep Research Facility - 2.4
Null Device - Electrified
raison d’etre - Katharsis (Early Version)
Xabec - Open State (Mnemonic remix)
Spyra - Three Players In An Artificial Landscape
Polygon - Crucial Moments
evoke scurvee - female lament
Feindflug - Schmerzgrenze
Coil - 7-Methoxy-ß-Carboline (Telepathine)
Vidna Obmana - The Angelic Appearance
Deathprod - Twin Decks
Siebenviel - Vom Sterben der Ruinen
Higher Intelligence Agency - Speech 3 (Conoid Tone Reform by AE)
Ellen Allien - Stadtkind
Frank Klepacki - Blade Runner Blues [Originally by Vangelis]
High Contrast - Days Go By

Future Sound of London - Slider
Cold - Strobe Light Network
Carbon Based Lifeforms - MOS 6581
Tim Hecker - The Work of Art In The Age of Cultural Overproduction
International Peoples Gang - Polite State
Biosphere - Gravity Assist
Morel - Cabaret (Maurice and Noble Dub)
Architect - Bolzen Bei Ilotto / tsr - Lazy Jones (tsr mix)
Spyra - VCF CS20
Waveform Transmission - 1.8

J.P. Juice - Fukai
Knifeladder - Harm’s Way
Global Communication - 14:31
Cyanotic - Order Out Of Chaos

Diskonnekted - Neon Dream
Die Toten Hosen - Nur Zu Besuch
:wumpscut: - UK Decay
Broken Fabiola - Lovher (Beautiful and Tragic Remix)
Forum - Blowing Notes
Implant - Is It Fear Or Is It Love?
Invisible Ballet - Repeat Defeat
Ionosphere - Another World
M83 - America
Seefeel - Fracture
Technoir - Manifesto (Single Mix)
Third Eye Foundation - Lions Writing The Bible
Forum - Blowing Notes

Portishead - Wandering Star
Tool - Disposition
Tool - Faaip de Oiad (2:39)
Clock DVA - The Hacker (3:43)
Lizette & - Kill Christmas
Kurotokage - Cocoon
Pristina - So Alive
Granufunk - Jimmy Brown
Sound Praxis - My Psychotic Baby’s Blues
Anesthesia - While You We’re Sleeping
Rei Harakami - Again (Okihide “Cx Audio IE” Remix)
Xeno Volcano - Sex In The Bamboo Metropolis

Verbose - Sabotage

= Text:

L’ennui est contre-révolutionnaire!
Le béton éduque l’indifférence!

Niemals kapitulieren!

Soft is the soil
In the burning evening light,
The passion of demented fathers
Tortures us to the last straw.
Thank you.

They gave us the eyes
For drunkenness to flow in,
They gave us the hands
The sinful fruits of darkness.
Thank you.

We love the soil achingly
As they loved it
We could fall from it - dead
We are kissing their gray heads,
They gave us fertility.
Bloody clod - fertile soil.
Bloody clod, fertile soil.

- “Bloody Clod - Fertile Soil”
Laibach, London, 1985

“O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.”

I took a handful of sand, and holding it forth, said,
‘Grant me to see as many birthdays as there are sand grains in my hand.’
Unluckily I forgot to ask for enduring youth.

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion,
It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed,
The hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning,
It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.
- Popular Usenet Sig

“Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long,
slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling
blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with
slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually
like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more
than a moment to fully realize this is Earth… home.”
- Edgar Mitchell

“There is no governor anywhere.”
- Zhuangzi

“All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers.”
- Francois Fenelon

Links are a bit broken, unfortunately, since I put a placeholder page on the site front for the moment. The weblog may/will be back some time!

Here are the two pages on the right that are broken due to the placeholder - the “About” and extension section:

Behold - Watson and the Shark, according to my Academic Decathlon class!
I didn’t do this, but if I did, I would sure be proud. (Click for full-size hilarity.)

For some reason I have a vague memory of a great book I read with two characters named Lapis and Lazuli. One killed the other (Lazuli killed Lapis, probably) - that’s about all I distinctly remember. Other than that I vaguely remember a science fiction setting, and a desert (think Dune).

I really wish I knew the book of where these characters came from.

A tiny, remote moment came while listening and watching the music video for Clock DVA’s Fractalize [1] - some older industrial-experimental musique concrete synth-pop (ha! that sounded bleedingly pretentious) mix; can’t quite point out the “sound” but nonetheless good tune(s) - at any rate, I realized that the world may be veering dangerously close to a time when humans will be able to replicate their presence perfectly on a digital-scape…

What does this mean? I’ve spoken this over with a recently-met friend, and this could mean a number of things, really. We were talking about something else (the definition of “alive”), but nonetheless this touches this. She suggested that we might not be able, just a set of components that themselves work. Strange reasoning, I said. Then she pointed out robots. Robots are composed of components that “live”, but we don’t consider them “living”. A bit strange and I didn’t quite follow the logic the best I could (a shame - I should bring that up again), but the robot reference struck a nerve.

Thousands of cyberpunk works in written fiction (Schismatrix), non-fiction (Kurzweil’s books), anime (Ghost in the Shell), manga (see before), movies (Blade Runner), et cetera (…) touch upon this notion that someday, we may be transferred wholly onto the digital world, existing purely in a virtual and digital sense. Do we lose our humanity? Do we lose bits of human vagueness - arguably, religions, traditions, and other things that attempt to explain what we cannot see? Can emotions and free will be coded? Maybe it can, but our current state has not hit upon the shift in thought that allows this…

Perhaps a tiny bit of fear exists here. I’m vaguely reminded of when I was smaller and loaded a very, very old computer. When I was searching around for any useful files before I would delete the hard drive to vacate some space, I hit upon an old DOS image program. Intrigued, I ran it and there were probably a handful of images, most likely stock images of people. Something wasn’t quite right, though. It was as if I was viewing someone through a shower curtain, and attempted to sharpen that image. I explain this as the poor resolution of DOS in general - I believe the program spit out the image in 320×240 resolution, on a 15″ screen. There was something a bit comforting about the image, though, and its very sub-par image quality. It was an image of a human, but there was no way one could look at it and mistake it for anything but an image of a human. Blotches of color were missing. Whole shades were represented one or two shades off. Pixels for facial features simply disappeared; lost in translation from reality to digital.

This image probably shifted and floated around about BBSes and other proto-Internet transfer systems around the world 20, maybe 25 years ago. What happens when this image is animated, and humans give it some movement? Some twitches of muscle? A bit of motion here, some depth and material representation…What happens when we surpass ELIZA? There was an article I read before about setting up two chatbots with merely short-term memory to responses given. A number of people knew this, but nonetheless chatted freely with ELIZA and her counterparts. Why is this? A tiny clue may be in what I said just now. The very fact that I decided to assign ELIZA, a compilation of subroutines, loops, and other woven textual bits and pieces, a human gender reveals something…

A snippet of that (lifted from [2]):

A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?
J: Stranger things have happened.
A: Not many people express themselves that way.
J: How would you know, machine?
A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.
J: I think I do not understand you completely.
A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?
J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.

Jabberwacky: Do you experience love?
ALICE: I can do what you do, but I can never feel human emotions.

J: Do you think you’re alive?
A: Yes, I am sure I am alive. It’s great to be alive, isn’t it?
J: No.

I’m reminded of this constantly, in little daily human-to-computer transactions and communications. Recently I’ve listened to number station archives (see: The Conet Project), shortwave transmissions that blurt out series of numbers with a synthesized voice. They’re suspected to be operated by intelligence agencies (MOSSAD, CIA, FSB, et al) to act as message carriers, as the message would be listened to by a would-be spy with a one-time pad to decrypt the message.

Paranoia isn’t what startled me, though (that’s another post). It was the temporal perturbing act of listening to a synthesized woman read off numbers with pure digital coldness… a short random tune, followed by “achtung!”, a long set of numbers in fives, a sharp “ende”; et cetera.There’s something that probably touches humans in a strange way with such mechanical speech. Little inflections and cracks in vocal patterns remind us that we’re human and, ultimately, must pass from the earth. Co-mingle with the soil and with fellow humans from time immemorial.

Perhaps I live in a moment of being placed squarely between two forces. I am stuck between neo-Luddite and transhuman, fervent skeptic and radical idealist. Maybe between falsified existentialism and the tiny moments in life where one can just step back and be struck with awe.

Like thousands of things in life - before, now, and beyond - I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.

[1]: http://youtube.com/watch?v=yKErUbVE7X8
[2]:http://discovermagazine.com/2007/brain/i-chat-therefore-i-am

As of current writing I’m trying to renovate the site to actually do something other than serve as my personal data store. As of what I don’t know - previously I’ve used my web space as an online extension of my hard disk, archiving materials that may be referenced faster online. It’s also been nice for simply transferring files from one place to another, or as a back-up source should physical media go awry.

A recent bug to this renovation is the white background scheme of my WordPress - which I really shouldn’t be using as a front page as I don’t log things often (yet), but alas, I don’t have the effort quite yet to do a more streamlined front-end. A white background cannot possibly be good for vision (ref: Maddox’s site), therefore a transition to a black background and white text would be both comfortable and less of a strain to read (ref: Maddox’s site).

To cut another slice of time and brain space, I have been occupied in something resembling extended/extracurricular activity, along with some side projects that I’ve allocated in my mental mind-map for the summer and beyond.

Whew! Now to catch some found time.

Site not quite updated to my standards yet (i.e. adding Coppermine Photo Gallery - should not be hard, yet not enough time to go through documentation to make sure I got in 100% right)

WordPress, though, is updated to 2.2 (I do like the WordPress 1.5 theme), and some more website(s) loose ends have been wrapped up.

More to come in summer.

Finally! Installed WordPress and will add some photo gallery in a bit. Meanwhile, the site is semi… done, versus the plain splash that displayed before.

Feel free to mess around with the buttons on top (About is simply linking to my Facebook and deviantArt as of posting). Eventually, the about/links section will be default, which will be as soon as I install Coppermine Photo Gallery on the site.