katapyknosis: a diagram of the traveling salesman problem

The Protos Chronos and the Figure of Compression: Code and Coda

Trey Conner, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

Key texts in molecular biology, infinitist mathematics, and the diverse musical minimalisms borne out of John Cage's attention to "the frame" (such as La Monte Young's compositions) seem to share more than just a concern with coding, as theological presuppositions and ad hoc metaphysics mixing codes of rationalism and mysticism in these discourses also produce fascinating transcodings that call to mind the technological and artistic heritage of Pythagoras and Plato. Scientists and artists in this lineage gravitate to versions of order that adhere in Bateson's coding primer, "Every Schoolboy Knows...." where parsimony is posited as the fundamental presupposition of coding practice (Mind and Nature 23-37). Where Bateson likens coding's premise to the figure of Occam's razor, this presentation will instead weave an analogy to the similar but perhaps "lossier" trope of "compression" as it appears in another Greek musical tradition, that of the harmonikoi and of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, and compare the coding practices of their protos chronoi (primary time-lengths, the musician's equivalent of the geometer's point) with the meaning and utility of data compression today, including a consideration of so-called pseudocode, reflective/dynamic/object-oriented programming languages, sampling in dj culture, tagging, and codecs such as mp3 and oggvorbis. These coding practices have dramatically reorganized the function and phenomenology of music, programming, and writing in ways neither the Greeks nor the minimalists could anticipate, and this presentation will conclude with an allegorical account of "the listener" in these coding regimes.

The closing allegory will accompany a sound installation. Fragments of mantra, Fluxus compositions, shards of tuned frequencies from an analog coupled oscillator, and free audience participation will provide coding elements, and George Gamow's diamond code diagram (vis-a-vis Rich Doyle's rhetorical analysis Gamow's codes, cf On Beyond Living 39-64) will provide metacode. Simple coding elements and fragments will be offered up in advance, in stages, so that interested members of the SLSA community may, by means of an open-access wiki, participate in the sonic coda to the paper presentation http://protoschronos.pbwiki.com/FrontPage

sacred compression excerpt from a peaecefeather operatic icaro The Grasshopper Lies Heavy

hole-y script a collage (including snippets of Cold Crush Brothers, La Monte Young's Drift Study 14 VII 73 9:27:27-10:06:41 PM NYC from Map of 49's Dream The Two Systems of Eleven Sets of Galactic Intervals Ornamental Lightyears Tracery, and much more). Inspired by Mr. Tompkin's "Cosmic Opera," where the now-passe debate between the big bang and steady state cosmologies is set to music and poetry.

keywords: protos chronos, compression, rhetoric, La Monte Young, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, metaprogramming

echo and ecos: habitats for transhumanity

harmonics, envelope, and compression

from monadology to nomadology

closing remarks: "The Fold of the Bards"

Afterglow: thoughts, reflections

Thanks to all for playing. I truly enjoyed the panel and hope to keep "conversating" and experimenting. I will scan the elements of our re-enactment of Composition 1960 #10, compress them as a .gif animation, and post them here on this page this week.-Trey

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Here's OncoMouse's critique

Drift Study 31 1 69 La Monte Young

brainfuck minimalist programming

Plenty of Room at the Bottom Feynman's 1959 lecture anticipates nanotechnology. Pump that bass!

the sutra-compressed epigrams on programming : programming and the ebb and flow of unity/multiplicity. "Whenever a multiplicity is taken up in structure, its growth is offset by a reduction of its laws of combination," (like this), but the compressions of Joycean language, like "Nietzsche's aphorisms shatter the unity of knowledge, only to invoke the cyclic unity of the eternal return," therefore, "the multiple must be made not always by adding a higher dimension, but rather in the simplest of ways" (D&G p. 6)

Fluxus: simplicity and intermedia

will the digital computer transform classical mathematics?

SuperCollider Code Pool swim in

dub, remix culture, wiki, and distributed version control - delta compression and "diffs"