Notes from the dovecote comes from a good family. Addictive micro-fiction accompanied by mysterious apocryphal photo-creations. (Siblings: Speckled Paint and Solipsistic. Dovecote: A compartmental structure, often raised on a pole, for housing domesticated pigeons.)

I can imagine the grin Escher would develop while watching this animation based on this woodcut. (Escher at the Artchive.)

Gravity Zero has started posting entries from an found journal. "Almost 30 years later, the analog curves of her pen and pencil entries find their place in the electronic hum of our disembodied choir." (via i@Squub.)

I have quite a few links to dole out today. Is it preferable to post them as a bulleted list of links, or in paragraph form? I'm drawn to description.

I've always maintained that consciousness and self-awareness need to be measured on a sliding scale. (As apposed to the popular view of haves/have-nots. Where certain organisms are simply organic machines, and others are mystically given the ability to make premeditated value assumptions.) When viewed on a sliding scale we see that it is difficult, (but not impossible), to foster conscious communication with organisms that posses less complex 'souls'*. It is very easy to discount the consciousness of less evolved organisms. However, there was a time in the distant evolutionary past when our ancestors were 'less evolved organisms'; animals in our current sense of the word. Interspecies communication is always compelling. The BBC is carrying this article on the stunning oratory skills of a captive African Grey parrot.

*The term 'soul' is used here as the root of complex organism consciousness and not necessarily as a religious construct.


Harmonia Macrocosmica, by Andreas Cellarius, is an atlas of the heavens as seen by Copernicus, Ptolemy, Brahe and Aratus in the mid 17th century. All 30 double-folio hand-painted color plates along with 200 odd pages of Latin text are available for our perusal. (Dad, check this stuff out!) [via pelp]

The Rough Guide to... is a musical adventure of quality discoveries.

Some drone and ambient music downloads served using the Freecache content distribution system provide by archive.org.

Is Canada a crucible of campus radio? The two campus stations here in Winnipeg are top-notch. Listen online: CKUW - UMFM

Mike has been posting some great experiments in colour and focus.

A hauntingly bizarre missing poster found by Andrea over at This Afternoon is Drama. Classic Lynchian reality.

Imagine if we could plant flowers all over war-torn countries. Flowers who's petals would change colour when their roots came across land-mines. Now replace 'flowers' with 'genetically modified wheat' and it's a reality.

I hope that you find the new colour scheme pleasing.

Note to the surfer who found there way here via this search: There are no scary places in Winnipeg. Well, unless you count the entire -38 degree Celsius city last night.

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We'll start today's post by opening up the old mailbag:

This weeks audio experiment was an exercise in Mixing, Mastering and EQing. The track was built around a bassline played by my friend Cam during a jamming session. The tracks tentative title was Slam It. In the end, I couldn't get Cam's bassline to sonically fit with the rest of the track; the bassline was replace.

Download Cam Slam Track.

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The free boardgames over at HipBone are wonderful. Explore!

From the hipbone website: "Your own mind is what you bring to the HipBone Games: your thoughts are the "pieces", the "cards" you play with. Whatever you know, think, or can guess or remember, whatever you can jot down, thumbnail sketch, whistle or quote is what you bring to the game, what you play the game with. We just supply the rules and the board.

The result is that a HipBone Game is like a conversation: it finds its own level.

And whether you are book-learned, experience-rich or streetwise, a visual person or someone with a knack for mathematics, funny or deadpan or serious, a lawyer or an artist, a geek or a jock or whatever, intuitive, spontaneous, considered or cautious, prone to telling tall tales, or precise as only a scholar can be -- it doesn't matter. The game will take on the form of your own mind, interacting with the minds of those you play with."

The HipBone games are based on the concept of the Glass Bead Game described by Hermann Hesse in his Nobel-winning novel, Magister Ludi. I discovered the game site by chance as my dad recently gave me a copy of Magister Ludi. (Related: 1 - Read Hermann Hesse novel Siddhartha online. 2 - The HipBone Blog.)

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My gf has started bringing me to the gym. I've also just begun a yoga class with my mom and sister. My body feels sore and relaxed. It's the good kind of sore. My DJ follows me everywhere. Lately, I've been thinking about reading the bible. Today I stumbled across the bible for the IRC generation.

Julian Jaynes had an interesting take on the evolution of consciousness. His book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, caused a stir in both science and pop culture.

"His basic thesis is that 'consciousness' is a modern development, arising in the last 3000 or so years. I can probably only give a gross caricature of his idea, but it suggests that the age preceding consciousness, the bicameral era, included the world portrayed in Homer's Iliad and the beginning of the Old Testament. In that age, one half of the brain (left) organised the ordinary business of doing things, eating, seeing, and ordinary sort of stuff, while the other (right) half did more, long-term sorting out of strategy. The brain's owner more or less trugged along on autopilot under the direct control of the left side until a totally new or unexpected situation, (in which we would use conscious thought) occurred. At this point, if the right half had any good ideas, it communicated them to the left, in a linguistic way. In other words, of course, the autopilot heard voices, giving instructions on what to do next." - Text from the last link.

(Related: The Julian Jaynes Society - An archived stungeye post on consciousness)

I just adore clouds. I'll bet you that Cary Grant did too.

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Playing with the new brushes in Photoshop:



It was snowing last night. The snow flakes looked like stars:



Legs:



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Today's Flash MX 2004 experiment is: Bees - A Sidescrolling Video Game.

This game took me quite a while to complete. I've been working on it, on and off, for about a month now. If anyone is interested in checking out the source file, feel free: Bee Sources (example fla). The file may be a bit hard to understand as there are few comments, and I was busily climbing the learning curve while I was building the game.

If you are using Mozilla or Opera to view this flash experiment I recommend you upgrade your Flash plug-in to version 7.0.

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Download winamp 5. Use their new Media Library (ALT-L). Load up the video stream entitled demoscene stream in the Internet TV section. Enjoy your fill of the old school demo scene. (Other winamp streams of note: The 1000kbps Bjork promo stream, #Rapkings - German, French and American hip-hop. Rapping sounds wicked cool in German and French.)

The demo scene stream lead me to Pouet.net, a scene related resource centre. From there I discovered a real treat! (More info on that, later.)

Back in the early 90s, I was into the local BBS scene. I witnessed the peak and the near-death of this digital phenom. Before the internet gained wide spread popularity, millions around the world were using their computer modems to connect over their phone lines to Electronic Bulletin board systems. There were even globally connected BBS networks like Fidonet that rivaled the early 90s internet in terms of ease of use, community strength and content. Worldwide communities were formed that promoted the distribution of knowledge, creativity and the fellowship of man. Of these communities and scenes, I was drawn to phreaking, hacking and the demo and ansi-art scene. I remember when my cousin first taught me how to make free long-distance modem calls through the Univerisity of Manitoba loopback switch. The world's BBS systems, like giant digital community built encyclopedias, were at my disposal.

This is where I learnt to love learning. Using the word "where" in this context is such an abstraction. For "where", was I while I soaked in this info from this proto-noosphere? I was at home. Sitting in front of my computer. And yet my consciousness was connecting to people and ideas around the world. Bringing 'home' some inspiration from a beautiful ANSI image created in Germany. Debating the finer points of shareware video games on a BBS in Hawaii.

And then I discovered the Net. Sure, sometimes I miss the BBS world, (especially it's lack of corporate sponsorship), but there's no turning back once you witness the future.

The treat I mentioned earlier is the final Artpack from the legendary ANSI-art crew, Acid Productions. These digital artists weave complex images with a limited colour palette and a collection of squares. (Download with BitTorret: acid-100.zip.torrent)

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"These 9 drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD -- part of a test conducted by the US government during it's dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950's. The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him."

What blew me away was the similarity of this image with the painting composition work of Wassily Kandinsky

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The current temperature is -31�C (-24 F). Our car is frozen solid and I've drained the battery dead while trying to start it. I'll try to boost later on today. Hopefully the block heater will have done it's job by then.

I've got some links to hand out. Let's do this paragraph style instead of a bulleted list, this time around. The people at creative commons have launch two sampling copyright licenses free for public use. Much like their other public licenses, the sample licenses will allow content creators to fuel the global creative process.

"The Sampling licenses will help authors foster a broad range of culture, from photo collage to musical "mash-ups," that the law currently deems illegitimate. [...] The Sampling license will let authors invite others to transform their work, even for commercial purposes, while prohibiting distribution of verbatim copies, or any use in advertising.

For example, an artist could take a photo licensed under Sampling, crop it, and use it in a commercial collage, but she could not distribute simple copies of the whole, original photo. A DJ could borrow elements of a licensed song, royalty-free, and use them in an original piece. He could not, however, put a copy of the tune on a file-sharing network."

I stumbled across some great philosophical musingss over the holidays. This thread over at Information Pollution has been attracting some interesting discussion. The seed of these discussions was the trailer for the movie 21 Grams, which states that a human body loses 21 grams of mass at the moment of death. (Proof of the existence of a soul?) This thread eventually lead me to C. C. Keiser's musings on Poly-Solopsism and existence, (complete with philoso-poetry.) From there I discovered panentheism.com, a website "dedicated to the creation of a Universal Philosophy for life universally and for humankind in particular using the metaphysical concept of Symbiotic Panentheism." Inspired, I teased the following out of google: Telespace.org - A game-player's guide to reality. Where the author presents his working hypothesis, that "reality may be an interactive fiction -- a game -- designed to promote the evolution of consciousness at all levels."

The Triplets of Belleville looks like a wonderful new animated feature. Watch the trailer here.

In music news, the Onion A.V. Club has posted their best albums of 2003 lists.

Kottke and Fimoculous are two fine blogs.

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As hip-pop continues to take over the airwaves, hip-hop is as fresh as ever:

The work of Josh Nimoy is hard to define. Technological art? An online collection of Josh's experiments can be found at jtnimoy.net. The word juxtaposition comes to mind. (I like the sound of that word, although I think this may be the first time I've actually used it.) Some experiments I enjoyed: