[ recap ]

Last week we looked at Bruno Munari and art with the Xerox machine.

[ thoughts ]

This week I've found myself digging into archives.

The January 1985 issue of Whole Earth Review opened with Monkey Trap by Birrell Walsh, described as, "Thinking machines grab our attention and won't let go".

A sentence from Walsh was highlighted at the beginning of the issue: "It is not our hand that we put into the computer, it is our attention."

Walsh was writing in 1985, before the World Wide Web. His concern was the amount of attention people were giving the personal computer.

Fourteen years earlier, economist and cognitive scientist Herbert Simon in Designing Organisations for an Information-Rich World, wrote that information consumes the attention of whoever receives it.

An abundance of one therefore creates a shortage of the other:
"a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention."

That problem shows up in creative work too. Research can continue long after there is enough material to begin. Generative tools can keep producing another image, paragraph or variation after the harder decision has become which one deserves to stay.

[ creativity ]

In 1958, composer Pauline Oliveros received a tape recorder for her birthday and placed it by a window to record a San Francisco street.

When she played the tape back, the microphone had recorded sounds she had not noticed while she was standing there.

Oliveros later recalled that from that day she committed herself to a discipline of rigorous listening.

The Center for Deep Listening describes the practice as exploring the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening.

Oliveros was interested in attention that could move in both directions. She described Deep Listening as "expanding to the whole field of sound while finding focus."

Her Sonic Meditations turned that practice into instructions other people could follow. In 1971, she wrote twenty-five textual scores designed for group work and not limited to trained musicians.

One of them, Native, begins with a night walk and ends with a single instruction: "Walk so silently that the bottoms of your feet become ears."

[ making ]

Oliveros's tape-recorder experiment gives us something to try this week.

Leave a recorder running for two minutes somewhere ordinary: beside an open window, on your desk, outside your front door. Listen back once and write down the sounds you hear on the recording that you did not notice while you were there.

Choose one of the sounds you missed and make something from it. Give it a title, describe it in a sentence, draw it, photograph something that reminds you of it, or turn the words into an image. Keep the response small enough that the connection to the original sound remains visible.

Also, offline and nostalgia trends are continuing to gain popularity.

I've built two free browser tools that touch both of those interests:

Zineware is for making printable folded zines. You build the pages in reading order and it handles the arrangement needed for printing and folding them into the finished object.

The second, Insert WordArt, makes the old Microsoft WordArt available as a fun tool: choose an effect, type the words, export what you have made.

[ sign off ]

Stay the one doing the seeing.

Thanks for taking the time to read.

See you next Sunday.