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ANTILOG_19June26a
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2026-06-19 00:26:45
- As should be quite obvious by now, I've been thinking a lot about the workspace lately; yesterday, I recorded a video, called Spontaneous Sorting Algorithms in the Workspace, of myself sorting through folders of printed materials from the archives; I made a series of 9 videos about 12 years ago where I did something similar, in an experiment I called Experiment in Spontaneous Creation of Organizational Heuristics; the basic premise for the video experiment was that I would take all of my current folders and try to sort through the materials, in an improvized way; I had no methodology in mind that I would use, it would be entirely improvized in real-time and based on what I would find in the folders themselves; at the time, I was printing out a lof of material from the web and from my own writings, and there was no organizational logic to those papers; I needed to organize them, to do a kind of retrospective as I've always done, of said materials; so I had a design concept for a video experiment which became the aforementioned video series;
- In any case, yesterday's experiment was a success, in my opinion; I was able to reorganize the contents of a bunch of folders; the idea is that I took materials almost randomly from within a bunch of folders I retrieved from the archives and I went through it item by item roughly and created new folders, adding a timestamp to the front of the folder and a new title for a current project represented by the sample I took from said folders; this process doesn't have to be exact, meaning I don't need to classify or reclassify every single item; it can be really rough, and I find it's important sometimes to keep at least some of the folder's original structure, even if the order or organization within it is pseudo-random; remember, I love noise in all its forms and may just need to write a new piece - and project! - called Noise in the Archives as a kind of complement to my Noise in the Workspace project I started a while back;
- In another note, as I said in a previous antilog a short while ago, I began taking field recordings outside the studio which I call Atmospheric Tone readings, if you will; these are similar to "room tone" recordings people often make in video and audio editing; I am now recording the "room tone" inside the lab as well to get a basic reading of the atmosphere inside the workspace; this might just have to be another project altogether, which I would call Atmospherics Analysis; in fact, I've been doing a lot of audio work these days, composing music, recording it, mixing it, and also doing a great deal of my ambient, experimental sound design work; throughout the process, I've thought a lot about sound in general, the physics of sound, the physics of atmospheres, and have developed what I think is a unique take which, as stated, would form part of a research track tentatively called Atmospheric Analysis;
- In this new line of research, I conceive of any ambient space as an Atmosphere, and atmospheres have all of the same features of any sound, really, except that it is a mix of disparate soundmarks, let's call them, which are all superimposed atop each other, blending in with one another and forming an overall ambience or atmosphere; I was recording some piano at Historiotheque 2 for a video we were making and noticed that we always close the patio doors to get a better quality audio recording, to avoid recording any background noise coming from outside; what I realized, though, is that if I leave the doors open and put the field recorder near said door, or even outside it on the balcony, then when I play the piano, the recorder will also record the atmosphere outside the studio, blended in with the piano sound inside the studio; this makes a composite atmosphere with two different atmospheric tones superimposed (in the 3D audio field, when mixed together in the DAW);
- I also came to the conclusion that authors of creative writing, mainly fiction, and specifically novels, also novels from the modernist period which is what I was studying, all have particular atmospheres, that is, the authors create atmospheres; I know that geocriticism and ecocriticism already, but my Atmospherics Analysis or Atmospherics Theory is different, different and unique; what I realized, like with a novel like Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, is that essentially, and this is my interpretation which may be flawed, she is representing and reproducing in fictional prose the environment in which she wrote the words that made up her novel; it is my opinion, after much research and reflection, especially trying to find any research that goes in the general direction of Atmospherics Research, the author of fiction and of novels is basically ALWAYS reproducing in prose what they are experiencing not only in their immediate environment, but also what they are experiencing in their interior evironment or milieu; this milieu is of critical importance and I found in any case that when doing creative writing, mainly fiction in the form of novels, one has to be in-touch I call it, with one's inner space, one's body, etc., and everything has to be in harmony, the inward space has to be in harmony with itself AND with the outer space ("ambience" or "atmosphere");
- I've done a great deal of inspired writing and it is my direct observation of the process from the inside that instructs me in forming this hypothesis, as it remains a hypothesis until I have enough data to back it up, which is what I'm trying to do by amassing hundreds of Atmospheric Tone field recordings, which I plan to analyze using the modern tools of data science, especially visualization of data and datasets; this will eventually fold back into my work in acoustic ecology, as most of my field recordings outside include bird sounds, and the Old Village where I live has dozens of different bird species; NOTE: ambient space outside in the world, in nature but also in spaces such as the village, always have a unique sound; what I mean is that you can make a field recording in the morning at let's say 4am on a day in the middle of summer, you can make two separate recordings at exactly the same time, but itwo different locations, locations with an appreciable distance from one another, and the overall STRUCTURE OF THE ATMOSPHERIC TONEwill be completely different; the niches or ecologies will have their own set of natural sounds, different sets of birds, of insects, of anything that is sound-producting;
- In a place like a village, town, or city, the natural environmental sounds, the background signal or sound, will include human-made sounds, everything from motor vehicles to the sounds of construction sites, to people walking down the street, chatting with one another; you always have some amount of wind, too, even if nearly imperceptible; wind is an unfortunate thing in field recordings a lot of the time, and I find with regard to my Atmospheric Tone readings, it is not only impossible to remove once recorded, but I haven't yet found a way NOT to record it; it blends in, bleeds into, every other sound;
- I've also been publishing images taken from my workspace which I collectively call Work Records or Work Recordings; these are pictures or other forms of recordings and data-gathering methodologies that are of the actual workspace itself, in its current, unique "work-state"; that is, it is a "snapshot" of the state of the exposed surfaces of the workspace, its appearance basically or we could even say its "face"; these word records are meant to show the structure of the given "facets of the work-face", the current status of the work-states of the workspace (I know, that is a mouthful!); here is a Word Record I took the other day of the main desk at Historiotheque 1:
- As I already stated, I've been making many field recordings, images and sounds, but I've also been writing a great deal, in public; writing in public is a bit of a nuissance in that I have to take out my pen and notebook and I have to try to take notes inconspicuously; inconspicuous because I don't want anyone to show interest in what I'm doing or pay any attention really, because that interest or attention will influence the actual writing process; I believe in working in a hermetically sealed environment with strong, thick walls separating the studio/lab and the outside world or milieu; I believe that one needs to erect strict boundaries between the two; it is rare that there is a direct communication between these ambient spaces or Atmospheres inside and outside the workspace;
- In any case, when I'm out in the field, I don't have the privilege of being invisible, so I am being observed if there are any people around; they might not be actually paying attention, but they do see me, even if only in their peripheral vision; this disturbs and perturbs the writing process, as I just said, as well as any data-gathering technique or medium I happen to use; even deep in the wilderness, the various animals will "see" me, which can also influence the field recordings and data-gathering processes; the only solution is to be as still as possible, and supple; that means that I sway gently when the wind blows against me, as any overt, intentional movement on my part, as I have directly observed, can also influence the recordings; I am just a silent witness, giving first-witness testimony to what's occuring in the environment; I call these events at times, sonic events, visual events, etc.; in essence it is a form of fieldwork, but I in any case haven't found anyway to solve or resolve the fact that I can be included in and so bias the recordings; if my presence causes people to respond by moving around me, or if say they stop speaking as they get nearer to me, or they change what they are saying, any chance basically in the overal Environmental Picture, can kind of "falsify" the recordings;
2026-06-19 03:07:25
- I've been really busy of late going through my personal archives and trying to downsize it, or what I have been calling "Dismantling The Archive"; I am envisioning what I call post-archival theory, which is where I think we are headed as a civilization; as I said above, I recorded a video of myself showing the process of going through folder upon folder upon folder of printed and typewritten as well as handwritten notes, recycling a bunch of stuff that I think is just extraneous noise; most of it is still good, though; folders have a birth date and a death date which encapsulate the lifetime of the folder; different folders have different lifetimes; the whole thing together forms a kind of historiome of the archives, if you will, to use an old term; that is to say, the specific shape of the changing surface of the archive over time in 3-dimensional space or 3D, forms a historiome, similar to the historiome of a population history; this historiome right now, for my personal archives, only really lives in my brain, with my exceedingly expansive long-term memory;
- I'm working on a new project and trying to figure out in what direction exactly I want to take my art-research practice, new projects and their underlying complex conceptual schemes; also, as I was saying above, I've been doing a lot of work in the field, especially note-taking; I have a separate physical notebook that I carry with me at all times when outside of the studio; I've been writing in a kind of aphoristic style similar to Nietzsche's, often just a single, punchy sentence; it's important, I think, to continually reinvent oneself as an artist or researcher, otherwise one rirks having things become stagnant;
- The sorting algorithms that I use when working through" the archive, as shown in my Spontaneous Sorting Algorithms in the Workspace video, are actual algorithms; the only difference between my sorting algorithms and those designed for computer systems, is that mine are manual; that is, I "process" data, information, or knowledge, in a physical way, in the physical space that I inhabit; I have spoken of this many times before, but I rely a great deal on context-dependent memory as well as state-dependent memory;
- I discovered that the brain and body together, the inward space or space experienced from the inside, has its own personal historiome;
2026-06-19 14:04:25
- I recorded a few more videos lately and uploaded these to YouTube earlier today; the first is on the subject of "DAY-TO-DAY OPERATIONS AT THE END OF SPRING:
- That's it for today; I wanted to write much more, but got carried away with cleaning up my workspace so that I can start clean tomorrow with a nice work surface to work on.
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