Alex McLean

I stopped using ‘social media’ for a while now for the usual reasons — it’s an inhumane way of interacting with people, is fully controlled by billionaires who seem hellbent on destroying democracy and life in general, is terrible for mental health, in certain cases unapologetically generates revenge and child porn, and so on. I have still used mastodon though, it’s been great enjoying its mostly slow growth. Mastodon is one aspect of the wider ‘fediverse’ – this means you can use it to follow blogs, video feeds, event feeds and so on.

This feels a lot like the ‘good old internet’. In the early days of this blog, people would be notified of new posts, and drop by to leave a response, often leading to really nice discussions in the comments. These days people don’t often log in to leave a comment in my blog, but instead they follow and reply to my posts on the fediverse (thanks to the excellent wordpress activitypub plugin), via their mastodon account. For example this recent post about repetition has some thoughtful follow-up taking apart my rather shakey rant about repetition.

This plays well with ‘syndication’ using RSS thanks to the feedwordpress plugin – I can make a post on the Then Try This blog, then press a button to publish it on the algorithmic pattern blog. From there, people following that blog on mastodon can read it and share/repost it. Previously it was a bit of a nightmare copying posts between the too-many blogs I manage, now I just have to write in one place and have it aggregate elsewhere.

This is inter-operation between software has more or less vanished from the corporate web, holding out in some limited areas like podcast feeds and email, but with spotify, google, apple etc doing their best to stamp it out. I’m happy to be part of a community of people using self- and community-hosted technologies that actually work to help us talk to each other.

More crackle weave


I’ve been having fun trying to understand crackle weave more, after weaving one of Ralph Griswold’s algorithmically generated patterns. It’s not too complicated in principle, you have a standard motif like this:

and a path like this:

There is exactly one black cell in each column. You then place the motif along the path, so that the ‘Y’ position of the cell gives the offset for the motif. Any gaps between motifs are filled with diagonal lines, so that you end up with this eight-shaft threading:

If you use this to thread a loom, and then weave it ‘as drawn in’ with a straightforward tie-up, you’d get something like this:

Cosmic!

I’ve managed to implement this in AdaCAD today (hence the above screenshots), it’s a lot of fun to play with. I’ve more or less run out of warp on my loom, so it’s time to re-thread it anyway. Looking forward to trying one of these patterns!

We love repetition


I’ve used some samples of different speech synth voices saying “algorave generation, we love repetition” for a while. It’s a great joke, because you can keep doing it forever, over and over again, and it keeps getting funnier (maybe). The ever-curious Lu Wilson asked me “where did it come from, how did it become ‘the line’, and why, and so on”, and this is what I replied:

Heh well when I was a (failing) student the first time around in the 90s I came up with “mdma generation, we love repetition” as a joke while messing around with a synth iirc and later reappropriated it..
For me though “algorave generation, we love repetition” as a statement sits in the context of UK university computer music departments around 2010, with their institutionalised electroacoustic music culture where virtuosity is all about the number of genelec speakers in your multichannel array, and where repetition was regarded more or less as pure evil. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of this guy Adorno but for some reason he’s taken seriously by music academics despite every quote I’ve read from him coming across as unhinged.. He reckons repetition is “psychotic and infantile”. Believe it or not, these people group together all music that isn’t electroacoustic or european classical as ‘popular music’ and repetition would be a mark of that. I think there’s a small world mindset inherent in rejecting repetitive dance music and it doesn’t take much imagination to link it to racism, homophobia, classism etc.
So basically to say “we like repetition” is a kind of rejection of that kind of weirdo performative seriousness that we were talking about in the pub. 😉

I can understand why some music academics have rejected repetition, I think it comes from a rejection of fascism. But people have danced to repetitive music forever, everywhere, it’s an important part of being human.. and repetition isn’t about listening to the same thing over and over again, unchanging, it’s about really getting to know something, through spiral loops, as it’s changing, and as you’re changing…

Continuing the weaving theme I was happy to see that Laura Devendorf has not only included the ‘bitfield’ feature I contributed into the excellent new 5.x release of AdaCAD, but written some great documentation for it, as well as used it as source material for a really helpful tutorial on weaving graphics, which the above photo of Laura’s weaving is lifted from. Reading back, this article must have subconsciously influenced my decisions in trying to weave a waffle pattern!