F. C. Zuke

The Word That Binds Them is an interactive installation that invites viewers to interact with several famous books. As viewers open the books, voices from inside each book’s pages begin speaking. These voices belong to the books’ authors and those who hold positions of power in promoting each book’s teachings. As the voices resound from the books, they are also panned up and down five suspended speakers, traversing the vertical length of the gallery. 

When the box of fire reaches its apex, a bright amber-colored light illuminates the gallery and pages are printed in real time, raining down from above. These pages contain passages from the texts that contain both “power” and the dictionary term that was submitted by participants (via Mira). Without knowing the source to which each quotation belongs, viewers are left to consider its origin.

Max was used to read sensor data, to control a motorized winch system, to control an electrical relay switch, and to control 17 channels of audio. 

The Word That Binds Them is an interactive installation that invites viewers to interact with several famous books. As viewers open the book

the-word-that-binds-them

The Word That Binds Them

Darwin Grosse

Paul Théberge has taken on a pretty hefty job: documenting the history and direction of music-making and music-consuming technology. If this sounds like an academic tome of doctoral proportions, you might be right - it is clearly a heavily-researched and annotated text. But it's also a pretty interesting read if you are into music technology. Despite being written in 1997, Théberge is able to produce a fascinating ride for anyone interested in the systems behind both popular and experimental music creation.

There are several books that have discussed the development of the Telharmonium, but few have looked into the Electric Sackbut, and even fewer that found the development of Transoniq Hacker magazine as an important addition to the environment. This is also one of the few books that I’ve read that offers as much attention to Dr. T’s software as to the Synclavier. Any Sound isn’t focused just on the companies with full-page ads - it is also focused on the companies that changed musicians’ working lives.

It’s the job of historians to determine the winners and losers of history. This isn’t easy in the case of music technology, where very few of the popular devices of the 1980s (let alone the 1950s) bear even a slight resemblance to current technology. But Théberge pulls together strands of related technologies and the personalities behind them to create an interesting blend of technological history and pop culture.

Any Sound You Can Imagine
Paul Théberge
Wesleyan University Press, 1997
ISBN: 0-8195-6309-9


history-of-music-technology-book-review

Book Review: Théberge's Any Sound You Can Imagine

Andrew Benson

Although it may be easy to ignore now as we stare into our cold, flat, backlit LCD displays, the history of visual display technology is shot through with wild mysticism, experiments, philosophical disagreements, and some truly inspired innovations. Carolyn Kane’s Chromatic Algorithms takes this history head-on in a fascinating and beautifully illustrated look at the last hundred or so years of video and computer generated art. As an artist working with video and graphics for years, it’s a great pleasure to connect with this wacky and oddly familiar history. 

Kane takes color representation, creation, and display technology as her primary focus here, making the case that this technological history both informs and is informed by contemporary artists working in media.  This journey takes us from Day-Glo inks and psychedelia, through early experiments with direct video synthesis, all the way to the present computer-driven age of ‘millions of colors’. As Kane points out, each new advance and system for creating and displaying colors creates its own set of assumptions, limitations, and possibilities.

Far from being a dry survey of technological advances, Chromatic Algorithms exposes the humans involved each step of the way, veering into the mystical philosophies and experiments of early video artists and the competing systems of color that eventually became today’s standards, or were left by the wayside. Sprinkled throughout are some of the most beautiful full-color reproductions of video art I have seen in a book like this, making this a book you’ll likely flip through long after you’ve finished reading.

Chromatic Algorithms has earned a place on my bookshelf next to my beaten up and dog-eared copy of Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema as an essential text that I’ll be referring back to for years to come.


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