Jonathan Sterne; romantic pragmatism; job news

When my beloved PhD advisor, Jonathan Sterne, entered hospice care this past March, waves of appreciation and then mourning rippled out from the many communities and institutions he touched. These voices were so helpful in arraying all the things that had made Jonathan a delight to read and to work with: there were the Jonathanisms, the farewells from editors and organizations, a host of voices at an SCMS panel that Amy Skjerseth and company converted into a remembrance session, and of course Carrie Rentschler’s stunning obituary for him, alongside many others.

A specific note that rose up against the backdrop of these brilliant remembrances, for me, was an appreciation I’d always had for Jonathan’s touch... Read more

Meta-influencers and automation as wedge

Meta’s decidedly non-buoyant test balloons for a new class of AI-driven fake accounts, rediscovered this week in a bevy of profoundly cringe-worthy Instagram screenshots, don’t make much sense at all in terms of what platform users might ever want to experience. They make a good deal more sense from a vantage point of labor flows and historical automation trends. Based on those patterns, we should expect that Meta will sooner or later invite influencers—the suppliers in the major pipeline of creative work that keeps audiences on its platforms—to accept in-house roles as meta-influencers (as it were) whose work will consist of adjusting the parameters for various AI-driven accounts.

Meta depends on many types of labor, but influencer labor is... Read more

Medium metadiscourse on Mastodon and in radio

It’s been very fun and heartening in the last week to see a big wave of people I followed on Twitter moving over to open source federated alternatives, namely Mastodon (or its fork Hometown, in my case). There are a lot of good blog posts making the rounds where people offer tips on getting oriented in the fediverse and reflections on its differences from Twitter; this is not one of those. Rather, I want to reflect on this present and probably brief period where such a huge portion of what people are posting on Mastodon is about Mastodon – this moment of lively medium metadiscourse as people help each other explore a new kind of communication channel.

As a... Read more

On finding a new text editor

I’ve spent an unreasonable amount of time this summer evaluating a few different text editors after Atom, the application where I did almost all my writing and notetaking between 2016 and 2022, got the axe from its corporate developers. I’m writing this post to capture my reflections from this largely procastination-fueled quest for the right editor before those thoughts vanish on the wind. Maybe it can also serve as a kind of Wirecutter-ish tour through some choices for people in a similar boat – that is, humanities researchers who use or might want to use a plain text workflow instead of a word processor. The choice I ultimately (and unexpectedly) arrived at was to use gedit, which was simply... Read more

A call for audio contributions: 25 Hz

Short version: Record a couple seconds of a steady sound (e.g. from a synthesizer or software audio tool) whose fundamental pitch is 25 Hz. Send any recordings to me by email to andykstuhl@gmail.com. I will use your sound(s) in a radio artwork and include you in its list of contributors.

Any suitable sounds I receive by May 9 (2022) will be used in the project.

Long version: In radio, “automation” refers to a system that can carry out a sequence of different sounds by starting and stopping the right audio sources at the right times. Today these sources are typically digital files, but in the 1950s, they were tape machines. Radio automation began as the technique of... Read more

Reflections on Pauline Oliveros and Software in Art

The composer Pauline Oliveros, who passed away recently at the age of 84, leaves behind a many-threaded legacy of musical adventuring amid vigorous support for colleagues, as Geeta Dayal documents in an obituary for Frieze. In all these pursuits, and in her writing, Oliveros’ voice was harsh in its directness and uplifting in its clarity — the fruit of a rare commitment to distilling avant-garde ambitions into simple vessels. Her series of “sonic meditations” makes that effort particularly apparent. In these poetically honed written works, she addresses the reader with instructions that, when followed by a group, bring the musical piece into being and the participant listeners into transformative states of awareness. I first learned about Oliveros in... Read more