Gökhan Turhan
edition://0xd754937672300ae6708a51229112de4017810934?editionId=144
Musicians, and sound artists as well as other creatives who incorporate sound, or the unsound, into their works on-chain can be said to be listening to the mempool at all times.
No, I am not making another metaphor, or attempting at a metonymy—as in mempool for IRL.
One needs to convince the cultivated collector that, as a creator, they know how to sit in a smart contract.
ethereum://0xabEFBc9fD2F806065b4f3C237d4b59D9A97Bcac7/17419
Yes, I am a fan of Alvin Lucier but I do not know how to recycle sound within, and through, a smart contract across EVM—yet. The above-previewed non-fungible token of mine is by all means and any media available an attempt to convince a traditional gallery that I am sitting in a smart contract, and they also need to know how to sit in a smart contract, and meet the on/off-chain oracle herself.
It is not that only the ancient crypto winter veterans, or DeFi Summer 2020 knight riders know how to sit in a smart contract—many a late comer individuals, or galleries, or any other establishment blended within the on-chain constellations of this cultural evolution is adept at navigating this maker rhymescapes of the Ancient Mariner who glides through the dark forest of the MEVvin’ mempool of a primordial soup that is only to be craft a world thanks to the blockchain technology which is reflected in the above-the-average (some call it radical) ideals of the likes of Vitalik—in which I rejoice, for instance, regarding longevity, ASI etc.
Hence, it is often that I find many a music NFT mediocre in that works are not up to my taste in sound, regardless of the composition.
I am one of those sinners who happen stash their hand-tagged digital music files in a sinful manner where Mariah meets Molton meets John Cage—those Kenneth Goldsmith spake of for countless times in myriad interviews as much as I recall.
…&, I am in a constant search for those who remind me of my Boomkat dot org wishlist—wish Boomkat had their own on-chain marketplace. Lately, I dive deep in Future Tape of Anthony. Nowadays, I look for pieces that will sound somewhere in between Klein’s Harmattan and anything by Julius Eastman—especially when I am writing these PLAYLIST pieces.
Writing these is a mental exercise that shall remind me of the fact that I am not mute at all. Being deaf to one’s own self is the hardest chord whose dissonance might tornado through elysian gardens of serendipity earned hard. You should not end up as the white void as in the individual visual poem of Swiss artist Eugen Gomringer:
One needs to create spaces out of both sound and the unsound. The unsound is by no means silence. As above, not so much so below. It is rather sound that is not hospitable to conventions in contemporaneous understanding of sound-born arts which range from pop music to video-art that cannot be thought of without its underlying score.
Xenakis tells HUO in one of their interviews that “[he himself and Le Corbusier] decided to work together on [that] idea that constructions of space [[sic]] are similar to those of sound.”
Spatialization of sound is not that much of an ancient concept—”historicoooolll nfts kekwise—iykyk.” Nor is total electronic art. Total electronic, or digital art, whether that art be of digital-, or electric-born, first; it won’t matter for your future ghost, and its shell, that can download all the sensualities and senses unto thy personal blockchain that can bridge with other critters in emotions and wetware simulations.
On-chain total electronic art is cottagecore intimacy if we think of the contract as a cottage and we are Justin Vernon cooking some deer on a stove. At this instance, I can only think of 2 names who might as well get angry with my mentions of them both on Twitter and Instagram, and occasionally on Discord: DeafBeef and Holly Herndon.
These two are the embodiment of everything archaic and sino-futuristic at the same time in terms of emergence of sound [sic] whose limitations are not merely subject to file storage problematics of the block size but may well as even reach a sentience of its own.
Anyone who has listened to that particular Interdependence episode where DeafBeef talks about digging up the earth to remove the ores that you need for your tools in the first place (titanium plastered Moog Modular 55 bootleggers en route). A dangerous self-sufficiency that I adore—in myself, too. No wonder that when you venture into the dark forest of smart contracts you start to re-discover the maker, crafter and the primitive in yourself to the degree that you start to think that emergent systemic tendencies in our species’ playbook to re-invent novel ways of coordination to enter another womb—as in Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse or al-Qadiri’s “Vatican Vibes” video-clip—is well in tandem with over-coming the entropic ends of our life times.
Per block time of existence is negentropic, and mere community ambassadorship without caring to learn to at least read a [smart] contract will cause rugs in tribes where there will be no illegal Agassi DeFi mullets to bootstrap back into a state of art that is white hat.
In this regard, today we are listening to these two amicable ends of cultural evolution of sound on-chain.
DeafBeef reminds me of Xenakis in that what he is doing with smart contracts, and primitive sounding sonar bites as accomplices to compiled mathematical statements against entropy. Those Beefs are oscillating through contracts, and transform the anechoic chamber status of basic Solidity into a pavilion of signal, noise and a plane of non-meaning where one can study to be a Shaolin master—since it requires hell of a patience, discipline and courage to be the man that one wants to be. You can listen to the autonomous sounding reflections of those pieces that narrates the story of DeafBeef.
https://zora.co/collections/0xd754937672300Ae6708a51229112dE4017810934/144
Holly+ is a project that is but a DAO where the sound of Herndon’s ghost can be instrumentalized so that other membranes of this onchain jungle can create works that are close to Poème électronique geist of our incrementally on-chain becoming world. That Kraftwerk moment. Trans-chain Express.
Angular is in which Beef deafens his own voice with that of Holly.
Enjoy.
GM.
https://zora.co/collections/0x6688Ee4E6e17a9cF88A13Da833b011E64C2B4203/86
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