Monthly Archives: June 2012

Fuck GEMA 2: Unblock YouTube

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If you’ve seen the image above before is prob­a­bly because you live in Ger­many and are also tired of fuck­ing GEMA.

Good ol Malte Götz is a 17 years old high school stu­dent, pro­gram­mer and web devel­oper from Ger­many. He has come up with an free addon for Fire­fox, ‘Prox­Tube’, which eas­ily unblocks all the videos in youtube that GEMA decided that you should not see. In his own words…

I was just annoyed time by time to find a solu­tion to watch a blocked video. Also, I don’t want to accept the deci­sion of the GEMA (Soci­ety for musi­cal per­form­ing and mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion rights in Ger­many), which totally unrea­son­able demands on YouTube and against the opin­ion of most of their own mem­bers, that they can tell me what I can watch. I gladly pay for music but in my view, YouTube is much more a kind of plat­form where artists can pic­ture them­selves and pro­mote the pur­chase of the songs. Accord­ingly, I’ve worked on a solu­tion that should make it eas­ier, as well for a user that has no large back­ground knowl­edge, and also not unlaw­ful. The result is this addon.

Click on the face of Malte to donate and down­load ProxTube.


The Evolution of 8-Bit Art

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We already intro­duced the sub­ject of chip­tunes on a pre­vi­ous arti­cle some days ago, but 8-bit art or pixel art also uses other media beyond music. There is graphic 8-bit art, videos, sculp­ture, mosaics, and lets not for­get video games. It also over­laps other art forms, like glitch art, gen­er­a­tive art, kinetic and op art, etc.

The fol­low­ing video from PBS’ Off­Book web video series traces some aspects of the the 8-bit aes­thetic over the past three decades, from the early days of Atari and Nin­tendo to the present day. It Fea­tures inter­views with 8-bit graphic artists Doc­tor Octoroc and Anthony Sneed, video game the­o­rist Jes­per Juul, musi­cian Minus­baby, and chip­tune band Ana­managuchi.

This time we want to expand a lit­tle more on the graphic aspect of 8-bit art and pos­si­ble pre­de­ces­sors and sim­i­lar mod­ern art endeav­ors. For exam­ple, some of Anthony Sneed’s paint­ings are very rem­i­nis­cent of Venezue­lan kinetic and op artists from the 70s and 80s Jesus Soto and Car­los Cruz-Diez.

And there is also the more con­tem­po­rary glitch art and gen­er­a­tive art of which Anthony Sneed also have some nice exam­ples; and recently I found out about another artist that has some very impres­sive glitch paint­ings and who I find to be a lit­tle beyond bril­liant, Ser­gio Albiac.

I also wanted to talk about pixel art on the street and again Anthony Sneed has some beau­ti­ful sam­ples and Invader is another great pro­po­nent of this art form. Take a look.

Ok, this post has become a lit­tle too long already for what we use to do here at The Remains but I also found the fol­low­ing inter­view of Invader to be very inspir­ing and I wanted to share:


Fuck GEMA!

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If you live in Ger­many, prob­a­bly you hate GEMA as much as the next John in his right mind. For those who don’t know, GEMA (Gesellschaft für musikalis­che Auf­führungs– und mech­a­nis­che Vervielfäl­ti­gungsrechte. Eng­lish: Soci­ety for musi­cal per­form­ing and mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion rights) is a per­for­mance rights orga­ni­za­tion from Germany.

Its pur­pose is to col­lect roy­alty fees from the organ­is­ers of pub­lic events where music pro­tected by GEMA is played as well as media man­u­fac­tur­ers and pub­lish­ers and broad­cast­ing stations.

GEMA are also the fuck­ers respon­si­ble for block­ing the videos in youtube, as Wiki says:

Music videos for major label artists on YouTube, as well as many videos con­tain­ing back­ground music, have been unavail­able in Ger­many since the end of March 2009 as GEMA sought to raise its fee charged to YouTube to 12 euro cents per streamed video., a fee a YouTube spokesman described as “pro­hib­i­tive”. The issue is set to be taken up by a Cal­i­for­nia court.

GEMA is also from next year increas­ing in grants, nine times more, the roy­al­ties they col­lect from clubs and bars all over Berlin. Which will end up in many venues hav­ing to close down.

FAIR Play is orginiz­ing a mas­sive Demo out­side Frannz Club (this Mon­day, 25.06. 18:00–22:00) where GEMA are hav­ing a member’s meeting.

Check also the On-line Peti­tion.


Alan Turing Year — 2012 Turing Centenary

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Alan Math­i­son Turing, mathematician, code breaker, and inven­tor of the com­puter, was born in Lon­don one hun­dred years ago today, June 23, 2012. But what do we know about this per­son who might right­fully be described as ‘The key fig­ure of our cen­tury’? Per­haps too little.

Dur­ing his rel­a­tively brief life, Tur­ing made a unique impact on the his­tory of com­put­ing, com­puter sci­ence, arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, devel­op­men­tal biol­ogy, and the math­e­mat­i­cal the­ory of computability.

His inter­est in code and ciphers started as a boy. Once while in school he was given the book ‘Math­e­mat­i­cal Recre­ations and Essays’ which had a chap­ter on cryp­tog­ra­phy which he found fas­ci­nat­ing. Another book which exited and focused his intel­lec­tual curios­ity as a boy had one chap­ter about the nature of the mind enti­tled ‘Where we do our think­ing’ which cap­ti­vated Tur­ing for most of his life.

At 15, he read for his mother a short account of Einstein’s ideas, mak­ing his own obser­va­tions. And at 16 he fell in love with fel­low pupil Christo­pher Morcom, who shared his pas­sion for sci­ence. It was hope­less unre­quited love. This friend­ship, cut short by Morcom’s death in Feb­ru­ary 1930 from com­pli­ca­tions of tuberculosis.

Alan Tur­ing wanted to believe that Christopher’s mind some­how could sur­vived and he meant it as a sci­en­tific plau­si­bil­ity, not a reli­gious belief. This obses­sion might have been behind his con­cep­tu­al­iz­ing of the Tur­ing machine.

Thanks to Turing’s work deci­pher­ing the Ger­man Enigma Code, the British Navy was able to coun­ter­act the pow­er­ful Ger­man mar­itime war effort.

Tur­ing was arrested under the same law that was used to con­vict Oscar Wilde in 1895. He was con­victed of gross inde­cency fol­low­ing a rela­tion­ship with another man and under­went hor­monal treat­ment (chem­i­cal cas­tra­tion) as an alter­na­tive to prison.

Well I’m not going to get all pseudo philo­soph­i­cal with you guys this time. I just wish really bad I was as bril­liant as lovely Alan. We posted two other pre­vi­ous arti­cles about  Tur­ing that you can read here:

This year marks the cen­te­nary of Alan Turing’s birth &

Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge Part II

OK, now I invite you to watch the fol­low­ing doc­u­men­tary about his life:

 


I’ve suffered for my art — now it’s your turn

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So says Sebas­t­ian Hors­ley in his book ‘Dandy in the under­world’. He said he decided to write the book because he was “so sick of all those f***ing mis­ery mem­oirs, where every­body is ill or dying. We live in this cul­ture where every­body has to have an alibi because they weren’t loved by either their par­ents or their bisex­ual polar bears. The truth is, dar­ling, I wasn’t sex­u­ally abused as a boy — I was a plain boy and nobody so much as looked at me. So I didn’t want to write a book that was ‘Poor Me’.”

Sebas­t­ian Hors­ley died of a drug over­dose two years ago today. He was per­haps best known for being cru­ci­fied with­out painkillers in the Philip­pines while being filmed, in order to make a piece artwork. There are almost infi­nite things and anec­dotes to tell about him.  He was a witty mod­ern dandy and flâneur, nephew of Quentin Crisp. He was once deported from the United States on the grounds of “moral turpi­tude”. Both he and his wife main­tained a stormy affair with killer turned artist Jimmy Boyle.

I find his life fas­ci­nat­ing. He was in many ways a tor­tured soul, and it comes across when you see pic­tures of him, lis­ten to him being inter­viewed, or read about him and dig a lit­tle deeper than his extrav­a­gant exte­rior, per­son­al­ity, or mask. Any way, all I mean to say is that being a dandy and flâneur is still a wor­thy pur­suit for mod­ern artists and poets and not just and old fash­ion 19th cen­tury cus­tom out of the pages of Baudelaire’s ‘Le Spleen de Paris’ or ‘The flow­ers of evil’.

Let’s remem­ber him today with a video of an inter­view Shot a few years ago at Stan­don Call­ing Fes­ti­val as Part of The Porter Report.

“My exis­tence, how­ever, is a work of art. It deserves a frame — if only to dis­tin­guish it from the wallpaper,”


Cass Bird

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Read­ing and arti­cle today, from early this year, about Cass Bird on the New York Times, they described her aes­thetic as “young, care­free, lov­ing life and you’re so jealous.”

Her pic­tures have a qual­ity that I can­not find words to define and make me want to look at them for hours. Her char­ac­ters are painfully human if that makes any sense. The androg­y­nous objects of some of her pho­tos con­vey  a deep melan­choly and a wild desire to expe­ri­ence life:

“for there are brighter sides to life
and I should know because I’ve seen them
but not very often”

Ask me why and I’ll spit in your eye!

I also found this video  by Cass Bird of “I Want to be Adored”, Stone Roses cover by the Raveonettes. I totally love it. I hope you enjoy it.


Dangerous Knowledge Part I

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The fol­low­ing doc­u­men­tary was orig­i­nally aired on BBC 4 on 8th August ‘07 as part of the “Sci­ence You Can’t See” sea­son. Dan­ger­ous Knowl­edge tells the story of four bril­liant minds that pushed the bound­aries of human knowl­edge to it’s lim­its but by doing that they paid a very high price (mad­ness or suicide).

The bril­liant math­e­mati­cian, Georg Can­tor, the physi­cist Lud­wig Boltz­mann, Kurt Gödel, the great­est logi­cian of all time and Alan Tur­ing, father of com­puter sci­ence. Each one of them reached the edge of the precipice and could not pull back.

Georg Can­tor, believed he was God’s mes­sen­ger.  But when his the­o­ries of infin­ity uncov­ered para­doxes and uncer­tainty at the foun­da­tion of math­e­mat­ics, he was bit­terly opposed and even­tu­ally dri­ven insane. Cantor’s one time friend Leopold Kro­necker said that he was a cor­rupter of youth. He died on Jan­u­ary 6, 1918 in the sana­to­rium where he had spent the final year of his life.

The physi­cist Lud­wig Boltz­mann, then brought uncer­tainty into the heart of Physics itself and faced equally implaca­ble oppo­si­tion.  After 30 years of being unable to get his the­o­ries accepted, he com­mit­ted suicide.

Watch the first part of the doc­u­men­tary now.

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infin­ity in the palm of your hand,
And eter­nity in an hour.

William Blake

Watch the sec­ond part of the doc­u­men­tary in the fol­low­ing post.


Dangerous Knowledge Part II

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This sec­ond part of the doc­u­men­tary focuses on Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing.

Kurt Gödel wanted to solve the prob­lems that had defeated Can­tor and prove once and for all the com­plete­ness of math­e­mat­ics. Instead he proved math­e­mat­ics would always be incom­plete and some prob­lems would for­ever lie beyond log­i­cal proof. He starved him­self to death.

Finally, Alan Tur­ing who we have men­tioned in the past. He died still ask­ing if the lim­its of logic were the lim­its of the human mind or if we tran­scended mere logic.

Here is the sec­ond part of the video.

If you reached this post before watch­ing the first part of the doc­u­men­tary, you can go to the first part here.


Quentin Tarantino’s new movie, ‘Django Unchained’

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Talk­ing about upcom­ing movies, Quentin Taran­tino’s new movie, ‘Django Unchained’ will be In the­aters Dec 25. It is a trib­ute to Spaghetti West­erns. The story is about a recently free slave who becomes a bounty hunter.

I have to con­fess that it always takes me a while to get a to love Tarantino’s movies, and then when  finally get it, I can­not under­stand how I did not love it since the begin­ning. I hope the story won’t repeat this time around. Spaghetti West­erns are not my favorite movie genre but Taran­tino always takes what’s really good about a genre and gives it a refreshed perspective.

Tarantino’s movies are always a pleas­ant visual expe­ri­ence and the music selec­tion is flaw­less. No won­der it takes him so long to come up with new movies, he really puts a lot of work into his films.

I want you to watch a cou­ple of videos here. First Django Unchained’s Offi­cial Trailer and after that another num­ber of the Every­thing is a Remix series that we intro­duced in a pre­vi­ous post but this time show­ing the sources of inspi­ra­tion for a Taran­tino movie, Kill Bill.

Now take a few min­utes to enjoy this video edited by Rob Wil­son of the “Every­thing is a Remix” series.

“Every­thing comes round again, so noth­ing is com­pletely new”. Pythagoras.