click here for the live version I ended up growing the talk on another wiki, "The Distributed Learning Project." Follow the link to this active version to feedback with panelists and participants.

image: from the online Journal for Math Recreations

The Protos Chronos and the Figure of Compression: Code and Coda

Trey Conner, University of South Florida, St. Petersburg

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Key texts in molecular biology, infinitist mathematics, and the diverse musical minimalisms borne out of John Cage's attention to "the frame" (such as La Monte Young's compositions) seem to share more than just a concern with coding, as theological presuppositions and ad hoc metaphysics mixing codes of rationalism and mysticism in these discourses also produce fascinating transcodings that call to mind the technological and artistic heritage of Pythagoras and Plato. Scientists and artists in this lineage gravitate to versions of order that adhere in Bateson's coding primer, "Every Schoolboy Knows...." where parsimony is posited as the fundamental presupposition of coding practice (Mind and Nature 23-37). Where Bateson likens coding's premise to the figure of Occam's razor, this presentation will instead weave an analogy to the similar but perhaps "lossier" trope of "compression" as it appears in another Unlimited KnowledgeGreek musical tradition, that of the harmonikoi and of Aristoxenus of Tarentum, and compare the coding practices of their protos chronoi (primary time-lengths, the musician's equivalent of the geometer's point) with the meaning and utility of data compression today, including a consideration of so-called pseudocode, reflective/dynamic/object-oriented programming languages, sampling in dj culture, tagging, and codecs such as mp3 and oggvorbis. These coding practices have dramatically reorganized the function and phenomenology of music, programming, and writing in ways neither the Greeks nor the minimalists could anticipate, and this presentation will conclude with an allegorical account of "the listener" in these coding regimes.

The closing allegory will accompany a sound installation of Satellite TV on PC Software. Fragments of mantra, shards of tuned frequencies from an analog coupled oscillator, and free audience participation will provide coding elements, and George Gamow's diamond code diagram (vis-a-vis Rich Doyle's rhetorical analysis Gamow's codes, cf On Beyond Living 39-64) will provide metacode. Simple coding elements and fragments will be offered up in advance, in stages, so that interested members of Water For Gasthe SLSA community may, by means of an open-access wiki, participate in the sonic coda to the paper presentation ( http://protoschronos.pbwiki.com/FrontPage).

keywords: protos chronos, compression, rhetoric, La Monte Young, Aristoxenus of Tarentum, metaprogramming

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