A Little Compression

Today on Pop Culture Intelligentsia we’ll talk with producer, engineer and mixer, Mark Pistel about protest music. Is it relevant? Does it change anything? Mark was a founding member of the band Consolidated, who had radical activist leanings. We’ll also talk with Eric Drass, who is an artist who paints, creates digital installation, and generative experiments that live on the net. In particular, we’re going to talk about his latest foray, The Glitch News Network, a bot that scrapes various online news sources for images of the latest stories and glitches and mashes them into a 2 second video. In our third and last segment we’ll discuss Storium, an online storytelling game. Storium is based around creative writing. As you play, the game helps you figure out what to write next and how to keep your story interesting. We’ll be joined by Storium’s CEO and co-founder, Stephen Hood.

Show Notes & Links

Protest music

Consolidated‘s Friendly Fa$cism LP
Friendly Fa$cism is the second full-length album by industrial/hip hop artists Consolidated which was released in 1991. The name comes from the title of a 1980 book by political scientist Bertram Gross, Friendly Fascism: The New Face of Power in America, which laid out the form of “creeping fascism” that Gross feared might come to pass in the United States.

Michael Franti
Michael Franti is an American rapper, musician, poet, spoken word artist and singer-songwriter.

Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy
The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy was an American industrial hip-hop band, active during the early 1990s.

The Beatnigs
The Beatnigs was a San Francisco band, which combined hard-core punk, industrial and hip hop influences, described as “a kind of avant-garde industrial jazz poets collective”.

Spearhead
In 1994, Franti formed a new band called Spearhead with a few studio musicians, including mainstay Carl Young, and announced the dissolution of Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy.

Donald Trump
Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American businessman, politician, television personality, and candidate for the Republican nomination for President of the United States in the 2016 election.

Vegetarianism

Holly Herndon
Holly Herndon is an American composer, musician, and sound artist based in San Francisco, California.

Honey Soundsystem
San Francisco’s coveted queer dj collective and production group.

Dark Entries
Dark Entries takes great care in preserving sound quality and respecting the aesthetics of its artists.

Bézier
Robert started DJing in 2003 and joined SF’s DJ collective Honey Soundsystem in 2007. He produces music under the moniker Bézier.

Rykarda Parasol
Rykarda Parasol is a composer, lyricist, vocalist, musician, and performer.

Blipvert
A blipvert is a very brief television advertisement, that lasts just one or several seconds.

tl;drbot
This bot takes works of literature and algorithmically summarizes them, a chapter at a time, to 1% of their original length.

bffbot
If you follow her, she’ll follow you back and send you a cheery greeting. She’ll favourite your tweets (she especially likes your ‘plain text’ tweets, rather than recycled links or retweets). Every now and then she’ll reply.

Machinima news

trippingbot
MARTA (Meta. Aphoric. Recurrent. Tripping. Algopoet) starts taking drugs at 6pm each day, and then reports on its mental state intermittently over the next 6 hours. As the evening progresses, the bot takes more drugs and becomes more intoxicated, which is reflected in the (in)choherence of the reports it delivers. This reaches a peak at midnight, when the reports cease until it begins again at 6pm the next day.

Conspiracybot

Robin Rimbaud A.K.A. Scanner
Robin Rimbaud is an electronic musician who works under the name Scanner due to his use of cell phone and police scanners in live performance.

Private Sector
Multimedia band that Eric Drass is involved in.

Matthew Plummer-Fernandez
Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is a Colombian-British artist based in London known for playfully and critically exploring socio-cultural entanglements with technology, through 3D printed sculpture, autonomous bots, software, and his ongoing research blog Algopop.

sekuMoi Mecy
Ongoing exploration of derivatives of a 3D scan of Mickey Mouse, titled sekuMoi Mecy (a simple computer generated anagram). Each derivative demonstrates the progression of scanning and remixing processes Matthew Plummer-Fernandez is developing. The choice of character also raises issues of potential clashes with big copyright holders that could potentially choose to lobby for legislation against 3D scanning.

Julian Oliver‘s cell phone jamming battle tank
With the flick of a switch No Network implements a blanket ban of mobile telephony in its presence. All access to the cellular (mobile) network within a 6-15m diameter aura around the object is jammed, including calls, SMS and data connectivity.

Culture jamming
Culture jamming (sometimes guerrilla communication) is a tactic used by many anti-consumerist social movements to disrupt or subvert media culture and its mainstream cultural institutions, including corporate advertising. It attempts to “expose the methods of domination” of a mass society to foster progressive change.

Democracy Now!
Democracy Now! is a daily progressive, nonprofit, independently syndicated news hour that airs on more than 1,250 radio, television, satellite and cable TV networks around the globe.

Storium
Storium is the online storytelling game.

Role-playing game (RPG)
A role-playing game (RPG and sometimes roleplaying game is a game in which players assume the roles of characters in a fictional setting. Players take responsibility for acting out these roles within a narrative, either through literal acting or through a process of structured decision-making or character development. Actions taken within many games succeed or fail according to a formal system of rules and guidelines.

J.C. Hutchins
J.C. Hutchins is the pseudonym for American podcast novelist and journalist Chris Hutchins. Hutchins is best known for his 7th Son series.

Beowulf: Beyond the Black
Storium game that takes place in the Traveller RPG universe.

Play-by-post role-playing game
A play-by-post role-playing game game (or sim) is an online text-based role-playing game in which players interact with each other and a predefined environment via text.

Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons (abbreviated as D&D or DnD) is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game (RPG) originally designed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, and first published in 1974 by Tactical Studies Rules, Inc. (TSR).

Champions
Champions is a role-playing game published by Hero Games designed to simulate and function in a four-color superhero comic book world.

Hosts

Joseph Aleo
Website: http://josephaleo.com/blog/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/josephaleo

Steven Howard
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mentalnotesAFM
Twitter: https://twitter.com/MentalNotesAFM

Brent Morris
Website: http://closetgeekshow.ca
Twitter: https://twitter.com/closetgeekshow