MSN

The Music/Sound/Noise (MSN) thread at ebr, originally edited by Cary Wolfe and myself, will soon pick up again as we launch new material to coincide with the SLSA gig in Amsterdam. When we first launched the series in 2001, nomadic net art and Life Style Practice were just beginning to take hold. The hip, designer devices we were starting to carry around with us (I still have the original iPod) were changing the way we perceived sound in the network-distributed environment. Of course, since the site was coming from the Alt-X network, we also felt compelled to see MSN in relation to avant-pop critical writing.

As Joe Tabbi wrote in the intro to the thread:

There's a parallel here to the sort of critique that ebr has attempted from the start, a project that spatializes the web, but in an especially fleeting and evanescent way. As one literary/academic site within a network whose extension is literally global, ebr has needed to organize itself within and continually adjust to the very environment we critique. With the introduction of sound, this problematic - the achievement of an interdependent web identity - can now open onto the question of what are the relations between sound, then noise, then music. As "sound" approaches ever more closely the condition of music it too approaches a kind of writing, which is then retroactively revealed to have been "noisy" all along.

Working from the perspective of sound as one of the "spatial arts," future contributors to this thread might raise the question of how one should navigate through the rhetoric of noise (while filtering the noise of rhetoric). Who wants to remix this noise into pseudo-autobiographical narrative? mystory? critifiction?

Why did Progressive Networks change their name to Real Networks in the year 2000?

You can go here to find the link to the various mp3 tracks I curated at the time for the "Network Voices" exhibition.

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Metadata: music, sound, noise, writing, art