Blog #8

Rhythmic Cinema
"Poker-faced, the dealer tells you, "Pick a card, any card." It's a game that asks, "Who speaks through you?" There are a lot of echoes in the operating system, but that's the point" (Miller 77). This reminded me of what Miller had said in the previous section, "Today, the voice you speak with may not be your own" (69) and ties in perfectly to what he is saying here in Rhythmic Cinema. He compares life to a "boundless-level video game with an infinite array of characters to pick from" and says that these characters speak through you, acting as your voice (77). Basically he is saying that the voice you speak with may not be entirely your own.

"Whenever you look at an image or listen to a sound, there's a ruthless logic of selection that you have to go through to simply create a sense of order" (Miller 81). This immediately reminded me of Weinberger. Weinberger discussed the use of explicit and implicit meanings to make sense of the world we live in and Miller ultimately agrees that they are important and key to making sense of any image we see or sound we hear.

Rhythmic Space
"From math to code to culture, contemporary art has shifted as well. It all seems more and more that the creative act itself is becoming a source-code like Linux where people create and add modules of thought-ware to the mix, making it all a little more interesting" (Miller 89). "Thought-ware" is the software that runs the creative process and I love that Miller introduced this word, what an interesting word that hits the nail right on the head. Basically he is saying that the creative process, because of technology, is open to people creating and adding their own thought-ware to the pot, stirring it up in an unique way.

Errata Erratum
"It's a milieu where each "musical sculpture" is unique yet completely dependent on the system that created the context" (Miller 97). Basically he is saying that each piece of music that is created is unique because someone added their own thought-ware to the mix, but is still completely dependent on the original system that created the context.

The Future is Here
"They left the Garden and moved from the finely tuned precision of rows and seat numbers into clumps and clusters of people held together only by fashion and previous social and geographic allegiance like so many particles of gas drawn together by electro-chemical valences and atomic mass" (Miller 104). This reminded me of lumping and sorting and what I think Miller means by this is that people are held together by different allegiances because of culture.

The Prostitute
"The sample is an interrogation of the meaning we see in a song, of its emotional content lifted away like a shroud from a dead corpse, only to be refitted and placed on another body" (Miller 113). Miller is talking about sampling here and basically says that DJs take out an interrogation of the meaning they see in a song and repackage it to make it different, or place it "on another body."

The song I chose to play around with on Who Sampled was Big Poppa by Notorious B.I.G. The song has been sampled by a lot of different artists which surprised me because I had no idea that it had been used so many times, in some pretty popular songs. Jay-Z and Pharrell sampled Big Poppa in Excuse Me Miss, and what's neat about Who Sampled is that it tells you when the sample occurs so you can jump right to it and listen to it. The quote I found interesting from the Errata Erratum section relates to this song because although Jay-Z and Pharrell created a new song, the piece relied heavily on the use of the sample from Big Poppa, so even though it is a unique "musical sculpture," it is still dependent on the original song that the sample originally came from.