Hello, Ruth.

 I hope that you’ve been well since the residency.  Since this is my first packet, I’m not sure if I’m doing any of this correctly, but I’ll follow the guidelines and do the best I can.

 I will admit that it has been a frustrating time for me, in terms of getting this semester’s project off the ground.  Inasmuch as technology is allowing me to create this project, it is at the moment a constant source of conflict.  You may have already noticed that there is no video contained within this packet, and instead there is a burned cd-r.  Although I have not changed the focus of my semester project, I have been forced to delay the visual aspect of it for the moment and instead focus on the audio for now.  I have purchased a Sony DCR-TRV730 Digital 8 camcorder from half.com, but as of this morning it is still in the “shipping” phase and has not yet gotten here, after three weeks of waiting.  So although I have purchased a high-end prosumer digital video camera for significantly less than retail price, I have no camera in my hands to show for it.  I’ve also purchased a majority of the books in my bibliography from amazon.com, but only five have actually gotten here.  The rest are delayed.  I’ve also been the subject of some very annoying (and financially-troubling) credit card fraud from a long-distance telephone company in California that uses pop-under windows to read cookies set by e-commerce sites such as amazon.com and eBay to read the personal information of customers and sign them up for a service they didn’t request, charging their credit cards $61.02 multiple times each month.  I use technology to create my art, but it has been a constant source of frustration lately.

 Because I’ve not had the ability to work on the visual segment of this project, I chose instead to focus on the audio aspect.  The cd-r that is contained in this packet should be playable on any compact disc player or cd-rom drive.  I intend to use the three tracks contained on the disc as part of the soundtrack to my video project.  If you have watched the [re][surrender] video that I gave you at the residency, you should know that in my video projects, I use a mixture of latent sound and soundscapes that I have created myself, incorporating instrumental and spoken-word tracks that have been altered in an audio composition program on my computer.  The three tracks represent just a little of what I want to do with the sound design of this project.  Sometimes I think that the audio aspect of a project is almost more important than what the viewer actually sees.  To me, sound can communicate the most poignant of emotions.  I hope to be able to explore how to achieve this same effect within the visual realm.

 Another major event in my life since the residency has been the release of the anthology that I assembled from entries submitted to one of my sites, dyingdays.com, in response to the events of September eleventh.  I will admit that my Goddard work has been secondary to the marketing and media campaign for this new project.  “to wound the autumnal city: a dyingdays.com 9-11 anthology” (ISBN 1-58898-625-X) has seen modest sales and has met with some critical praise.  My decision to donate all proceeds to the Red Cross has met with some critical derision.  The book itself is the main source of voiceover material for my G1 video project.  As such, I’ve enclosed a copy of the book, which I would like you to keep, if you want to.  It is a self-published book, which means that it must deal with an entire set of misconceptions and pre-judgments before a reader even picks it up.  Self-publishing certainly helps to get my words into the hands of an audience, but the process is shunned by the traditional publishing industry and is met with skepticism by the general public.  I like to think that I maintain complete control over the content of the work, without editorial interference to make it “mass-marketable.”  Especially in the case of this anthology, I feel that such raw footage preserves the emotional atmosphere of that distinct moment in history better than letting it simmer in slushpile hell for years before some editor with a BA in English deigns to let the public see the work.  I edited the work, designed the covers, footed the bill, and now I’m selling books.  That’s what I do.

 I’ve tried in these past weeks to explore the issue of developing my own voice in my work by reading the works of others while continuing my own writing schedule.  I’m ashamed to admit that for years, I just didn’t take the time to read.  Since coming back from Goddard, I’ve taken a few hours each night to just sit down and read.  Right now, I’m halfway through Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren, a work that, although I read most of it probably five years ago, I never could quite get through.  The opening line of Dhalgren is in fact the title of my 9-11 anthology.  I was honored to conduct an email dialogue with Mr. Delany, and he gave me permission to use that title.  I’ve found Mr. Delany’s work to be extremely influential to my own writing style, at least when I’m writing science fiction.  Since January of last year, I’ve been writing a new science fiction novel at silverthought.com.  Only since beginning to read Dhalgren again have I realized where I acquired my idiosyncratic style of prose, one that blends a complete disregard for traditional science fiction themes and the mechanics of proper grammar with a strict adherence to systematic process: the new book will have five parts, each of which contains twenty entries, and each of which will not be altered in terms of content once it has been uploaded to the site.  Dhalgren is a metaphor; Delany is Kidd, the main character, and Bellona, the wounded city, is the tumult of the era in which the book was written.  In my own writing, and particularly in An End, my latest novel, I tend to insert myself into the book as a minor character, and the main characters always reflect enough of my own personality quirks to be considered each an exploration of a little bit of myself.  In the case of An End, I blatantly insert myself into part two: the stillness between, as an author named Paul, who went to St. Lawrence University, who had a professor named Betsy, who had a fascination with James McNeill Whistler.  Whistler himself is a main character throughout the entire novel.

 Besides the other works that I will detail in my annotations, I’ve been reading Remediation: Understanding New Media, by Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin.  I must say that this is the most fascinating “academic” work that I’ve read in a long time, perhaps because I work so closely with the ideas that the authors explore on a daily basis.  For the first time, I’m beginning to understand the concept that emerging technologies, although they attempt to replace older methods, draw directly from these methods to create and even exist.  Photography attempted to replace painting, computer graphics attempted to replace photography, virtual reality attempts to replace computer graphics… but they all draw directly on these older artistic practices.  As the definition of “remediation” explains, one form of media appears in another form.  The internet is a great example; in the context of webpages, we see graphics, audio, and now even video, along with text.  The webpage itself, while it attempts to be an independent work, draws directly from these other media to exist.  The components themselves draw from reality..  Audio attempts to re-present sounds that we would hear in real life, video re-presents the act of seeing, digital graphics re-present painting, drawing, or other visual media, text re-presents speech.

 In the three tracks that I’ve included in this packet, I’ve begun the process of exploring my own work in the context of remediation.  Each track, as will be explained in my process papers/personal practice section, draw from a multitude of media to become a coherent artform: guitar, emails, poetry, digital alteration, found objects in the form of various audio tracks.  The pieces themselves each have an inherent meaning to me: the guitar was recorded while I drank coffee and stared out the window at 5AM, the emails were written years ago to an ex-girlfriend, some of the vocal tracks were recorded years ago for the [re][surrender] project, etc.  Each piece evokes a time and an emotional response within myself that I hope to be able to convey to the audience.  As a cohesive product, I find that these tracks are at times confusing, suffocating, disturbing.  It will be interesting to see what an audience takes away from the experience.

 I draw heavily from the past, attempting to explore connections of emotion that exist between distinct moments in my life.  In this project, I am comparing the emotional atmosphere that pervaded my senses in the fall of 2001 with another emotionally-traumatic time of my life, the spring of 1998.  As such, I’m incorporating text that I wrote during both periods into this project, juxtaposing the two timelines in an attempt to gain the same kind of closure from last fall that I think I’ve been successful in creating from the spring of 1998.  The process isn’t pleasant, and I know that the audio tracks are at times unpleasant to listen to.

 I’ve not yet been able to travel to New York City as I had intended to, because of professional obligations and travel plans falling through.  I no longer know if I want to go…  I experienced the events of September in this tiny apartment at 1003 East Fayette in Syracuse, New York.  I think that I’d like to incorporate an exploration of this physical space into the end product instead of footage of far-away places and people.  I was alone at the time, and I’d like to convey that sense of solitude to the audience.

 I’ll be honest; I’m not where I’d like to be with this project right now.  Technological frustrations abound.  Once I get my camera, I will have some video footage for the next packet, assuming my systems do not crash in the interim, which is always a distinct possibility.  I don’t know what kind of feedback I would like at this point.  Any suggestions are always appreciated.  I’d imagine that once I get my first packet back, I’ll know what exactly to ask for in terms of feedback.  I hope I’m not being too ambiguous.  I know where this project has to go, and if I can sort through the technology issues, I will get there.

 Take care, Ruth.

Sincerely,
Paul

In this section, I will attempt to explain in a step-by-step manner how I created the audio tracks that I’ve included in this packet on the burned cd-r.  Because tracks one and two are basically the same composition with alternate strands and the addition of more material in the second track, I will document only the creation process of the second and third tracks.

These are works in progress.  I still need to fine-tune the individual .wav files of each track to eliminate hiss, popped Ps, etc.

My intent with these musical compositions is to create a link between the past and near-present through exploration of intense emotional atmospheres.  My work tends toward multi-layered, retrospective, suffocating emotional evisceration.
 

 
“A Lifetime Without You”
tylermix02.wav
Track 2

software:
Syntrillium Cool Edit Pro 1.2

strands:
10february1998audra.wav
05april1998audra.wav
tyler01.wav
tylerclip01.wav
tyler02.wav
longclip01.wav
longclip01rev.wav
lighter01.wav
smoking03.wav

mixdown:
tylermix02.wav
tylermix02.mp3

creation timeline:  I will attempt to list the steps of production in chronological order. 

1.) I have over a gigabyte of audio footage burned to cd-r from the [re][surrender] video project.  This audio was recorded in February and March of 2000 using a stereo microphone connected to Francine IIv1.0, a Gateway Pentium III 450mhz desktop with 384mb of ram and at the time, over 40gb of free hard drive space.  I burned the voiceover footage onto cd-r with my IDE-CD R/RW 4x4x24 rewriteable drive.  The text itself was drawn from emails that would later become my first published work, Deconstruct (ISBN 1-58898-021-9).  The voiceover artist was Ms. Tyler Hotchkiss.  To draw parallels between the emotional atmosphere of the times represented in those emails and last fall, I decided to incorporate several passages from those voiceover tracks in this new project.  The files that I chose were 10february1998audra.wav and 05april1998audra.wav.

2.) Because those two files each contained over three minutes of audio, and I only wanted to use certain phrases from the files, I opened them in Cool Edit, selected the phrases that I needed, and saved them as new files tyler01.wav (see attached) and tyler02.wav.  To create the recurrent “I cannot imagine a lifetime without you” track, I copied the phrase from tyler01.wav and saved it as tylerclip01.wav.

3.) Satisfied for the moment with the vocal material that I had gathered for this track, I began to record the guitar strand.  I recorded into Cool Edit with a stereo microphone fed through a Midiman Multimixer 10 ten-channel multimedia mixer into my laptop, a Gateway Pentium III 1.2ghz laptop with 256mb ram and 10gb of free disk space.  The guitar is a 1998 Synsonics acoustic six-string.  The song itself is an untitled track that I first wrote in the nights after 9-11 while staring out the window, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes.

4.) Once the guitar track was recorded and saved as long01.wav, I cleaned the track using the click/pop eliminator function in Cool Edit.  I also performed a hiss reduction on the track.

5.) Because the original track is over five minutes long and filled with material that is aesthetically-displeasing to me, I decided to remove a clip from the track that did appeal and was shorter, and easier to loop.  I copied and pasted a new track that contained 1:09 minutes of sound.  I named this track longclip01.wav.

6.) longclip01.wav was too muffled and dull for the ethereal feel that I intended for the end track, so I amplified the treble on the track by using Cool Edit’s FFT filter Treble Boost function.  I altered the track further by adding an echo effect called “stereo whispers.”

7.) Because I love to reverse tracks and hear what they sound like backwards, I reversed longclip01.wav, creating longclip01rev.wav.  Pleased with the result, I decided to incorporate this track into the mix.

8.) The guitar track brought to mind those five a.m. mornings of coffee and cigarettes, so I decided to record the opening and closing of a Zippo lighter, using the same recording setup that I described above.  The Zippo is gold.  The cigarette was Marlboro.  I saved the file without alteration as lighter01.wav.

9.) It was at this point that I placed all of the above files into the Multitrack mode of Cool Edit and visually arranged them until I felt that they sounded appropriate.  I have no system for the arrangement of strands of a musical composition; I just move things around until they seem to fit.  This often involves a confusing layering effect, where vocal tracks overlap, creating a wall of sound that is at times disturbing.  The end result of this first exploration of these strands of sound was Track 1 on the cd-r that you will find in this packet.

10.) Track 1 was a good first attempt, but it doesn’t contain any new vocal material, nothing written in response to 9-11.  I selected a paragraph from a journal entry I wrote, 21October2001: don’t look down.  I recorded the paragraph using the setup from above and my own voice.  I saved the file as smoking01.wav.

11.) Cleaning up the audio quality of that track resulted in smoking02.wav and later smoking03.wav, which I decided to use in the final composition.

12.) After inserting smoking03.wav into Multitrack mode, I rearranged the placement of individual strands in the composition.  (See attached for final multitrack arrangement.)  I decided to loop certain elements and bring other vocal tracks to the thematic foreground through repetition at “empty” moments.

13.) I saved this multitrack session as tyler01.ses.

14.) I mixed down the elements of this session into one .wav file and saved it as tylermix02.wav.

15.) I saved the .wav file as an mp3 (tylermix02.mp3) so that I could share it online.

16.) I uploaded the mp3 to resurrender.com and linked to it from the resurrender message board so that people could hear it.

17.) I uploaded the mixdown .wav to the resurrender.com FTP and downloaded it into my desktop system.

18.) I burned the track onto cd-r using Nero burner software.
 
“Living in Denial”
neuramix02.wav
Track 3

software:
Syntrillium Cool Edit Pro 1.2

strands:
neurafadein01.wav
neurafadeout01.wav
nearaA01.wav
22april1998audra.wav
denial01.wav
telephonedenial01.wav
denialpaul01.wav
denialpaulphone01.wav

mixdown:
neura02.wav
neura02.mp3

creation timeline:  I will attempt to list the steps of production in chronological order. 

1.) In 1998, I produced a double album for my friend Jacob’s band, Pills Bury Buddhas, called “positive/negative.”  Track 18 of the “negative” album was a short thirty-second composition that I created from a clip of Track 1, anhedonia.  I called my composition neurasthenia.  This track was a heavily-distorted interpretation of a guitar riff from the original track

2.) I decided to use this short composition as the underlying theme for a larger work, to be incorporated into the soundtrack of the video project that I’m creating this semester.  I ripped the track from the “negative” album and saved it as neurasthenia01.wav.

3.) My original intent with this track was to create a purely instrumental piece, with no vocal tracks.  I altered the original neurasthenia01.wav file by creating separate fade-in and fade-out tracks, and saved them as neurafadein01.wav and neurafadeout01.wav.

4.) I inserted neurafadein01.wav and neurafadeout01.wav into Multitrack mode, visually arranging them until I was pleased with the result.

5.) Because I didn’t want to rely solely on the original feel of the neurasthenia01.wav file and its offspring, I decided to experiment with various filters.  The filter that I ended up using was a “ringing As” FFT filter, which amplifies every incident of an “A” tone within the track, while dropping other tones into the background.  The result is a shimmering, eerie effect on the track.  I saved the altered track as neuraA01.wav.

6.) I inserted neuraA01.wav into Multitrack, using it as both the intro and outro of the piece.

7.) I mixed down and saved this composition as neuramix01.wav and neuramix01.mp3 for distribution online.

8.) Because I was so pleased with how the instrumental version of the track turned out, and because I seldom know when the leave well-enough alone, I started to search for an appropriate voiceover track to insert into the mix.  I found 22april1998audra.wav on one of the cd-rs of leftover vocal tracks from the [re][surrender] video project.  The sense of loss embodied in Tyler’s voice felt right to me, and I knew I had to incorporate this passage into this track.

9.) After cropping out unnecessary material from the track, I saved it as denial01.wav.

10.) I filtered denial01.wav with FFT filter “Get Off the Phone!” which makes the file sound as if it is being played through a telephone.  This is a recurring motif in my work.  I like to acknowledge the technology that makes this possible.  I saved the altered file as telephonedenial01.wav.

11.) I inserted denial01.wav and telephonedenial01.wav into Multitrack mode and visually arranged them until I was pleased with their placement in the mix.

12.) I started kicking around the idea of mirroring the vocal tracks with identical tracks using my own voice.  I felt that it might be a disturbing addition to have a distinctly female and male voice speaking in unison.  I used my recording setup to record my own voice as I played denial01.wav in the background.  After five attempts, I was successful in mimicking the cadence of Tyler’s voice well enough for my standards.  I saved the subsequent file as denialpaul01.wav.

13.) I used FFT filter “Get Off the Phone!” to create denialpaulphone01.wav.

14.) I inserted denialpaul01.wav and denialpaulphone01.wav into Multitrack mode and visually placed them into the mix.

15.) Pleased with the end result, I mixed down the files to create neuramix02.wav and neuramix02.mp3 for distribution online.

16.) I uploaded neuramix02.wav to my other system.

17.) I burned neuramix02.wav onto cd-r.
 
example of a .wav file.
tyler01.wav
 

 
 
example of a Multitrack session.
tyler01.ses
 

Bolter, Jay David and Grusin, Richard. Remediation: Understanding New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000.

• In what I’ve read so far, this book could be a textbook for the Interdisciplinary Arts MFA…  It discusses the melding of various media into a cohesive product, and how, although emerging technologies always try to replace traditional media, they draw directly upon them to be successful and even exist.  This work speaks most directly to my own artistic practice: I combine a wide array of images, text, audio and video to create an end product, but instead of denying the unique attributes of each medium, I sometimes try to enhance one over the others, to draw the audience’s attention in.  The authors assert that “all mediation is remediation.”  I am just now learning how true that is; it is difficult if not impossible to create a new for of art that doesn’t draw directly from the past in some way.

Coyne, Richard. Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999.

• This book attempts to draw parallels between current narrative about the “digital revolution” and the concepts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century romanticism.  In the segments that I’ve read so far, Coyne does successfully discuss how people who write about the internet and emerging technologies do seem to view them as a utopia, a great leveling ground where everyone is equal and anyone can be anything, do anything (within the realm of digital possibility), and the internet will be a great uniting force in the world, crossing cultural and national lines.  Coyne also discusses the arts and crafts aspects of webdesign, how the end products are functional and aesthetically-pleasing, and designers are seen as artists.

Delany, Samuel R. Dhalgren. New York: London: Vintage; Turnaround, 2002.

• A metaphor for the creation process: Delany is Kidd, the protagonist poet exploring the post-“apocalyptic” city of Bellona.  I’m reading this because I’m just now realizing how influential Delany has been to my own writing style.  Dhalgren is an inspiration to read, and the process of reading it again has broken down a wall of writer’s block that I’d developed in trying to write my own science fiction novel, An End.

Ginsberg, Allen. Howl and Other Poems.  San Francisco, CA.: City Lights Books, 1956. 

• I’m interested in the development of voice, and Ginberg’s Howl has been an eye-opener, especially since I’ve never really read the material of the Beat poets.  There is a cadence, an inner rhythm that I hope to be able to develop within my own writing.  The sense of disenchantment and struggle also appeals to my own exploration of emotion.

Henderson, Bill. Minutes of the the [sic] Lead Pencil Club: Pulling the Plug on the Electronic Revolution. Wainscott, N.Y.: Pushcart, 1996.

• The members of the Lead Pencil Club shun any use of electronic media in the creative process.  This book was a difficult read for me because I use primarily electronic media to create artwork.  The essays were well-written, but I can’t believe that in this day, there would still be such a vocal group of people who refuse to even use a typewriter because a pencil somehow creates a better product.  I get extremely frustrated with technology sometimes, but I would never walk away from it and just use a pencil, no matter how romantic the idea may sound.  Ironically, the best way to find out any information about the Lead Pencil Club is to search for them online.  A google.com search that I just performed brought me over one-thousand links to articles and discussions about their Minutes and Manifesto.  I don’t begrudge their right to use pencils; I just think that it is unrealistic and haughty.