Incomplete Manifesto for Growth by bruce mau design

1. Allow events to change you.
   You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.
2. Forget about good.
   Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.
3. Process is more important than outcome.
   When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.
4. Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child).
   Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.
5. Go deep.
   The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.
6. Capture accidents.
   The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.
7. Study.
   A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.
8. Drift.
   Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment. Postpone criticism.
9. Begin anywhere.
   John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.
10. Everyone is a leader.
    Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.
11. Harvest ideas.
    Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.
12. Keep moving.
    The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.
13. Slow down.
    Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.
14. Don’t be cool.
    Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.
15. Ask stupid questions.
    Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.
16. Collaborate.
    The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.
17. ____________________.
    Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.
18. Stay up late.
    Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.
19. Work the metaphor.
    Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.
20. Be careful to take risks.
    Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.
21. Repeat yourself.
    If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.
22. Make your own tools.
    Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.
23. Stand on someone’s shoulders.
    You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.
24. Avoid software.
    The problem with software is that everyone has it.
25. Don’t clean your desk.
    You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.
26. Don’t enter awards competitions.
    Just don’t. It’s not good for you.
27. Read only left-hand pages.
    Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our “noodle.”
28. Make new words.
    Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.
29. Think with your mind.
    Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.
30. Organization = Liberty.
    Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between “creatives” and “suits” is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’
31. Don’t borrow money.
    Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.
32. Listen carefully.
    Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.
33. Take field trips.
    The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.
34. Make mistakes faster.
    This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.
35. Imitate.
    Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.
36. Scat.
    When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.
37. Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.
38. Explore the other edge.
    Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.
39. Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms.
    Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls “the waiting place.” Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.
40. Avoid fields.
    Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.
41. Laugh.
    People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.
42. Remember.
    Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.
43. Power to the people.
    Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

handbook-for-cyberdissidents

for those who don’t know them yet…it’s a good introduction to the dubsahara journey.

http://www.mixcloud.com/dubsahara/

greg uploaded a nice set of 13 oriental beats for free download
get them here :

http://dubsahara.com/archives/10366

One thing I’ve often said, when confronted with the type of person that gets in to the minutia of the recording process, perhaps at the expense of the big picture, is that a good song will survive any production process, while a bad song can’t be saved by the most sophisticated gear and recording techniques available.

This sort of idea is anathema to the Gear Queer, who is always certain that there is that one more piece of kit sitting out there, just beyond grasp, that will push things over the edge and make all the difference. We’re each of us guilty of this behavior, of course. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, etc. But the simple fact of the matter is that the work of art exists already, as a wave function, and whatever you need to collapse that bitch and bring shit out in to the cold light of day is what you need. There are records that wouldn’t exist without a massive, and relatively expensive, modular synth and a fairly detail-oriented production approach (see: A Funneled Stone), and others that would sound fucking retarded if they were anything but a guitar and a vocal. (See: Robert Johnson’s entire ouvre. Happy 100th b’day to Mr. Johnson, btw.)

Now, this entire approach could be perceived as my own way of justifying my several rather ridiculous recording habits, the which you’re all perfectly aware of. I approach photography and music-making in the same way, trying to squeeze something interesting out of a device not really meant to do what I’m asking of it, largely via a trial-and-error approach rather than any cohesive planning on my part. My general philosophy with respect to photography is the Shakespeare/Monkey method: if you take enough pictures, some of them are bound to be interesting, and quantity has a quality all its own. No particular reason this can’t be applied to music. (See: Wesley Willis.)

I guess what I’m trying to say, when it comes down to it, is this: I am of the firm opinion that there is interesting shit hiding in my brain. All I have to do is figure out how to get it out. While a new piece of The Shiny might make certain aspects of that chore easier, at the end of the day, the song lives in my brain, not in the gear. The medium is the messenger, not the message itself.

…since I kind of become addicted to it…
i started a fractal site where i will upload the fractals (and possibly the code) as soon as i do them…
it’s not a gallery…more of a feed/stream…and a notebook for me.
it’s hosted on tumblr

http://athanor.tumblr.com/

RSS

this is a short intro tutorial to fractal lab

Click here to view the embedded video.

an amazing animation done by subblue : Surface detail

Click here to view the embedded video.

monkey marc – as the market crashed

this is not new…but I reckon not many ppl discovered it yet
a very good album, a base of hip hop topped with blues, etnic spices, dub and onu-sound influences (yeah!).
not just intelligent and clever…but also soulful and highly enjoyable…TOP MARKS.
I played 2 times on the same stage with him…and I can say he is a lovely guy…and his liveset is very good…all done with 2 MPC…proper.

released by Omelette Records (australia)

Duskky : Illeism – free download from Acroplane

“I approach the tracks like they’re each little creatures, with their own ways of moving and interacting with the environment around them. Each one is supposed to have a certain personality or feel which is in some way distinct from the others. However, by virtue of them all being grown from the same broad gene pool they feel related to each other, sharing in the environmental pressures from the world around them.

All the tracks on this album were made over the last year and a half or so. They wouldn’t sound anything like they do without constant support on every level from the Mothers Against Noise Collective. We’ve been calling this stuff Dubfunk, but you can call it whatever you like.” – Duskky

Duskky on Soundcloud

aka E.Olenikov aka Alltag, Tehran, Iran

http://soundcloud.com/sohrab

this was a great surprise…a “producer” from Iran…good tekno…and even better ambient !

sorry but I cannot embed the soundcloud players of his music since he doesn’t allow it…go and check it out directly on soundcloud…really…go.

very very fresh and alive techno.

i’m against the every-day-a-new-plug-in-mentality of todays music makers.
turning knobs, twisting sounds, jamming and getting deep into single sounds –
this is what i’m all about.

stay techno!

http://soundcloud.com/the-marx-trukker

i wish to work on a similar project in the future

he is one of the minds behind Ableton…and he does many workshops around the planet sharing his knowledge….and many other good things can be said about him…he is humble !

I met him at the Sonica festival 3 years ago where I had the honor to share the same stage (Deadbeat, Rhythm and Sound and Greg Hunter were there too)..that time he played in front of 30 ppl (maybe less)…while thousands where lobotomized on the main stage by some rubbish trance…but he delivered an amazing set…and he didn’t behave like a rockstar…even if many of the bloated rockstars (who were playing on the lobotomy (trance) stage) were actually using a software that he created…period again.

he just released Silence, a new album…(dunno where he finds the time to do music)…

I haven’t got it yet…and I am very curious.
I am very pleased to read that he also joined the movement to stop the Loudness War…and he didn’t use any compressors for this album…and no limiters during the mastering.
This is a link to a very interesting conversation about mastering between Robert and Rashad Becker, the guy who mastered it:
http://www.monolake.de/interviews/mastering.html
and it confirms what I wrote in the post “Mastering is killing music” more than 3 months ago…cheers.