Channel 2014 - another randomized neverending sadness loop machine

welp, i’m working on another internet thing. it's called channel2014.com. in the grand old tradition of conferencecall.biz and introspections.me, i’m looking for suggestions and advice as well as a small amount of voice contributions. my goal is get this thing out during the holiday season in december 2014.

the idea is to create a subjective time capsule of 2014. similar to my earlier projects, the structure involves a randomized curated collection of audio clips and GIFs, though there will be some slight modifications to the template. as i imagine it, it will be sort of like a rhythmic waking dream.

i’m looking for help in thinking of things that somehow seem like the “essence” of 2014, encompassing everything from very literal 2014 (sounds of ferguson protesters, snippets of contemporary advertisements) to more abstract things (visuals of distraction, the feeling of ’headlines yelling at each other’).

i know that’s laughably vague, and i’ve spent the last several months going back and forth on the entire idea. but i think that i’ll be able to curate the content in ways that lead to interesting juxtapositions when they’re randomized. a big moment for me, personally, was watching chris marker’s Sans Soleil for the first time the other night. the way the film builds a gigantic web of self-references and is somehow both intensely personal and universal was really inspiring.

i’m open to changes in direction (that’s part of why i started this thread!) but right now the “channels” consist of the following groups of audio/visuals:

TV (laugh track, talk shows, late-night monologues, nature docs, ads)
Devices (hold music, alerts, vibrations, electromagnetic interference, sound of keypad, ringtones, automated announcements from buses/airports)
Speech (sentence fragments, repeated syllables, middle 1/3s of sentences, interruptions)
Celebrity
News
Persuasion (speeches, sermons, new age, pundits, more ads)
Work (lol conference calls, meetings, office gossip)

the default channel would mingle all of these elements together, but the user would also have the option to change the “channel” to limit the content to a specific theme. i hope to gather a lot of the content by goofing off on the internet, but there will also be some audio that i’ll need to create from scratch. similar to conferencecall.biz, i’m planning on coming up with some lines and then asking people to record them and/or improvise other material, then edit the recordings so that they’re combined with other sounds in a way that hopefully sounds natural.

foolishly, i’m again thinking of the final product as neverending chance music, in a way. i attempted this with introspections.me (where the musical accompaniment in each of the 48 clips was unique and played in a randomized order) but wasn’t happy with the result for reasons that are so self-indulgent to explain that i can’t even manage to do it in this, the most self-indulgent thread of all time. this time, my plan is to establish a rhythmic piece of music that will constantly play in the background. the randomized content will play on top of that, but i’ll edit each bit so that it’s at the same BPM (and where possible, the same key) as the background music. it’s really hard to explain, but imagine an edited a spoken sentence with emphasized syllables that line up with a beat, and certain other syllables occasionally break out into an echo effect that also aligns with the music. i know my description sounds idiotic but i think i know how to do it in a way that will be very listenable and endlessly generative and new sounding, no matter how long you listen. also sort of lucid dreamy. combined with the content of the audio and visuals, i hope to convey a feeling of dystopian propulsion, like you can’t stop moving and can’t reflect on meaning even though theoretically you understand more than you ever have before.

again, sorry for the self-indulgence but for better or worse, soliciting the advice of internet people early on is part of my process. i realize that if i started a thread called “what is the essence of 2014?” i’d get fp’d within half an hour, but i really am looking for both general thoughts on whatever it means to live in this year + ideas/examples of specific audio/visuals that could be referenced.

Ooh, interesting. I'd be up for recording again if you'd like me to. Though I might get too depressed if I have to read any GamerGate tweets.

Feel like the "HAHAHAHAHAHAHA/that's a fake laugh/IT'S REAL" bit from Guardians of the Galaxy could fit in this somewhere. Anyway, sounds like another extremely cool project.

enough open chrome tabs that you can only see the 'x'

also "you can’t stop moving and can’t reflect on meaning even though theoretically you understand more than you ever have before." def speaks to me

oooh, the lots of chrome tabs thing might fit well with the visual style of it. to give it some consistency (and also to make my own life easier) i'm thinking of applying a similar process to each image where it kind of...well, like these basically:

http://38.media.tumblr.com/c70df4db92b23ea6ad3b85ddd32ac8da/tumblr_n9x43fkGPN1qdmmiqo1_500.gif
http://38.media.tumblr.com/fc5dcca6e7adaf07fdd245a6be87eb8b/tumblr_n30oxuI5i81qdmmiqo1_500.gif
http://38.media.tumblr.com/8028b39e8b15b4926bbf968346496bdc/tumblr_mv92i2g6I21qdmmiqo1_500.gif

do something with this maybe:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBZjZ6eAzMw

jumping up and down and/or knob fiddling

oooh, that's a nice suggestion, thanks. my hope is that even if this ends up being an eyeroller in the present, it will be interesting to look at in 20 years if we're not already floating in space or whatever

25:09-12 is pretty good

http://gifsforum.com/gif_generator/gif_created/584704877be644a2118d8ed4db4d336a.gif?1413908974466
(around 41:30)

http://gifsforum.com/gif_generator/gif_created/5633858e4c64b0583a69ce233accf675.gif?1413909141580

(sorry using crappy web gif editor, can't get it exactly where I want it but you get the idea)

omg he looks psychotic there

i'll have to wait til i get home so i can look at the video, but whatever part is used for the cover frame/still shot for the video looks promising - DJ/crowd/sparks flying all in one shot.

my 2 cents is that you don't have a sense of how a year will be remembered until several years later... like maybe it would be more doable to do an "essence of 2010" site? Unless that's the point?
but i'm down to help in any way if you got ideas

yeah, the difficulty of capturing a time when you're still in it is something that kind of kept me in standstill on this for months. but eventually i came to the idea that it's not about accurately documenting the content of the year in a comprehensive and universal, but instead a really subjective slant on it. that may not be a great idea, but at least it lets me move forward on it. (also, i don't have the kind of memory that allows me to draw a good portrait of 2010, or even 2013 really.) i'm not so concerned with capturing all of the most important elements of 2014 life so much as getting the general vibe down. and for me the vibe is just waves of information, infinite scroll feeds bleeding into private thoughts. it's hard for me to explain what it will end up sounding like but my goal is for it to sound like walking through a crowded market, catching bits and pieces of various conversations

IDK if I agree anyway, often the after-the-fact distillation of a time is a caricature or distortion, focusing on the outlandish and ignoring the more mundane but fundamental essences of life during that era.

I see that a lot now with 90s nostalgia, granted we're talking about 20 years ago not 4 years ago.

I don't know how hard it is to make it an apple TV app, but apparently making a roku channel is easy, so you could make it a literal TV channel of sorts.

xpost Also, the thing that got me re-excited about this the other day was the realization that something on the edge between documentary and fiction could be a positive distinguishing feature rather than a flaw. It's the Sans Soleil thing. I've always loved documentaries that break out of the really boring structure of interviewing people sitting in chairs with overlaid text with their name and title. I will fall massively short but I hope to make a sort of generative pseudodocumentary that communicates truth versions without being too obvious about it.

history is a set of lies agree upon, the present is an ongoing lie that we haven't committed to yet.
-bob marley

man bob marley knew everything

hyped for this & also want to just throw in that marker eventually abandoned film in light of the greater possibilities afforded by the cd-rom as a medium & so is a valuable touchstone, here

there should be a compendium of 2014 shame-faces a la this facial expression

do something with this plz: http://i.imgur.com/J46pi1m.jpg

including this facial expression is a great idea!

http://i.imgur.com/ZKVOMGE.jpg

https://medium.com/the-nib/2014-the-year-in-garbage-626ca0d58c6

welp, i've decided to put this project on hold and focus on another one that uses the same code but is waaaaaay more coherent (i think):

Thirty Second Stories (.com)