Week 1

"Principles of New Media"  talked about continuous an discrete media. For example, a song (in real life) is continuous because there are no breaks, but in a digital photo, everything is made up of pixels and everything can be represented in a numerical form. Because new media is programmable, we can sample continuous intervals and make it discrete. Modern digital media technologies are discrete because language is discrete; Sentences, words, and morphemes are all discrete.

Additionally, modern media technology is both modular and discrete. That means, that an artist can combine singular objects together to create art. In terms of variability, it makes it easy for artists to split up other works in to form new pieces and make a unique piece of media themselves.

In"Prosthesis", Ian has a collection of songs that sound very choppy and robotic like. A lot of the songs sound like he's doing programming syntax (e.g. for loops, i++, recursion, do while) and he builds upon those elements. In this way, he uses discrete objects to build something greater.

"The Listener" is an alexa skill that performs a conversational performance. It is interesting because alexa has a voice that seems human, making it seem like the user is talking directly to the artist. However, Alexa is purely synthetic and is an example of human aurality. The human-like features of Alexa makes it invited to the household and almost makes it part of the family.

In "Long Rong Song", OTTARAS repeats "LONG RONG SONG TONG", except uses different vowels each time. He uses discrete elements, but in a way "programs" it to be slightly different. Additionally, he uses discrete objects (in this case, words) to create a song.