Uvula Audio‘s James Campanella has added a complete reading of H.P. Lovecraft’s “quintessential work of horror” to his podcast feed. In China Miéville’s introduction to the Modern Library paperback edition of At The Mountains Of Madness, he describes the novella as “taxonomy as horror.

What is a book, really? For that matter, what is an article, a record, or a movie? For each of these, I have a very clear picture in my mind that says more about when I came of age than about the content itself. When I think of books, my mind retrieves an image of my grandparents’ bookshelves, which I used to browse after school as a child. Records? I see the CD stacks of my teenage years, collected from local music shops and trading with friends. And somehow, thinking about movies still produces images of VHS tapes and memories of frustratedly fixing the tracking on my VCR. No doubt, future generations will have very different associations. (Or, more disturbingly, some readers of this column won’t even know what a VCR is. Just Google it.)

Words, music, and films are all content experiences that we’ve come to know just as much by their containers as by their substance.

What is it about a particular media that makes it successful? Drawing a mini history from printing-press smudges to digital compression artefacts this lecture considers the value of error, chance and adaptation in contemporary media. Biological evolution unfolds through error, noise and mistake. Perhaps if we want to maximise the potential of media, of digital text and compressed file formats, we first need to determine their inherent redundancy. Or, more profoundly, to devise ways to maximise or even increase that redundancy. This presentation was designed and delivered as part of Coventry University, Media and Communication Department’s ‘Open Media‘ lecture series. Please browse the Open-Media /stream and related tags (in left column) for more material

(Audio recording of talk coming very soon)

Many thanks to Janneke Adema for inviting me to present this talk and for all her hard work with the series and podcast.

"I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physi- cal fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have."

A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas, which they turned into code, which they released on the Internet for free. These four men, not one of whom finished college, laid the foundations for much of the digital-media environment we currently inhabit. Then, for all intents and purposes, they vanished.

In 1999 a Northeastern University freshman named Shawn Fanning wrote Napster, thereby pioneering peer-to-peer file sharing and a new paradigm for consuming media without the intermediary of a big studio or retailer. TIME put him on its cover, as did FORTUNE. He was 19 years old. (See the 50 Best Inventions of 2010.)

That same year, a Norwegian teenager named Jon Lech Johansen, working with two other programmers whose identities are still unknown, wrote a program that could decrypt commercial DVDs, and he became internationally infamous as "DVD Jon." He was 15

On July 29, as part of its Sender, Carrier, Receiver program, Triple Canopy presented a briefing on the activities of the International Necronautical Society's Berlin Inspectorate at Program. As heard in this unofficial recording, Provan, Triple Canopy's editor, and Yamamoto-Masson disputed the INS's claim that Berlin is the World Capital of Death, and discussed attempts by its members—chief among them writer Tom McCarthy, artist Anthony Auerbach, and philosopher Simon Critchley—to surreptitiously recruit agents and take over major cultural landmarks. Click here to read the draft copy of their internal report, and here to listen to a file of covert INS recordings intercepted by Triple Canopy and prepared for the occasion.

Porn for the Blind is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to producing audio descriptions of sample movie clips from adult web sites. This service is provided free of charge.

audio essay : On Pharaohs, Cults and Parasitism (The Condition of Division) Originally broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM as part of Antepress’ Digestives series, Monday 24th May 2010 [Audio clip: view full post to listen] Subscribe: via iTunes

"Starting with the precedents set by Charles Ives and John Cage, VARIATIONS presents the principal milestones of Sampling Music, looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and the mass media, and the way all of these currents converge today." Curated by Jon Leidecker, who records and performs as Wobbly. "Poet Kenneth Goldsmith presents selections from UbuWeb, the learned and varietous online repository concerning concrete & sound poetry, experimental film, outsider art and all things avant-garde" in Avant-Garde All the Time. Goldsmith's the founding editor of UbuWeb and sometime DJ on WFMU as Kenny G. (Previously: CodPaste - a 14-part podcast about the history and practice of sound collage and mashups. )

Glenn Marshall is an Irish computer video artist and musician whose recent work has focused on audio visualization programed in the Processing language. Generally the program is left to its own devices, though his work-for-hire has more intentional design, as in his video for the Peter Gabriel song "The Nest that Sailed the Sky." Marshall has also been hired to create video for Guinness for Sky TV and the Rugby Six Nations Tournament, and a looping animation for Hermes of Paris. Marshall discusses his works with some detail on his blog. (More videos inside)