Tag: ETC

The Last Day

Evaluation

So on the last day to the ETC, we started out with an evaluation. It was a big love-in. “I love you guys! You’re all so great!” It was a nice, positive vibe. There was some discussion about privacy and posting images from the con and some also about possibly having some equipment or an organization. The stream was constantly screwed up, so maybe an org should buy a computer for streaming instead of trying to recycle junk computers into a stream machine every time?
Aileen spoke up about how she was happy that there was no organization and it was all kind of ad-hoc. She talked about how people could just do things and it would all fit in some how. She said that since people wanted me to come, they had just changed the policy on who could come and that was that. An organization might be limiting.
I felt all warm and fuzzy. Aw, they really do like me! I’d spent the whole week feeling awkward about whether I was really meant to be there. Was I intruding? Were people annoyed by me? Was it all in my head? When people shortened “women and gender minorities” to “women” what did that imply for my presence? Aileen’s statement was not contradicted at all. Clearly my nervousness had been in my perceptions only! I felt pretty good and thanked people for letting me come.
That was a weird thing to do.

Beach

Then, we rode the train north to the the dunes and walked several km to the beach. It was a bit cold and cloudy, but still very nice. The beach had a strange, thick foam. We sat out and picnicked. Some people tried to swim in the frigid, foamy north sea. After a while, we moved to a cafe where we drank tea and hot coca and beer. It was on the beach, but had glass set up to obstruct the wind, but not the view. Some ETC people starting climbing up the outside and juggling and otherwise being silly. I laughed so hard my sides are still sore.
It started to rain, so we went back to A’dam. Some of us went to a benefit dinner for migrants. A few others, including me, went to get stuff from our space, with a vague promise of dinner.

The Discussion

There was no dinner. Instead there was a lot of discussion about the future of ETC. I felt really uncomfortable during it because it talked a lot about trans issues. Some of the people there felt like there should have been discussion before the definition of who was to come was changed.
What I was thinking at the time was, “I’ve only been transitioning for a few months. I’m not fully secure with it. Anything talking about this is like poking a fresh wound. I want to be proud of who I am and my queer identity, but I still feel sad that I failed at being a woman. I really tried to make it work, but couldn’t.”
I don’t have a clear memory of everything that was said. Because unless somebody is saying something like Aileen said, it feels like poking a wound. In fact, some of the things said were transphobic. It mostly wasn’t personal (it never is), but I felt terrible afterwards.
Right now, my inclination is that I will not go to another ETC event. Last year was really the last time I went into a gendered space as a woman and it was so positive and the contacts that I made so valuable, that I had hoped I could still participate. Part of my pre-transition identity really had a lot to do with being in a certain kind of gendered space: feminist spaces where variance is welcome. ETC was the perfect combination: feminism, tech, green, free culture. All these progressive elements have synergy and it was so wonderful to be around others making the same connections.
A generation ago, there was worry that lesbians would somehow mess up feminism. Now it’s transgender people. C’est la vie. I’ll do my own sort of gender liberation, you do yours. I’m in search of a community. God knows where I can find it.

The Party

So, feeling like shit, I started biking towards a drag party. At least I can do drag, right? Or something. I was really feeling low wondering how I will ever be able to have a coherent sense of self if I have to pick between my own gender and the political issues that I see as so vital. Part of what motivated me to transition was that guys a few years out say that they don’t really have to think about gender anymore. It’s something that for years now, I’ve had to think about all the time. Now my hopes to be able to move on to something else seemed to be doomed. I wanted to just keep biking forever and not stop.
But I did stop and there was a sign on the door which said, “you are now entering a gender-free zone.” Well, that’s a positive development. I paid my cover and went to get a beer and one of my (awesome) hosts was behind the bar dressed as a pirate! She took me around backstage where I painted on a goatee. There were people in all kinds of drag. Butch women in dresses. People presenting some female drag items paired with some male drag items. Hairy cleavage. Goatee and eye makeup. Every kind of genderfuck. I started feeling better.
There was a burlesque show / drag show / comedy show / whatever fun thing. Dykes, bis, trannies, queers. It was awesome. Afterwards there was dancing. This being amsterdam, there was also more booze and more pot and it was totally awesome.
And suddenly, instead of being some irreconcilable fringe character, I’m all sexy and cool. Girls were after me!
I’m in puberty right now, for the second time. It’s cool, but it’s still weird. I haven’t been feeling especially attractive. But there, suddenly, people wanted to kiss me! I was out dancing and being drunk and stupid until the sun came up.

The Next Day

I went to help clean the bar. I was supposed to help clean the ETC space, but the bar also needed cleaning. And I had happier feelings about it. There were people I really wanted to see while doing ETC cleanup, but my last conversations there had sucked so much.
So I got things out of going to ETC this time, but I think it was a lot about seeing people I had met before and being in a country that I want to return to. And being in queer spaces that were just coincidental to ETC.
I don’t know anything about anything. I kind of like being foreign, obviously, or I would move home. But, I guess that’s a broad category of experiences and some are great and some are not. I was thinking of trying to play on the Ladyfest circuit, but right now, I’m wary of it. Part of being foreign is creating communities of outsiders, of expats, of artists, of queers. I felt it sometimes in ETC, with some people. Some folks there were awesome.
I need something right now. English isolation = not so great. Somebody in the discussion of doom suggested that I start a group. I guess I have to.
Anyway, that’s the last about ETC. I’m ready to move on and feel some complexities some place else. Maybe in music. I’m supposed to be a composer.

Gendered Spaces

Why Limit by Gender

We live in a patriarchy. People who are perceived as male have privilege over people who are not. This starts from very early childhood and continues through adulthood. Statistically, people raised as girls tend to be steered away from science, technology and math. Children internalize these messages, so as adults, people tend to think of men as being good at technology and women as not. This is easily observable by phrases like “the mom test” or “the girlfriend test” for software usability. Women are dumb, so if they can manage the user interface, it must be really good, because even a neophyte can handle it. Because your mom could never be a software engineer. Your girlfriend could never be a hacker.
There’s a million arguments already made about how mtfs share this sort of experience. Many are aware of their gender identity from early childhood and internalize all of this crap too. Finally, when they do transition, they get all the discrimination against women, and also all the discrimination against trans people. And ftms tend to also be around these kinds of places. We were perceived as girls through our childhood. I had a lot of access to technology as a child, but definitely felt unwelcome in my highschool’s computer room. The boys used tools like degrading pornography to enforce the male gaze and male dominance (and heterosexual dominance) to keep others out.
Women and gender minorities, therefore, tend have a shared experience around technology. It is an experience of being discouraged, of being not taken seriously, of being excluded.

New Feminism

The ETC had a kind of interesting talk about New Feminism. (There were some issues with it, but whatever). One of the speakers, Rosy, was making a lot of generalizations, which irked many, but I think there were some kernels of truth in what she was getting out. She heavily disparaged identity politics, saying they were an aspect of capitalism and market segmentation. MTV was trying to sell us our identity. I bristled a bit about this, since MTV is most definitely not selling me my transgender identity. It’s something I have to constantly fight for. I asked her about agency. If an identity is being asserted in opposition to corporate culture, what does that mean?
She said identity politics were narcissistic and had several problems. If we say women should be equal, well, equal to what? Should rich white women become just like rich white men? Furthermore, it creates a context of victimhood. In order to organize for rights around a particular identity, you need to say that identity is lacking. I think she meant to imply that there’s a danger there of failing to see intersections. She noted that there are situations where lesbians were the dominant political power. If you see lesbians constantly as an oppressed class, you won’t see where you’re oppressing others.
Of course, you sometimes have identities forced upon you by others and organizing around that is vital. In the feminist forum that I help moderate (livejournal feminist), we have rules about “oppression olympics” where we require that intersectionality be taken into account. I think that Rosy’s thinking and our thinking is very similar. Yes, there is an institutional, hierarchical power structure in society which privileges some identities and bodies over others (the Patriarchy!), but we all function within it and might be upholding it in ways that privilege ourselves. A white lesbian is still white. A upper class gay man is still upper class.
There aren’t that many places where lesbians are at the top of the heap. But when you’re talking about women-only spaces, such a situation can arise.

Focussing on Women

Comparing oppressions is rarely a useful exercise, but if you wanted to do so, there are metric you could use. I would pick unemployment figures and salary gaps to look at economic discrimination. I would use hate crime statistics and domestic violence statistic to look at safety issues. There are a few other metrics that one could employ. People who are out as transgendered do worse on these metrics than do heterosexual women. They even do worse than lesbians.
So if you were the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and you had a policy of only admitting people who had been born and raised as female and who were still female-identified, you would have a policy of excluding people who were lower on the ladder than you. I think most progressives can agree that there’s value in oppressed classes creating their own spaces. I think most progressives can similarly agree that there is not value in privileged classes creating their own spaces. A men-only event is different than a women-only event.
So excluding trans people is asserting privilege. Yes, it changes the vibe. But if a group of all-white women suddenly racially integrates, that changes the vibe too. If you bemoan that, you’re a fucking racist. Certainly, it’s more comfortable to be around people of your own race, gender, and economic class. But if you’re trying to do something political to benefit people who face gender-based discrimination and you’re all cisgender, bourgeoise, legally immigrated, white women, that’s kind of problematic. If you worry that changing that will change the vibe of your event, well . . . the response that springs most immediately to mind is “fuck you.”

Who gets Access

We’ve all heard the stories or perhaps even experienced a hostile male response to spaces that exclude them. I think the contexts of power and privilege make these replies different than trans people asking for access. Indeed, the entire justification and model of progressive, gender-exclusive spaces says these are different replies. But in the patriarcal challenge, the cisgender man says, “can I come if I wear a dress?” The annoyed feminist says, “no, fuck off.” How can we tell who is a man in a dress trying to start a problem and who is gender minority?

The Gender Police

We can judge them by how well they pass! Yes, in this fantastic model, we employ something I’m going to call the cisgender gaze. Gender normative people can feel empowered to determine how well transgender people are passing. It’s a fun diversion for cis people. And devastating to the identity of trans people! Yay!
When I try to explain the male gaze to people, I sometimes talk about a phenomenon that occurs on University Campuses in the US. Sometimes men will set up chairs along a bust walk way and make score cards like those used in the Olympics. A woman walks by and they all hold up scores on her attractiveness. 6.3, 7.5, 8.1. However, unlike the Olympics, these are just women trying to get to class who did not ask to be rated by their male peers. Indeed, they are no longer peers, there are judges and judged. A power structure is created where one class of people sits dominant over another class of people. Men judge women. In the context of a rape culture, this is especially alarming.
The cisgender gaze has a lot in common with the male gaze in that a rating and ranking system is employed. The people doing the rating have economic and social power (in a broader social context) over the rated. And we live in a society where the rated have to be concerned about experiencing violence at the hands of the class of people that is rating them.
Plus, this has the added bonus of kicking people where they’re already wounded. Trans people often have a lot of anxiety about passing, especially when they’re just starting on their transition. We can all wish this were not so. But nobody would transition if they did not with to be perceived as a particular gender. Furthermore, there is a safety issue when we try to get access to other gendered spaces, like toilets.
Would you tell a cisgender woman that she looks like a man and you would think she was one if you encountered her out in public? Then why the fuck would you tell a trans person that you were certain you could read them? Fuck you. A woman wh heard that would probably feel like shit about it. But some trans people are also fighting for their identity. I have to jump through a million hoops with the NHS. I have to come out to people. I have to struggle to assert my gender identity. You just told me I’m failing at a core aspect of my identity. I don’t even want to fucking hear that I’m passing very well today. Are we best friends? Do I get to tell you that those trousers might make your ass look big? No? Then shut the fuck up.
At last year’s ETC, we all went swimming naked in the Danube because it was hot as hell. I felt really weird being naked in front of other people, largely because of trans issues. At the time, it really felt ok. Now, though, I wish I hadn’t. People were talking to me last week about my breasts. Yes, they’re larger than you would think. No, they’re not especially masculine. I don’t want to fucking hear about my boobs from anybody, unless we’re snogging or something. They are not up for casual conversation! Again, shut the fuck up.

Up For Further Discussion

The change from Women Only to Women and Gender Minorities was made without much discussion. Nobody wanted to have an argument. Some people wanted me (and a couple of other transguys) to come, so the change was made.
That’s great for you that you don’t have to argue about who should access gendered spaces. But alas, I know you meant well, but then those conversations fell on my shoulders.
There might be a bajillion trans organizations and trans activist, but I’ve just come out in a foreign country where I don’t know that many people. I don’t know any such groups. I’m one person trying to get through multiple border crossings at the same time. I don’t have the resources to deal with extra shit..
My roots are in feminist spaces, in queer spaces, in women’s spaces, in doing tech. I’m not entirely pleased to be moving away away from certain aspects of my roots. When I first realized I was queer, I had several unhappy breaks from the institutions of my childhood. I lost my religion, for example. Former spaces of support suddenly excluded me. Now, it seems like the spaces that I found, that seemed so much better than the spaces that excluded me, are now breaking away also. This fucking hurts.

Educational video

This is a re-post, but in case some of you missed it the first time, I highly encourage you to watch it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjqsB1huDxg
I’m still sorting through my thoughts about the last few days, but I’m feeling more and more negative. Just because I want to feel good about something doesn’t mean that I do. I can try to be forgiving, but that means I need to first acknowledge that there’s a sin to forgive instead of telling myself that everything is fine. What I feel is what I feel. Saying I feel something different doesn’t make it so.
I will write something less abstract later. Obviously, I’m going to talk about transphobia. On the one hand, it might be more appropriate to hash this out with specific people or on a closed list. I don’t want to do that for two reasons. One is a high-minded desire to educate, etc. But, more, I just don’t want to have these conversations further. And I shouldn’t have to.

LambdaIstanbul

this group was declared immoral yesterday. It’s an LGBT Solidarity Association founded in 1993. And a cultural center since 2000. Grassroots, non-hierarchical, volunteer based. They are anti-military.
They have commissions within the org. Trans, Women’s Group, Pride, Performance, Family, Human Rights Violations Reporting. Alas, the police have a lot more power recently and raid groups, including this one. The government insists that human rights are not violated. They work a lot with trans people including sex workers, trans women in feminism, etc. They do also legal aid for trans women harassed by the police.

April 7, 2008, 15 big police guys searched everything. They saw a trans woman coming in, so therefore they must be running a prostitution ring. (Because it’s really great for women to make prostitution illegal.) the government of Istanbul said the group violated public morality.
And then I had to g chase after my dog. Now the speaker is showing pictures from the pride parade. Apparently, this was an illegal protest? Last year, there were over 1000 people. Nobody is allowed to protest on the biggest street. But they were so small in the past, they were ignored. The police followed them last year, because of the size. It’s not a big party, it’s a protest march with chanting.
There was participation from some political figures, including a guy running for parliament and an italian politician.
she’s showing up a movie of another march which was stopped by the police and football hooligans. Turkey is not a great place to be queer.
and holy fuck. they were attacked by a giant mob, helped by the police and had to sit on the floor of a bus while people tried to break the windows while they escaped. mobs of men sang “die trannies die”

Queer festival action in slovenia

This speaker is talking about a festival they’ve been doing for 10 years. It was a DIY thing in a squat. It was a women’s festival.  Culture and art for women. They wanted to increase visibility of their own work. Local women could meet and talk about feminism and stuff.  It grew over time.  This is in around Slovenia now.

The festival grew to include more of the balkans and then farther outwards.

IT’s now a feminist festival and not just a women festival to be less essentialist. There was a lot of resistance to this change. alas. The latest version is feminist and queer.  I see this as a good thing.

Eventually participants were cool, but the media would just skip the word queer.

Theyve had themes around sex work.  A documentary was made. 

Last year they wanted to think about how to make it have a more lasting impact in the town. They decided to do a lot of workshops.

They did an action where they renamed the streets in responce to the revision of history going on in responce to the system change.  They changed names to be names of women instead of men.  They change “master” street to “servant” street.  The city didn’t take down the changes for a while.

Drupal video server.


Generatech, the post porn folks, use drupal video server.

Their content is queer, performances and post porn.  These go up on their website. It is politically decentralized actions made visible and empowering.

They ARE code. Code and surface creates agents. Code is central in defining technology, subjectives and culture. The digital divide is an issue of access to code. There isa gebder gap and an ethnic gap in access.

Capitalism restricts code access through software patents.

Access to code is cultural power. The net creates culture and represents culture. Media corporations want to control and sell culture.  They represent women poorly. They sell western culture to everyone.

There are economic issues in regards to access and also knowledge issues. I can’t afford it. I don’t know how.

We need to write our own code and make our own culture. Free software lets us protect our interests. We can make sure out interface is non-sexist.  Queer theory lets us rewritew the gender/sex code.

They use inkspace as a tool. And cineralla.  Their work is copylefted.

Their plan of action: is to increase access to tech by increasing knowledge of foss tools.

They want to specifically promote these tools among people who tend to have less access.

Video.ningunlugar.org is to share documentation of their acts of “gender terrorism.”  They did a festival with an image of jesus with boobs and a penis crown (instead of thorns). The police came to the house of the graphic designer.

Post pron is non-normative. It seems theyre trying to tweak social conservatives. They want to re-sexualize the body and change social definitions of sexiness.

“Gender hackers” can be whatever they want and rewrite the gender code. YAy.

They are trying to fight censorship.  One of the speaker’s friends got banned from youtube. ANother from myspace. ANother from blogger. Her POETRY was banned?

In summary: we are code. COde is being privatised. We have to rewrite all our codes for social transofmration.

They want to combine all progressive causes in a larger millieu.

They really beleive in online video, free software and progressive causes. Yay.

Voxfeminae

Voxfeminae

Feminist festival in Croatia. The first one in the country.  The organizer started. Itś about art and music and stuff.

Cultural events used to be very male dominated. So she started something for women. The festival is annual and for all kinds of arts. ITś an NGO funded by the ministry of culture. They decided to not take commercial sponsorship.  It was for 3 days in the student center. It had international participation.

Donna gave a workshop, but nobody came.  This festival is more about art and music and not about tech. Maybe they shouldnt have tried to give a tech workshop.

The speaker is asking how we organize these kinds of festivals in other countries. How to make it more visible?  How to communicate its specialness? How to avoid corporate sponsorship? Nobody seems tohave answers.

Another speaker is talking about a lesbian band she started called Burabend. They play covers (alas). The members are all on a football team in croatia. During the half time, they decided to start a pop band.  Its all very political. Plus they thought it would help them get girls. Apparently, itś the only dyke band in croatia.

They are political and an art project as much as a musical project.  Www.burabend.net

they hope to play gay weddings. Just as soon as it gets legal in croatia.

They mostly play at festivals. At pride. Also at the only gay club in crotia. (there is only one?)

Alas, their website has no mp3es. They will play anywhere, they say. In fact, they want to branch out to more straight venues.  Their band is not making money, alas.

As an asde, they speaker is really cute.

The next vox feminae will be in october. I wonder if i can play at it?

Security and .Net Programming

.NET is a Java competitor from M$. It is also cross-platform, compiles to virtual machine code. During run-time is Just In Time compilation. So the source code compiles most of the way and goes the rest of the way when you run the program.

Security

Security aspects: secret data must be kept secret. Data I want to protect is confidential. Some data can be readable by many, but not writable. I want to protect the integrity of that data. Sometimes I don’t want to leave a paper trail for the feds. That’s non-repudiation. Data must also be accessible to me when I need it.
so to ensure all of that, I have authentication and logging. The Authorization and authentication protects confidentiality and integrity. Hashing also helps protect integrity. Encryption. logging for non-repudiation (have i got ths term backwards?). And redundancy keeps stuff available.
Now we’re talking about why we should care. Firewalls are no substitute for proper design, etc. I can’t even believe that people would think they didn’t need to worry about this if they were writing network applications.
.Net has it’s own sandbox concept called CAS: code access security. It is really similar. Code gets permissions based on origin and you can say how much you trust it, etc.
How about security for the developer? You need to figure out which permissions that your code will need. Communicate your permission requirements. Make the documentation machine readable. (Is this built-on/for free?)
What about for the admin? What permissions should the code get? What’s the source of this code? How much do i trust the source? Check the hash and the signature (x 509 or strong name (I don’t know what that means, but ok))
there are some pre-defined permissions. They can let you at some resources.
This talk is really intense for this group. I wonder if anybody in this room is a .net programmer.
ok, so you might want to access the printer or to skip verifying stuff. Full trust allows everything. Be careful. Did she just say that Microsoft must have full trust at all times? Isn’t that a huge issue?
So one spot to attack is input validation: Cross-scripting (XXS), SQL Injection, buffer overflows, canonization attacks. Double check everything!
Validate input against XXS:Cross Site Scripting. Lookout for javascript in image tags and weird html tags. Look out for .. in urls. Blackhats might be trying to get into forbidden directories.
The speaker is now warning us not to try this on other people’s websites, lest we become blackhats.
She is further warning us to make sure things are escaped and sanitized. And now the whiteboard has suddenly collapsed on my dog. Who seems ok. Um, so make sure html doesn’t get executed. And check your SQL. Is this actually a string? Is this way too long? Ironically, she’s going on great length about buffer overflow. Great, great length.
Now it’s canonicalization attacks, which is the thing where you need to use a full path or else somebody might be evil.
Ok, in summary: check all your input. know what you expect. check fr it. check for weird input. She’s asking somebody to describe what a regular expression is. I don’t know how to define this. She’s giving us an example. I don’t know if the point is to look out for regular expressions lurking in input or telling us to be smart with our regex. Ok, it’s the latter. Be precise.
Um, yeah obviously do all of this on the server side.

Session management

http is stateless. so fake states with cokies (um, be careful with that), encrypt the authentication cookie with SSL. There must be timeout.
Um, I’m going to skip out before everybody else eats all the food.

Gig Report: ETC (Hangover editition)

I started yesterday by sleeping in a long time. Then I went to get a haircut. There’s a great haircutter here in Amsterdam. So I got a haircut. On the way out, my bike tipped over, alas, which is a common enough occurrence. I got to the venue early in the afternoon and proceeded to drink like 10 cups of coffee and eat a lot of sugar.
Then I went to set up and my synthesizer wouldn’t plug in. The power transformer plug got bent when my bike tipped over. Oh No! Oh no! So I used my pocket knife to bend it back, but, um, yeah, it would have probably been smarter to unplug it first.
My synth wouldn’t turn on. After some experimentation with a volt meter, we determined that the transformer is dead. And just try finding something that puts out +15V, -15V and ground. I’m not 100% certain that the problem is actually the transformer, but I really hope it is because trying to fix the synthesizer itself is beyond me. It’s an evenfall minimodular, so if I broke it, bah, they’re not being made anymore.
I wet and bought some Jenever, a type of Dutch gin. Then I tried to figure out what the hell to play. 40 minutes of live sampling was down the toilet with nothing to sample. I quickly assembled a program and put together a very alpha version of of my crotch-mounted joystick piece – with the wrong game controller, so the visual element was lost. I got it finished just in time for my sound check.
The right speaker connection was janky, so the person running the sound check, was all “we’ll have to tell the engineer to jiggle this if it drops out.” The next person trying to sound check just could not get her system working at all. So finally, about an hour late, I was on. Nobody from The Hague came, but I didn’t exactly give them advance notice and anyway, I wasn’t even playing my program so whatever.
I started playing the silly phone sounds piece that I wrote for brumcon. And I hit the button on my joystick. And nothing happened. I knew it had loaded the drivers correctly. Jesus, the batteries must have died. I wasn’t on a stage, I was back by the sound booth, which was lucky, but nobody had batteries. I ran up out of the performance area and found bag, overturned it, grabbed my spare batteries. The moral of the story is that spares must be kept with me. The cool thing was that as soon as I got the batteries in, I could start controlling the piece, even from outside, so I was able to make it kind of play ok while I was coming back.
That piece sounds great in a bedroom, playing out of genolec monitors. It sounds like crap on any other equipment with any other acoustics. Sine waves are unforgiving. And the acoustics at Plantage Dok are crap. Yeah, so great start.
Then I went to play my little movie about getting an injection. (I know, a few days ago, I’m all weird about shooting T and two days later, I’m performing a video of it. Whatever.) The right speaker dropped out completely. And then proceeded to allow bursts of sound in only on the really loud parts. all of the nice, sustained bass sounds are on the right. I turned to the sound engineer, “the right speaker is out!” She had no idea about the janky connection. Somebody sitting next to the speaker, said, “no, it’s fine! I hear sound!” It was not fine. It’s kind of suboptimal explaining a technical issue to a sound perform during a set while an audience member insists that it’s all working fine. This whole situation can’t have lasted more than a minute, but it seemed a bit longer. And then the sound was back. on the right.
I don’t even remember what else I played. Finally I did the piece with the joystick and the moaning porn women and it worked really really really well. Which was amazing because I had done less than a full run through of it ever. It was the maiden voyage. so to speak.
I decided to quit while I was ahead. I think everything must have been less than 20 minutes, but I actually have no idea at all. But to summarize: we have a dead synth, a dead joystick, a dead audio channel, a sudden exit, and playing pieces about male-embodied masculinity and sounds of porn to a feminist, women audience. It went over really, really well. This is one of the friendliest audiences ever.
I think also the performance aspect was working very well. I was projecting my screen contents so that I could show my video, but it also showed them the source code for my pieces, which was not cleaned up at all. My phone sound piece is still full of cuss words. The piece with the porn sounds has “naughty_piece” for it’s file name. They could see all the weirdness, which created a connection. And also, running out and upstairs and madly throwing cables everywhere, digging for batteries is dramatic. People like drama. I want everything to be really clean and professional and together, but folks seem to connect more when it’s more obvious how precarious things are. I mean, I always test my music a bunch of times before I play it. (well, almost always), but I never make it perfect. some of my pieces dance on the verge of completely crashing and print out tons of error messages. People like that.
So I didn’t do any live coding, but I think I see the mechanism that attracts people to it. They don’t just want to see somebody play violin, they want to see them do it on a highwire without a net.
Anyway, after I was off, I opened the bottle of jenever and proceeded to drink a lot of it. It’s really good! Tasty. Not harsh. Really fucking strong.
And today, I want to barf.
Just randomly, about a year ago, I went to a show at this same venue. Somebody was making sounds with a wireless joystick exactly like the one I have now. The show ran into major technical problems and wasn’t really going. They had thrown something together at the last moment, but it sounded cool at least.
Ugh, I fee like sick.