Contemporary culture, with its focus on media mixing and sampling as well as its heavy investiture in the Internet, can be traced back to your work on what is now known as spread spectrum technology. Indeed, frequency hopping is the very progenitor of the frequency hip hopping espoused by theorist and turntablist DJ Spooky.
”In the mixing board metaphor for how we live and think…
information and beats and rhythms
never stay in one place.
You just have to be open to different frequencies.”
As in the ”dueling” records portrayed in Malraux’s La Condition humaine, a message can arise from noise with the proper filtering and demodulation:
Lu Yu Hsüan, all smiles and as if ready for a thousand little curtseys, placed the two records examined by Katov on two phonographs. The two had to be put into motion at the same time.
“One, two, three,” Kyo counted.
The hissing sound of the first record covered the second; suddenly stopped—
one heard: send—then continued.
Another word: thirty. More hissing.
Then: men. Hissing.
(Man’s Fate 20-21)
More importantly in your case, noise can be a means of disguising a message
PATENT An object of the invention is to provide a method of secret communication which is relatively simple and reliable in operation , but at the same time is difficult to discover or decipher.”
Perhaps somewhere in the mix there’s “An uncanny cipher regulating the traffic of plural meanings that bombard us at every moment.” As the words scrolling up instead of down on a moving piano roll demonstrate, however, it calls for a different mode of interpreting:
keep changing.”
and the numbers
puzzle
mathematical
to solve a
you try
It’s as if
“No one can plan. . .
as you yourself note:
a cipher, a code,
But the story itself is
“We’re in a delirium of saturation” (Spooky)
“Once you get into the flow things, you’re always haunted by the way that things could have turned out. This outcome, that conclusion. You get my drift. The uncertainty is what holds the story together…” (Rhythm Science 003)
Rhythm science
is a forensic
investigation
of sound
as a vector
of coded language
that goes from the physical to the informational
and back again.
Check the Flow
“A vector has a fixed property and an indeterminate property. One could say length is fixed but axis is not. Strictly speaking, that’s a relation between a determinate and an indeterminate property. The virtual dimension to any vector is the range of possible movements of which it is capable. This is the wildstyle. Check the flow” (Rhythm Science 008)
PATENT “Although the invention has been explained by describing in detail its application to the control of a torpedo or other craft where it is necessary to steer in only one dimension, it will be obvious to those skilled in the art that by using a large number of modulation frequencies, additional functions can be performed. . . .”
“It will be obvious that by so positioning the perforations in different rows A, B, C, D, E, F, and G, that perforations in different rows are successively brought into registration with ones of the switches,…different ones of the switches will be successively closed, to connect different ones of the tuning condensers.”
FREQUENCY HIP HOPPING
“Sampling is a new way of doing something that’s been with us for a long time: creating with found objects. The rotation gets thick. The constraints get thin. The mix breaks free of the old associations. New contexts form from old. The script gets flipped” (Rhythm Science 025).
Spinning narratives “on several fronts at the same time” is a feat that has allowed Spooky “to produce persona as shareware” (Rhythm Science 13).
In Rhythm Science, Spooky’s project is the same as ours:
“Whatever mix you make of it, it can only be a guess–you have
to make your own version…With that in mind…think of this as
a mix lab–an ‘open system’ where any voice can be you.”
The promise Spooky holds out is one in which “any shift in the traffic of information can create not only new thoughts, but new ways of thinking” (Rhythm Science 84).
“The only limits are the game you play and how you play it.”
Offered as shareware, this project invites you to apply and extend the functions set forth here in your own ways.
Find connections/ disconnections. Create new functions. Rotate, select, and reconfigure as you frequency hip-hop through Hedy’s life circumstances, her invention, her films. Each discovered instance carries with it the promise of a new insight breaking through the static of a noisy channel.
Rather than submit ourselves to linearly arranged or prepackaged information, he urges us to “Rotate, reconfigure, edit, render the form” (5).
Shareware? … Trafficking in new ways of thinking? … Reconfiguring?
These are all measures you would recognize as an inventor, actor, and a public figure whose image and voice often spiraled out of your own control, subjected to the noise and jamming of a world at one moment adoring and another hostile.
Re-inventing yourself as a maid, you acted your way right out of Mandl’s prison house!
Mixing and sampling, frequency hip hopping, can be restorative:
“The turntable’s needle in Dj culture acts as a kind of mediator between the self and the fictions of the external world” (RS 3).
