Memories of Miss Memory

The Velcro City Tourist Board (situated in the Disunited Kingdom no less!), has tagged me, and, like some kind of ultra seductive and sophisticated social meme, I have been lured into writing this post about why I blog.

But before i list them, in some vaguely apparent order, i just want to mention a little bit more about this concept of memes from personal experience. I have a terrible problem with certain types of memes. Its an individual twitch of my mind that was implanted in my soft brain at the tender age of four or five (i of course, blame my mother). Like William Gibson’s character, Casey, from his book ‘Pattern Recognition’, who has an allergy to brands, I have terrible trouble with certain advertisements on television, paricularly with melodic refrains in advertising and commercial radio. Certain ads on television have me running for the safety of a quiet room, or plugging my fingers in my ears and ranting “rah rah rah”. Particular melodies on the radio make me literally gag. Picture me, happily waiting in a bagel store for my salad ‘n’ rye, when a song like “wind beneath my wings” starts playing. I run out of the store groaning, or begging the manager to turn it off, or standing there in the shop grinding my teeth with my fingers in my ears.

I really do suffer.

After having a long hard think about things, I have decided that the memetic imprint of these particular sound bytes try to attach themselves to the inside of my head, and my brain, sensing something evil incoming, sends out repulsed and negative sensations to stop the evil from spreading to my memory. If somehow it doesn’t get caught in time, the evil meme essentially takes over until thats all i can hear/see.

Meditation helps.

ok on to the crux of this post.

I blog because:-

a/ it helps ward off evil memes
b/ it gives me an outlet for various concepts and thoughts I have been mulling over in my head, and giving them a place on my blog seems to help them come together.
c/ i enjoy contributing to a community of people sharing knowledge, situations, ideas and feelings that obviously we feel strongly enough about to commit to the world wide web for every Sally and her pet iguana to read.
d/i want to share my rapidly expanding knowledge of music technology related subjects (and commiserate) with other terribly addicted gear heads.
e/ to stand up and be counted, and make my “voice” heard, as a female electronic music producer, artist and tech head. Hopefully, one day this place might just be some kind of proof that there was such a thing as me, or maybe I can be a compatriot for other ladies feeling the pinch of loneliness in a STILL male dominated area.

I now pass this seductive meme to

her royal madness, Yunyu
Some Freak - DJ, music maker, sub-cultural providore & sleep walker
Kirsten Bradley - artist extraordinaire, and like minded individual.
Sonic crusader and blue haired blogger - Shannon O’Neill

“My whole life has been, ‘okay, change for the machines.’ Every time they bring in a new machine, more change.” …”God, the truth is running in the gutters today. Karma so thick you can cut it with a knife.” He fed the coins Gabe had given him into the coffee-machine slot. “Gets that way every time there’s change for the machines”…”And the more change, the more you don’t know what the fuck is going on. Right?” (p.97)

I am currently reading a book by Pat Cadigan called Synners. Although its the third book i have read of hers, Synners was Cadigans second novel and I have come to realise that this seminal piece of writing has obviously had a huge influence on newer cyberpunk literature, most noticeably, Neal Stephensons Snow Crash.

Synners is short for “synthesisers” and from what I understand from the book so far, Synners are people who create music videos by jacking their brain into some software that records their visions and sound in a virtual reality space. To be a synner is an entire body experience.

I have often thought about how the world would be, to be able to access directly the things you imagine, and hear in your mind. What kind of sociological consequences would this have? Cadigan paints a pretty dismal picture of the world in which this kind of tech exists. Will it always be the situation that, the more we become at one with technology, the more we open ourselves up to the possibility of crushing ourselves?

It also makes me wonder if humans will ever get to a point where we will not be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past?

When I think about this on a personal level, I realise to a certain degree it has always been inevitable that we make the mistakes our parents try to shelter us from by warning us, because we need to experience them first hand in order to understand the consequences. But perhaps in a future where technology allows us to share memories and experiences directly, we will come to a point where there will be no need to make mistakes because we can literally experience them without them actually taking place.

Knowledge through simulation.