I‘m a bit late with my personal newsletter for February, which is partially due to the fact that I just returned from a weekend in Graz, attending the Elevate Festival (see below) for the first time, connecting with old friends and mentors, visiting family, resorbing the city’s spirit. We need to do this more often, as my wife and I concluded afterwards. Having a kid in grammar school age it’s a bit of a stretch to just get away for a long weekend (homework!), but it’s doable, not least because we are doing everything by train these days.
An Event I Enjoyed
In late 2023 I learned that one of my favorite sound artists/electronic musicians - Ryoji Ikeda - was confirmed as an artist at Elevate. So I made plans to attend the festival, and it resulted in two quite different evenings in terms of performed music and audience.
I am starting to make some strides regarding two commissioned tracks for an upcoming Electropia EP. Those are going to be two IDM tracks, one titled "Anthropocene", and the other's yet untitled. I experimented with advanced sampling techniques in Bitwig, using some classic Vermona and Moog synth sounds. It needs a bit polishing, but I'm positive that this will come out fine.
The other piece I restarted work on is called "Arecibo". It's wholly based on the Arecibo Message that was sent to outer space in 1974, and is available as an audio sample. Composed just of variations of this sample I am producing a multichannel rendition in 3 acts. I hope to submit it to the Luigi Russolo prize. There, I said it 🤞.
In a nutshell, this book proposes a new evaluation framework for macroeconomics in the age of climate change and biodiversity loss. The doughnut metaphor serves as a catchy graphic to visualize how society's needs and the planet's affordances define the "safe and just space" for humanity. It's not a degrowth manifesto, rather an "anti-growth" manifesto that simply rejects growth as a meaningful metric and instead embraces systems thinking.
One thing it teaches us is that viewing everything through the lens of linear (Newtonian) mechanics is one of the greatest misconceptions of the last two centuries. If modifying a system just by adding a third component (as in adding a third body to a gravitational system) renders it utterly chaotic and unpredictable, what does this tell us about the models we apply to understand our surroundings? Systems display organized/deterministic but unpredictable behavior all around us. Attempting to change their behavior by adjusting singular parameters is generally futile. This applies to economics, ecology, music, and it also applies to (software) engineering.
What to do? One lesson to be learned comes from nature itself. Given time, carefully designed feedback loops and patience, most system tend to self-organize. Every tree, beehive, pond etc. is proof of that. Personally I think that one source of many dysfunctionalities nowadays stems from the fact that our feedback loops are far to short in general. Stock-markets are managed on the sub-second level, software development advances in cycles of a couple of weeks, new (digital) products flood the market every month, etc.. The climate crisis, on the other hand, dramatically makes us aware that nature's time scale is several orders of magnitudes longer. This seems to correlate with the number of participants in a system. It might be time for us to grow accustomed to a time frame of years and decades rather than milliseconds. Quick action, in many circumstances, might not be the best path to success.
That was my February in round-up. Talk to you next month - tata! Julian
