This American Life: Blackout

I almost always enjoy the podcast, This American Life, but now and then, they do an episode that just blows me away with their use of sound and voice. The most recent episode — Blackout — is all about inside of Iran, and the voices of regular people through audio voice memos.

The Iranians put their lives on the line to smuggle the audio files out, and then — through a process where voice actors listened and then read aloud the words, in order to protect the identity of the original people — we get to hear what life is like in this war. It’s powerful storytelling as the podcast weaves the voices together into a quilt or collage of audio.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

The NYT Songwriters List

Any list of any musicians or artists is sure to get push-back. Still, I enjoy the grapple and I am listening to The Daily podcast from yesterday, explaining and exploring its list of the 30 Greatest Living Songwriters. I did appreciate the videos the NYT folks shot of various artists explaining their art — from Jay Z talking about flow to Taylor Swift talking about bridges.

Peace (and sound),
Kevin

Internet Phone Book Explorations: Lee Tusman

(This is one of a series of periodic explorations of the Indie Web via the Internet Phone Book project. I am on a personal exploration but also hope to lift the profile of sites I have found.)

I was wandering the book, hoping for some interesting site with artwork. There are, of course, many options in the phone book. I landed on a site by Lee Tusman and found myself in an exploration mode. Lee has a lot of projects here.

The Quilt Poems site caught my eye, so I spend some time with these generated poems, which uses quilt patterns as its code underneath. I don’t quite understand it, but I found it fascinating (and appreciate how he has kept it all open sourced).

Another project of his is called Context Collapsed and is a sort of multi-media collage. For the live site, when you click the mouse on the collage, it reconfigured itself with a mix of words, patterns, colors, images — all of it compacted together (thus, the collapse).

Finally, in one of the other projects – this from a workshop — he shares an informative zine with open source tools for artists. I love when folks like Lee share like this. It gives a sense that we are helping each other be creative in our endeavors. Thanks, Lee!

Peace (and art),
Kevin

PS — He has a podcast, too, that merges art and code and more.