05-10-2019:: dig no further                           .moji
===========================================================

Thanks to tfurrows[1] and others for playing with the ROOPHLOCH2019
contribution I made a few days ago. I'd had some contact elsewhere
telling me it had been fun from a couple of other folks - so glad to
know this was a small joy. I wanted to respond to tfurrows and
others real quick in saying: please dig no further! You've found it
all! haha. 

After first publishing, with zero context, I received some comments
that made me suspect no-one would check out the meta-data, or look any
further, so my last post was an invitation simply to do this. Sadly,
there's nothing beyond or beneath what has already been uncovered (not
that I am consciously aware of, at least!). There's no hidden meaning
in the audio, and the title was just a bit of poetry on the subject;
the high-frequency of the audio captured.

I captured this audio at the location referenced, during a night walk
with some friends and a few other pieces of tech. I've since been
looking into getting an 'audiomoth' device[2] or something to try and do
some monitoring/insight into local ecologies in my area.

My initial attempt to make my ROOPHLOCH2019 entry a bit more of a
complex puzzle had been to use paulstretch.py[3] to distort the audio,
with a note such as 'paul stretches but moji squeezes' - the
invitation being to try and reverse-code paulstretch.py, but during an
incredibly busy month I didn't have time to do the proof myself, and
work out how exactly to reverse-code paulstretch, so didn't want to
land this task as a burden on the port-70 community. Still, that would
have perhaps been neat.

For the meta-data: for years I've been using 'exiftool'[4] on a
regular basis - mainly to strip metadata from photographs before they
ever find their way onto the Web. Strings is not a tool I had known
about - so thanks to tfurrows for introducing me to that! And thanks
to all who engaged with this little entry.

                     *     *     *

The whole ROOPHLOCH experience itself was a really welcome inviation -
thanks for solderpunk for initiating this. It has got me thinking
about *nix-based or even just 'media' communities and what we can do
with media; an approach that is about puzzle/play/develop (as opposed
to, for example, enterprise or commercial building through
tech/media - a type of tech development that predominanley falls under
'capitalist realism'[5]). 

Over the past few years, I've attempted a couple of times to base
*nix-based computing projects at community centres in London. Kind-of
like hacklabs, but more-so as 'DIY' server projects. These have been
based at some social community centres I used to help out at. But
unfortunately I found that these projects/groups/clubs would fall
apart after a few months or so. In hindsight, I think that the reason
they have fallen apart is that there has been really contrasting
imagination/philosophy around computing/media, with different people
wanting to take the project(s) in different directions, and so a lack
of coherence among the groups. For example, some people may approach
DIY tech as a way to develop decentralised Web-based tools, like
hosting a pleroma instance. Others may focus on
pedagogy and learning together. Others may want to provide unix-based
'services' for a community (public access, to a degree). And still
others may be have more of an artistic focus and want to do generally
weird shit with tech. Others may also want to focus on an
anti-surveillance kind-of project; providing services similar to
Riseup[6]. 

I think the reason these projects I've been involved in have fallen
apart is a result of this lack of enough of the people I've been
involved with being on a similar page about what the initiative is all
about. This is true for myself as well, as my own interests are
perhaps a smattering of all of the above, though perhaps are more
fundamentally about a kind-of 'media community' or attempting a
different sociality *around* media/tech (than say, for example, the
prominent cultural way we relate to tech/media/digitality; through
social media, prominently through Web tools/platforms, through the
reproduction of forms of C20th print and broadcast media (the same
subject-matters being produced albeit in these digital forms:
identity, celebrity, specatcle[7], propaganda, separation, etc.)). 

This sense of a different 'media community' is perhaps for me the
driving interest. That and a desire to learn and learn in a group
setting. Making media more like a trip, or social form, like a
psychedelic social encounter, an experiment, an 'unfolding' of
possibilities and perhaps, insodoing, also a moving-away-from other
forms of media, such as outgrowing, together, Web tech/surveillance
tech, and moving into new domains of digitality or media community
altogether. So ROOPHLOCH has got me thinking: perhaps a neat way to
situate such a project, based around a locality, could, as one thread
of it's proposal, be about focusing on these
puzzles/projects/initiatives/'side-missions', such as ROOPHLOCH and
other puzzles. Another example could be setting up a VM as a kind of
'puzzlebox' in itself, with a series of puzzles or games within to
engage with. I'm not sure though. For now, it's just got me thinking,
as there's at least a handful of DIY social spaces in my area that I
could imagine *could* be a good way to root such a project. And I've
been looking for some new stuff to get involved with... so maybe.
Maybe. That said, there's also something really nice about port-70
communities being about bringing together a more distributed Internet
community than other forms that are more locality-rooted (like social
networks). As we're all, somewhat, strangers to eachother in this
place - and that in itself is an interesting quality for a community.

[1]
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2019-10-01_replyMoji.txt
[2] https://www.labmaker.org/products/audiomoth 
[3] https://github.com/paulnasca/paulstretch_python 
[4] https://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/ 
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalist_Realism:_Is_There_No_Alternative%3F
[6] http://mail.riseup.net/ 
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle