Across the Transom: May 2023

The singer’s stature had grown so much by 2006 that the eminent jazz guitarist Bill Frisell was nervous the first time she invited him onstage. Then, as Frisell started to play, he noticed Williams subtly shift her singing to follow his lead. “I felt completely free,” he recalls of that moment. “There wasn’t an expectation that I was supposed to fill some role. She wanted me there for my personality and my sound, so I felt safe, and I wasn’t afraid.”

Level A is the technical level. In answer tot he question: How well are the symbols of transmission being communicated and received? – which we were concerned with quite a lot. So, doing a technical fix to improve the inadequacies in order to achieve better communication.

Level B is semantic, which is characterized by the question How well is the message getting across? This is the content level and includes aesthetic considerations.

Level C is where is joins up with the social aspects. To answer the question: How well are the objectives being achieved in the external world? Or, if you like, in terms of social change: What is the effectiveness of the product (or the activity) we've made in achieving the external objectives?

if i do something, i write about it here, or update my main portfolio site, and then share either the portfolio site or the corresponding blogpost on fedi and discord. that’s it, the entire workflow. i’m not caught in a numbers trap, or desperately crossposting across multiple different platforms that i could never meaningfully engage with without that just becoming my full time job. on the other hand, there are far fewer opportunities for someone to just happen upon my work. and if reach is something i decide to care about, this is quite clearly a negative.

They shift the focus from photographic indexicality to stochastic discrimination. They no longer refer to facticity, let alone truth, but to probability.

This notion of influence harkens back to its early etymological drift as an astrological term, “streaming ethereal power from the stars acting upon character or destiny of men,” from Old French influence “emanation from the stars that acts upon one’s character and destiny” (13c.), also “a flow of water,” from Medieval Latin influentia “a flowing in” (also used in the astrological sense), from Latin influentem (nominative influens), present participle of influere “to flow into,” from in- “into, in, on, upon” + fluere “to flow” . This notion of an inflowing from elsewhere that doesn’t so much as change reality, as it does the thoughts and minds of its human inhabitants, carries them beyond their shared illusions into that realm of Imagination from which we begin to see into things.

Cooked into everything digital and online this present day is the fact that speed and efficiency win out over authenticity and reality. We go from thinking we’d like to hear a piece of music to hearing it (or never hearing it, as we can’t find it), in brisk flashes, a few clicks and a momentary pause. But listen to a track of music written decades ago, and a mass of assumptions by the creators of how you would experience these works no longer apply.