Today is my dad's birthday. All of us kids surprised him by showing up in Vienna today. It's hard to call it a surprise though. He pieced together the puzzle somewhat by the time we were there. All in all, it was an enjoyable afternoon and next morning. I got some music work done but not really much else.
I had a good conversation this past week with someone my friend Gerry Fialka had me call. It was awkward at first as we struggled to find out what we were supposed to be talking about but we finally settled on the subject; he had an idea for an app that enhances context across the web. Although it was more of a theoretical idea it made me realize that enhancing context is what I'm trying to do in PAPIO. So I've been thinking about that a lot.
I realized that context operates at an infinite number of levels. For example, if I listened to an hour long podcast and extracted a 30 second clip from that podcast and then showed it to a friend who then found that clip preposterous, offensive, or insightful (it doesn't really matter), it might have been because it was taken out of context -- the context being the hour long podcast.
But it gets deeper. Let's say that the person in the 30 second clip said something that offended someone. To understand the true intention of the clip however, one must consider the context -- the hour long podcast. When taking that into consideration, the clip will probably come off as less offensive. But if it didn't... you could take into account the context of that day that produced that hour podcast (i.e. how they felt and what they did that day). And if that day weren't long enough to provide understanding, you could take into account what kind of year they are having or just simply consider their entire life.
That's the infinite layers of context I was talking about and I want to expore that in my app. In addition to full length media, I want to provide clips that take things out of context but provide a seemless way of interacting with the "parent" context.
Clips are simply more consumable for a variety of reasons. They likely have only one topic and are concise. They are also the ripe fruit that's picked from a tree that some times has a bunch of uninteresting fruit on it but even if that's not the case they can be a good entry point to the larger work.
The next few weeks are going to be very busy with Sizable music stuff. We're trying to get this album done by the end of the month. It's getting a little overwhelming but I think we can manage. The worst / best part is that we get to do this all over again immediately after. And then again. Then again.
I've also been doing some musical things with my friend and roommate Caleb. We've been trying to imitate Galimatias's Blowback. It has a bunch of great sounds and we're trying to reproduce it as closely as possible to learn about the process of making something on this caliber.
I'd better get back to work!