The Kind people from The Museum of Lost Interaction have published a wonderful story about musics first sampler.

The PRAT Sampler, that is the Phono, Repeating, Audio, Track, Sampler, was found in the form of blueprint drawings, original instruction manual, and some company/personal papers of Edwin J Baird, dated back to 1916.

Baird’s innovation was not well documented, or immediately further developed, but did indeed lay the foundations - and was the precursor to all modern day multi-track audio recording.

The PRAT Sampler was of course a four track wax cylinder recording and sampling machine; developed for writers and composers, allowing them to create new music, loops and compositions without the need for a full band. This domestic looking artifact comprised an input horn, a length of musical pipe, a rotating shaft, four repeater arms and sound boxes, one recording arm and an output horn.

Ediwn J Baird was surely a visionary, his invention a true treasure for us to find and resurrect to its former glory.

To see a short film and hear what the sampler sounded like has a look at :
THE PRAT SAMPLER

Keitai Girl

A short film to watch as well.

Her Website

Yamaguchi Noriko is Under Our Skin

Emerging Japanese artist Yamaguchi Noriko gets under our skin thanks to what covers hers. Currently in her last year of an MFA program at the Kyoto City University of the Arts, this 22-year-old artist from Kobe tackles issues as diverse as technology, mythology and feminism through bodily transformation and endurance. Yamaguchi uses her body to challenge present-day social mores by quite literally camouflaging herself with materials such as red azuki beans, golden thumbtacks and silvery cell phone keypads which become a constructed second skin that acts as a meaning-laden barrier against the world beyond. The art world in Japan has already recognized Yamaguchi as an up-and-coming talent: in 2004, she was selected by famed photographer Hosoe Eikoh as a recipient of the Panel of Judges Award at the 21st-Century Asia Design Competition award held by the Kyoto University of Art and Design and again by Morimura Yasumasa as a winner of a young artists’ competition hosted by the Osaka Contemporary Art Center.

Yamaguchi’s work is awash in sexual politics due to the extreme modifications she enacts during performances or in front of the camera. In Keitai Girl (2003), the artist dons a skin-tight body suit reminiscent of metallic fish scales that is carefully crafted from cell phone keypads. Her face painted in the traditional powdery white makeup of Butoh, Yamaguchi wears large headphones and is draped from head to toe with wires seemingly ripped from a telecommunications command center, setting her adrift and alone in the ether. The suit, thanks to its digital keypads, begs to be dialed, thus showing the vulnerable position of the artist within the grasp of any number of anonymous hands that might reach out and “touch someone.” In fact, certain guests are given the telephone number of her body suit and can dial her up from their own cell phones and engage Yamaguchi in conversation during her performances. Thanks to the widespread use of cell phones, or keitai, in Japan, Yamaguchi created this suit—a full-body prosthetic that turns her into a walking and talking cellular device—to investigate the future development of the human body and its interaction with technology.

In another series, “Ogurara Hime,” or “The Princess of Ogura” (2004), Yamaguchi covers portions of her body with red beans to visually recreate the Japanese myth of Princess Ogura who became a human garden whose body sprouted forth azuki beans. Yamaguchi uses this ancient Japanese tale as a metaphor in her visualization of the female body as a site of production on a multitude of levels. In one image, long cords of red beans sprout forth from Yamaguchi’s head and attempt to take root in the ground just below her recumbent body. Her pale white flesh and exposed breasts become fertile ground that gives rise to crops and, perhaps more likely, to male desire and sexual objectification.

With her sexually charged examinations of the human body and its potential transmutations at the hands of technology and society, Yamaguchi Noriko’s skin trade is bound to remain on the Japanese art market for some time to come.

- Eric Shiner

MORE INFO

May 30, 2007 — A large extraterrestrial object exploded over the heads of the first Americans about 13,000 years ago, wiping them out and making big mammals and other prehistoric creatures disappear, according to a new U.S. study.

Presented last week at the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico, the controversial research proposes that the extraterrestrial blast triggered a catastrophic millennium-long cold spell.

The dramatic climate change would have been the major cause for the sudden disappearance of mammoths throughout much of Europe and America and the demise of the Clovis people, the New World’s most sophisticated hunters.

“The impact occurred precisely when the megafauna suddenly disappeared from North America. The Earth, which was warming from the last ice age, was plunged suddenly into a 1,000-year period of cooling known as the Younger Dryas,” nuclear scientist Richard Firestone of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory in California, told Discovery News.

Full story: Here

This hour and one half long lecture details how new research and technology could possibly solve the earths energy consumption problems.

Please watch this wonderful movie, that I found today on the blog paleo-future

Professorstrange.com we normally do not promote interest of commerce but in this case, we have decided to post a link to a preview of a video promoting Soviet era animated propaganda films, which are for sale.

Jean Baudrillard
First published Fri Apr 22, 2005; substantive revision Wed Mar 7, 2007

French theorist Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) was one of the foremost intellectual figures of the present age whose work combines philosophy, social theory, and an idiosyncratic cultural metaphysics that reflects on key events of phenomena of the epoch. A sharp critic of contemporary society, culture, and thought, Baudrillard is often seen as a major guru of French postmodern theory, although he can also be read as a thinker who combines social theory and philosophy in original and provocative ways and a writer who has developed his own style and forms of writing. He was an extremely prolific author who has published over thirty books and commented on some of the most salient cultural and sociological phenomena of the contemporary era, including the erasure of the distinctions of gender, race, and class that structured modern societies in a new postmodern consumer, media, and high tech society; the mutating roles of art and aesthetics; fundamental changes in politics, culture, and human beings; and the impact of new media, information, and cybernetic technologies in the creation of a qualitatively different social order, providing fundamental mutations of human and social life.

For some years a cult figure of postmodern theory, Baudrillard moved beyond the postmodern discourse from the early 1980s to the present, and has developed a highly idiosyncratic mode of philosophical and cultural analysis. This entry focuses on the development of Baudrillard’s unique modes of thought and how he moved from social theory to postmodern theory to a provocative type of philosophical analysis[1] In retrospect, Baudrillard can be seen a theorist who has traced in original ways the life of signs and impact of technology on social life, and who has systematically criticized major modes of modern thought, while developing his own philosophical perspectives.
From The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosphy