By Peter Swimm, on December 23rd, 2009 
[ed: so im on vacation, but ill keep posting as much as possible. Maybe its time you take advantage of our submit posts feature if you have some news?]
Yes! C64 and weird people freaking out children on television! We’ve seen it before, but this is one is from 1998. The performer is Monotrona and the song is Cadillac Fantasy, from her album Hawkeye & Firebird. The C64-music is not made by her though, it is Hotrod and was made by Jeroen Tel in 1989.
Monotrona: SID, Freaks and Children
Playlist is an exhibition featuring many of the more famous 8-bit artists. It’s curated by Domenico Quaranta, who was also responsible for the recent Pixxelpoint exhibition where several low-tech old-media works were shown (mentioned here).
More here.
[PS: I appeared on an episode of chic-a-go-go in the late 90's in a plush frog suit and where I challenged a 5 year-old to a dance contest.]
By Peter Swimm, on November 12th, 2009
By Peter Swimm, on October 13th, 2009 
Chipflip has a very thoughtful writeup of the recent Ready > Run exhibition in Philadelphia that discusses on what makes things chip art, and discusses how chip art can coexist with other methods and mediums in order to be better integrated with the artists vision.
These works go beyond the limitations of systems in several ways. There are physical interfaces that are not inherent to the systems. There are no NES-printers and therefore printed NES-graphics can only exist outside the system. There are unfortunately no lazer interfaces to the NES either, and it is possible that the hardware modifications by noteNdo produces effects and artifacts that are out-of-system-experiences; things that software and emulators can only (try to) dream of. The ideal glitches; those that cannot be reproduced or explained.
via CHIPFLIP.
By Peter Swimm, on August 17th, 2009 Chipflip has an interesting essay on note duration, a potentially dry subject that is well worth the read if you are concerned about how casually you throw terms around.
Due to a comment by Viznut, I’ve had quick look into music made with the PDP-1 (circa 1960). This was a popular machine in the early hacker culture that grew out of universities such as MIT. A few of the audio hacks are documented in MIT’s HAKMEM (1972). Writing this post, it gradually turned into a form of platforms studies or media-specific analysis, describing note duration on different trackers/hardware, and considering the compositional consequences of it. The scope of platforms here is limited, and comments about alternatives are appreciated.
via CHIPFLIP.
By Peter Swimm, on August 10th, 2009 Goto80 has an interesting essay on the differences the live 8bit warriros of the Blipfest and the monastic demo gurus of LCP
It seems that Blip and LCP shows two different schools of 8-bit computing. The Blip-way is to amplify artifacts and platform-specific features, often involving glitches. The LCP-way is also highly platform-specific since a hardcore demo only runs on a specific set-up ie Amiga500 but not Amiga600. It is technically platform-specific, but usually not aesthetically. A good demo does not have glitches and other artifacts of the platform. It seems important for a demoscene-author to show that s/he is in control.There are tendencies in the demoscene towards the embrace of the quirks of hard/software, somewhat similar to what Viznut calls post-technical. It is a good term from a demo-coder perspective – leaving code-skill-flexing behind for more expressive productions. But from a broader aesthetical perspective I think it makes more sense to call it techno-centric, because the inate character of technology is not supressed.
I would go even further, in saying that the blip festival kids are working towards a more innate sense of what is correct per their intuition, versus the demosceners constant strengthening and testing of common best practices. My approach to gameboy music personally has more to do with the excellence of LSDJ, than with any affection for the gameboy sound as a whole.
via CHIPFLIP.
By Peter Swimm, on July 6th, 2009 CHIPFLIP > Tell us a bit about your different projects. How did you come up with ‘the new waveform’ in Pico? How did you do it and what does it actually do? Will there be new experiments with the waveform editor?
SOUNDEMON > As with Perkele, we needed a very small tune for Pico which is also a 4kb demo. I decided to include some metallic drum sounds by using the “testbit trick”. While trying different parameters for the sounds I got some weird pitched sounds. Only after releasing the demo I spent some time analyzing the behaviour of the SID chip to find out how and why the trick works.
via Interview with SounDemon, the Sound Chip Hacker « CHIPFLIP.
By Peter Swimm, on April 24th, 2009 Not being a huge Queen fan, i’ve avoided posting this:
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.
But leave it to goto80 to make the subject fresh with this excellent post on chipflip.
An excerpt:
I just found a version of Bohemian Rhapsody performed by an Atari800XL, 8? floppy drive, TI 99/4a, 3.5? floppy drive and four HP ScanJets. It’s apparently the hottest youtube-clip in Canada right now, yip yip! The same author also has Funkytown performed by C64/modem/printer and TI99/4a. Mentioned as his inspiration is James Houston’s Big Ideas (Don’t Get Any) which had a slow start of its Internet career, but has received lots of internet attention by now. It’s James’ final project for design school, so the visual aspect is also well worked through. A very special clip. It’s a ZX Spectrum with scanners, harddrives, and printers that performs a Radiohead-cover. James “placed them in a situation where they’re trying their best to do something that they’re not exactly designed to do, and not quite getting there”.
Fun reading! Rock the Matrix!
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