What I wish to keep track of is the meaning of music in digital media.
The idea of what people are — indeed the idea of what things are — is shifting with media. We have long conceived who we were through print, paint, recordings, and other strange mirrors. And now data is our mirror, our representation. Big data is our house of mirrors. Where we had once squeezed expression from single dimensions — vanishing points, letters, or notes, we now must also derive it from masses of bits, each one a vanishing point. And so we live between the minimal and the maximal, hoping to derive meaning by drawing paths between these points, like constellations.
What music offers is something pre-representational. It gives us an idea of how ideas are formed, of how the invisible can still be conceived, and above all how they an be remembered.
But even the invisible is shifting with our new forms of representation. And that will be the subject of this writing.