Writing
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik: how nefarious nonartists cleverly imitate music - An article from thejournal Leonardo that discusses projects including the Tangerine Awkestra, Thai Elephant Orchestra, the People's Choice, and more (pdf)
Notes from under the floorboard - A chapter on making new opera from a new book Live Movies (2006) on multimedia performance edited by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White (pdf )
The Thai Elephant Orchestra, a chapter from the book, Kinship With Animals (pdf )
The Y2K bug
was a contest entry by Jaron Lanier, Lisa Haney, and me for a millenial
time capsule to preserve an issue of the New York Times Magazine by
mutating cockroach DNA and then setting the little rascals loose in
Manhattan. It was displayed at the Museum of National History and won
second prize from the Times: we're lucky it didn't win first prize or
we would have had to do it. Here's (art by Lisa) and the full text by Jaron including sections the Times didn't print, and a "review" in Nature.
Liner notes for Phill Niblock's string quartet CD, Early Winter. These discuss the aural hallucinations Phill likes to produce in his music.
Liner notes for Otto Luening's orchestral CD An appreciation of Otto at ninety-three years of age for his only orchestral CD on Newport Classic.
The survey from the People's Choice Music (pdf)
A blindfold test with Otto Luening, conducted with Mark Dery from Keyboard Magazine
Liner notes from Phill Niblock's String Quartet record
These notes are from Phill's 1994 CD, Early Winter,
consisting of two long works performed by the Soldier String Quartet.
His music uses loud drones with that produce notes and melodies that
aren't actually played.
At a recent concert,
Phill played a tape piece of warm synthesizer-like sounds, suggesting
fast-moving arpeggios and distant thunder storms. I told him the sounds
were moving, what was the piece? I was embarassed to find that it was
one I had recently recorded, Five More String Quartets. In
that room, under those conditions, I couldn't recognize the sound of
the strings or the music's slowly-evolving structure. But in other
rooms, at a different volume, it sounded precisely like an overdubbsed
string quartet with pitches moving irrevocably toward unison.
What gives each Phill Niblock work its own identity? Unlike any other
composer's work I know of, the personalities of Phill's compositions
depend crucially on how the recorded music is played back, the volume,
and the sound of the room. This is because sustained pitches promote
audible rhythmic beats and high and low tones (sum and difference
tones). In Phill's work, these are never played by the performers, but
come from the interplay of sound waves during the recording, in the
speakers and in the room where you listen, and in your ear. In the
string quartets, sounds that are strikingly heard but not played are
rhythmic patterns in the cello and thick chords about an octave above
the highest violin notes.
That Phill's music can sound different if you move into the hallway or
a different part of the room, or even cock your head, must underlie
something unusual that occurs when we perform Phill's pieces live.
Someone in the audience realizes that the difference tones and other
aural phenomena change as one moves. This encourages a few others to
move around and after a while the concert hall lookls like it has been
invaded by extras from a George Romero zombie movie.
Exactly
what are the unplayed pitches that you might hear in this music? The
highest pitch played in the String Quartet is roughly a G-sharp resting
on the top line of the treble staff. The lowest note is played by the
cello, around a G-flat at the bottom of the bass clef. If you hear
higher or lower pitches (or pitches in the middle that are not centered
around G-natural) and are listening with a good, distortion-free
speaker and amplification system, you are hearing genuine auditory
hallucinations that are produced in your ear. These pitches, called sum, difference, or combination
tones, are determined by the played (fundamental) tones. For instance,
if a violin is playing a pitch close to a G-sharp, say 420 Hz (cycles
per second), and a viola plays a flatter pitch an octave lower, say 200
Hz, the sum tone is f1 + f2 = 620 Hz, the difference tone f1-f2 = 220
Hz, and the combination tones derived from harmonic frequencies, for
example 2f1-f2 = 640 Hz. These auditory hallucinations are audible at
sound pressure levels from about 20 dB to 65 dB.
Some
of the physiological mechanisms underlying this phenomenon are
understood. The fundamental pitches stimulate mechanoreceptive cells,
the so called "hair bundles" in the cochlea of the ear, by deflecting a
mechanically sensitive area on the cell. This mechanical force results
in the opening of electrical ion channels. The changes in cellular
voltage produces a vibration of the bundles. Stimulated at a single
frequency, a hair bundle will normally vibrate only at that frequency
and its first harmonic (the octave). However, since the ion channels
jump back and forth from open to closed states and their conformation
is one of the components that affects the hair bundle's movement, there
is a nonlinear relationship between the auditory stimulus and the hair
bundle's movement. With the addition of a second frequency, the
cells also vibrate at the frequencies of the sum, difference, and
combination tones. This does not occur after a similar stimulation of
an inert object such as a glass fiber; the extra pitch hallucinations
are apparently the result of the opening and closing cellular ion
channels. The hair bundle's vibrations are transmitted to the ear's
basilar membrane and, eventually, to the cortex which appears to be
responsible for pitch perception.
- Dave Soldier 's day job is as an assistant professor in the Departments of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University.
Blindfold test with Otto Luening
Conducted by Dave Soldier and Mark Dery
Published January 1991 in Keyboard Magazine
Even
at 90 years and counting, Otto Luening hasn’t quite had the time to
hear every new work that’s come down the pike. So we thought we’
borrowed an idea from Leonard Feather’s classic down beat
Blindfold Tests, choose a few provocative pieces, and play them for
Luening. His responses offer insight into both his own compositional
aesthetic and the material on our selected recordings.
“Tre Nel 5000” by John Zorn, from The Big Gundown: John Zorn Plays the Music of Ennio Morricone [Nonesuch/Icon].
Luening:
The first reaction I have is that the various sections of the piece,
where things are coming in and out, project all right in terms of
sound. He’s got a pretty good sense of balance, but the shifts, the
changes, are pretty fast. Whether the piece is successful depends on
who’s supposed to listen to it and how well they’re supposed to listen.
An untrained listener who hadn’t listened to much might listen to this
and think it was a very exciting thing. A more experienced listener, I
think, would begin by saying, “Well, I get the confusion, but the
details don’t stay in my mind. I come away with feeling of nostalgia
about these genres, a feeling of ‘The good old days were so beautiful,
but my God, all you get now are the terrors.’ It’s a daily newspaper
reconstituted as music ….. If that’s what the composer wants to
project, well then, he’s succeeded. It’s not exactly what I would do
myself, because I get that sort of information from television; I don’t
need it in music.
“Svabata,” from Le Mystere des Voix Bulgares [Elektra/Nonesuch].
Luening:
Whoever wrote this piece has a pretty good sense of vocal writing, and
he’s also very sensitive to speech. He employs a scale formation which
he uses sufficiently to sketch in a harmonic idea so that the general
sound sinks in. This means that he’s able, as a result, to do a great
deal with speech rhythms. He gets counter-rhythms and other things
going. He also knows the value of repetition, even in a short piece,
but also the value of not doing it too long. In other words, he has a
sense of proportion, even in a piece of this length. I’m prejudiced
toward short pieces; I like the condensed statement. The harmonic
concept here is very interesting. He’s got a kind of contrapuntal
movement, mostly around this certain scale formation. It isn’t tonal
and it isn’t chromatic; it’s a modal adaptation, a scale that he’s
picked up somewhere or made up himself. But he sticks with the scale
sufficiently for the harmonic structure to come through.
“Young Once” by Scott Johnson, from Patty Hearst: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack [Eleketra/Nonesuch].
Luening:
The composer sounds as if he was trained in this country; he doesn’t
sound like a European. On first hearing, I would say that he knows
something about harmony, about the overtone series; in certain spots,
the music gets polytonal. He has a lyric quality, that’s his main
drive, but he must have composed a fair amount because he also has
enough sense to know that can’t go on with the lyric thing forever. So
he shakes his lyric things up and has contrapuntal devices going, some
imitations and some figuration, to keep things from sagging. Where I
feel he’s lacking a little is in the articulation of the phrasing to
bring out his thoughts; he gives it to us in a big pudding–a pudding
with some very nice ingredients, but it’s a pudding nonetheless.
Another thing I’d say about it, technically speaking, is that he ought
to get his instruments moving a little more. He sits on them on pedal
points that don’t help much: instead they detract from listening to
some of the nice things that are going on in the higher registers. You
can’t hear them because you’ve got that glue down there, gumming things
up.
Fourth Etude (“Fanfares”), by Gyorgi Ligeti, from Gorgy Ligeti: etudes pur piano {Wergo].
Luening:
I’ve heard some playing along these lines, most of it done by that guy
in Buffalo, Yvar Mikashoff. This piece is very funny because it’s hard
to tell whether it’s a live piano or a mechanical one. It’s a live
piano playing very mechanically, but nice mechanical. It sounds very
much like Nancarrow. It’s probably by a pianist, or if not a pianist by
somebody who is associated with pianists like Ursula Oppens and that
bunch, who are very good at this sort of thing. Stockhausen could do
something like this. People like him and Cage want to astonish you, and
they’ll come up with something entirely different that they’ve never
touched before. It’s a skillful piece of music, very well constructed.
Within the virtuosity, it’s terrific. I’ll tell you what my criticism
of the piece is: the overdoing of the scale. It’s like the overdoing of
the beat, or overdoing of anything. I don’t need it, I get the point,
and I’d like to be able to hear the other things he’s doing, which
interest me more. I like the crashing chord at the end; he has to do
that to over the mechanical thing and come to some sort of a
conclusion…. It reminds me of a friend of Beethoven’s, Czerny, an
excellent composer who wrote some concert etudes that sound like this,
where he’s doing everything under the sun. It’s not the same things as
Liszt where when he does an etude, he does all sort of other things
besides virtuoso display or Chopin, which is a whole different ball
game….At any rate, this piece could be by Elliott Carter, who sometimes
does stuff like this. And it could easily have been figured out by
Milton Babbitt. Will, I give up.
Gyorgi Ligeti.
Luening:
Ligeti? I’ll be damned! I admire him enormously as a composer, but I
would never have figured he’d write something like this! But this is
another example of what you get with the basic training: A guy can turn
around and, if he has to, write a virtuosos piece for piano. And he’s
done it so beautifully. He’s really managed to capture the character of
Nancarrow on a real piano, which is an accomplishment in itself.
Liner notes for Otto Luening's orchestral CD
These notes are from Otto's (only) orchestral CD, Otto Luening: Orchestral Works Newport Classic,
recorded by the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra, Richard Auldon Clark
conductor, in 1993. Otto was 93 at the time, and it was a chance to
thank him for being a mentor. Incidentally, following Schoenberg's
lead, he didn't charge for lessons.
Otto Luening has a quality in greater abundance than any other working composer, and perhaps the best name for the quality is perspective.
Through times of optimism and eras of social and personal tragedy,
Luening continues on an astonishing path to rediscover himself. The
orchestral works performed here range over seventy-five years from
those by a Luening in his late teens under the spells of Richard
Strauss and his mentor Ferruccio Busoni, to a Luening in his nineties
with a tremendous formal and stylistic breadth. But more stunning than
the length of this journey is the realization that this composer of
incomparable experience chooses now not to write in some easily
digested style for a mass audience, but to write some of the craggiest,
most challenging work of his career. One suspects that Otto is telling
us that the greatest gift an artist can bestow is not something
smoothed over or simplified in an attempt to be universal, but to give
one's own singular honest view of the world.
One
of the perspectives from Luening's vantage has to do with the silliness
of identifying oneself by ready-made labels, like "experimental" or
"conservative" composer. During some periods, Luening has been
portrayed as America's most experimental composer. For example, in
collaboration with Vladimir Ussachevsky, he produced the first
electronic pieces on this hemisphere, developed means to combine
acoustic and electronic instruments, and helped form an audience for
electronic music; he knew Benny Goodman, "Fatha" Hines, and other
members of the Chicago jazz school in the early twenties and wrote a
large scale concert jazz piece with Ernst Bacon, Coal Scuttle Blues, before Ellington or Gershwin; became immersed in Vedic philosophy nearly seventy years ago, and as a result wrote the Trio for Flute, Violin, & Soprano,
as Henry Cowell stated, the first aleatoric concert work; performed as
a pianist/composer for the original Dada events with Hugo Ball and
Tristan Tzara in Zurich in 1917; wrote some of the first music based
directly on the overtone series as explored by the German polymath
Helmholtz; studied Schonberg's Harmonielehre when he was
twelve years old; and was a close confidant of Edgar Varese, Cowell,
Carl Sandburg, Martha Graham, and Harry Partch - in fact, Partch
thought that Luening, who arranged his first New York concert, first
financial backing for his work, and critiqued his theoretical works,
was his earliest major supporter in the musical world and asked him
write the introduction for Genesis of a Music.
But
Luening's music also comes from Wagner, with whom Otto's father closely
collaborated, Richard Strauss, and his teachers Busoni and Philipp
Jarnach. He says that he became hooked on music by singing folk
songs as a small child on the farm in Wisconsin. Like Bach, Brahms, and
other musicians of the European "classical" tradition, he practiced
music from different perspectives; as conductor, composer, a performer
on flute, piano, organ, and percussion. His experience as a conductor
alone is astounding; after working under the greats of the early part
of the century (he maintains a particular fondness for Arthur Nikisch
and Strauss), he conducted in Zurich, in vaudeville, on Broadway, for
the first opera company devoted to American opera and opera orchestras
formed by the W.P.A., premiered Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All and Gian Carlo Menotti's The Medium, revived Paisiello's Barber of Seville,
and led a Croatian folk choir based in a Chicago tavern. And in his
seventies when he noticed he had begun to lose some of his amazing
power of memory, he reversed the decline through daily memorization of
a new movement from Haydn's piano sonatas. (Otto will read through your
orchestra score and later quote to you what the French horns are doing
on the two hundredth measure.)
All
this makes Luening an uncomfortable subject for music writers and
musicologists, who need to invent categories and hierarchies to try to
make sense of a complex real world. Luening says that he has long felt
justified in using any style to make a musical statement and that he
will tailor the style to the temperament and specialties of a
particular performer. Still, one of his favorite pieces of advice for
the em-erging composer (Otto now refers to himself as a sub-merging composer, and feels a great kinship between the two) is "Don't let them tell you who you are. You tell them who you are."
Luening's
perspective on the history of the culture can be a bracing tonic.
Recently we discussed cocaine abuse in New York. He said, "This is the
third cocaine epidemic I've experienced. The first was in Wisconsin,
when some of my father's university students were addicted to cocaine
sold as patent medicines in pharmacies. The second was in Zurich during
World War I, when many of Jung's followers and the Dadaists developed a
habit." Indeed, one can be quite intimidated knowing that the man to
whom you are speaking followed Lenin and his entourage as they boarded
the train on their return to Russia following the Bolshevik revolution,
that he attempted to visit the Dachau concentration camp in 1936, that
he investigated the musical foundations of Irish-spoken English with
James Joyce during the period Joyce was writing Ulysses, that
he knew the traditional culture of the Bavarian peasants as a
participant. Whenever one demonstrates something one thinks is a new
musical idea to Otto, he will say "Well, you know this direction was
explored in detail by such and such fifty or several hundred years ago.
You really should study the scores of Byrd, or Carpenter, or Debussy,
or Ziehn, or Varese, and see how they did it." I find that Otto is
always right about recommending these unexpected sources and suspect
that the innumerable composers and performers he has supported over the
years have found the same thing.
Luening's
perspective also provides the foundation for an amazing iconoclasm in
taste. For instance, during my last visit he was rhapsodic in praise
for the contemporary composer/flutist Robert Dick and the
singer/composer Mary Jane Leach. These opinions are startling not
because Luening has more than fifty years of experience over these
musicians, but because he doesn't feel any need to be cautious and wait
until their work has been established into some hierarchy. One comment
he made was "People say that Leach's music is hard to listen to. Well, Beethoven's
music is hard to listen to - at first." He has also expressed
enthusiasm to me for works by the Bulgarian Woman's Choir, Gil Evans,
Gyorgi Ligeti, and Frank Zappa.
Luening's
interest in creating a climate for others to make music led him to
cofound artist's cooperatives including the American Music Center and
CRI Records. This selfless support of those who would be creative
musicians continues, and he is currently coaching a composer just out
of college, Dan Cooper. Dan joins a list of such stylistic breadth that
only Otto could understand it, including Harvey Sollberger, Gil
Goldstein, Partch, John Corigliano, Ezra Laderman, Nicholas Russakis,
Malcolm Goldstein, William Hellerman, Charles Wuorinen, Alice Shields,
William Kraft, and Wendy Carlos. Yet despite the fact that these people
and the many others may feel as if they have nothing in common, they
seem unified in following some of the specific lessons that Luening
teaches. Among these are 1) Pay attention to register, since
counterpoint changes according to the audibility of overtones, a point
he thinks neglected in musical education. He also feels that careful
study of counterpoint is important no matter what one's style, and that
even if one's writing is not contrapuntal, all good composers are
united with a foundation in contrapuntal hearing. 2) Pay attention to
dynamics and phrase markings, parts of the language of written music
that also feels are usually insufficiently addressed. 3) Acquire real
life experience as a performer, whether as an instrumentalist or
conductor. 4) Study cultural history, because "what is old is new". He
also repeats Busoni's maxim that every experiment needs to result in a
piece with a beginning, middle, and end. 5) There is no handed-down
path for a composer, and everyone must try to figure it out as an
individual. This point seems to grow out of Luening's lifelong personal
motto and koan, "Know thyself, physician heal thyself."
Beyond
his concern for the artistic development of others, Luening continues
his own musical odyssey. For the latest addition to his canon of over
fifty orchestral works, we thank the wonderful young conductor Richard
Auldon Clark and his Manhattan Chamber Orchestra. Luening tells me that
he would like to continue in this direction, particularly in writing
shorter orchestra pieces, but is somewhat concerned about the costs of
copying parts. Frankly, this country should not allow such a situation
and one hopes that the evidence on this recording will generate support
for Luening's continued orchestral compositions. Still, just as he
would advise emerging composers, he is currently writing for smaller
forces, setting poems from James Joyce's Chamber Music for voice and piano. Although others can set these poems to music, only Luening was a member of Joyce's theater troupe, The English Players,
in Zurich during the second decade of the century, and only Luening was
coached by Joyce in his approach to words and diction. This return to a
singular personal history tempered by a tremendous journey of
development in discipline, achievement, and reflection, results in the
individual perspective that makes the work of artists like Joyce and
Luening so important for the wide world.
A Time Capsule that will survive One Thousand Years in Manhattan
Submitted by Jaron Lanier, with the collaboration of David Sulzer and Lisa Haney
May 3, 1999
Summary:
An
archive of the New York Times Magazine and other materials will be
encoded into the DNA of cockroaches which will be released in Manhattan.
Method:
The
familiar New York City cockroach predates the city’s geography. It has
survived ice ages, earthquakes, famines, and floods. It has watched the
dinosaurs come and go. It has resisted determined efforts by mankind to
remove it even from individual buildings. It would survive a nuclear
attack. It will probably outlive all other contemporary fauna on
Manhattan, including humans.
Some
of the cockroach’s genes are extremely stable. They have not changed
substantially for millions of years, and are therefore extremely likely
to remain stable for the next one thousand years. Associated with these
genes are DNA sequences known as introns which serve no known purpose.
While it is possible that these sequences serve some unidentified
function, their content is gibberish.
Recombinant
techniques will be used to overwrite this gibberish with the archival
materials. While computer memory is made of bits, which exist in two
states (zero or one), DNA is composed of four "base pairs"; so it has
four states. Therefore a given sequence of DNA can store twice as much
information as a similar length of computer memory.
A
single cockroach’s introns will easily be able to contain the articles,
letters, and other primary texts of one full year’s editions of the
Times Magazine.
Certain
types of information will be written into mitochondrial DNA sequences,
which are inherited matrilinearly and are not subject to sexual
recombination, instead of introns. DNA in this location is not as
stable, but will nonetheless remain useful for the required period of
time. Mitochondrial DNA is well suited to data such as digitized
photographs, audio recordings, and crossword puzzles. The continuous
nature of photographic and audio materials makes them useful even if
there are slight modifications to the data; indeed even the best
preserved photographs are constantly undergoing slight changes which
are not perceived by casual observers. While crossword puzzles are made
of discrete information (text), it is presumed that the further in the
future the puzzle is decoded, the more advanced the civilization will
be; therefore any errors caused by the passage of time will simply
generate an appropriately difficult puzzle.
Once
an archive is selected, it will be written into a computer file and
coded into DNA base pairs. The sequences will then be synthesized by
conventional protocols. Then the archival DNA will be ligated into
cockroach intron DNA via injection into eggs.
Once
the archival roaches are born they will be cultivated until the
population achieves at least the specified volume (8 cubic feet). The
roaches will be released in selected locations in Manhattan. Further
cultivations and releases will follow, carefully calculated to assure
that the archive is widespread enough to survive for the specified
period of time.
Within
approximately fourteen years, the archival roaches will inexorably
become so endemic as to become an ubiquitous and permanent feature of
the island.
In
order to decode the archive, a future historian would make use of
Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR) to amplify and then sequence the
fragments, turning the DNA sequence once again into the contents of a
computer’s memory. In order to facilitate decoding, the archive will
not make use of data compression or encryption technologies.
Justification:
This
proposal is not intended as a joke or social commentary. It is the best
technological solution to meet the demands of the constraints presented.
a)
The time capsule is to be placed in Manhattan, yet last for 1000 years.
Manhattan is one of the least desirable locations on Earth for archival
storage. It is a likely target for terrorist or military attack during
the specified period of time. Furthermore, Manhattan might very well be
subject to political pressures that would cause future residents to
make unplanned use of its spaces and other resources. Even "sacred
ground" such as Central Park, might become vulnerable to exploitation
because of unforeseen changed in technology and society. For instance,
travel might become restricted and parklands on Manhattan might be
needed to produce food. New forms of transportation, such as
spaceports, might become available that require large amounts of space
and are demanded in population centers rather than at the peripheries,
where contemporary airports are found. New space might be required to
house artificial phases of human life, such as cryogenically preserved
bodies or disembodied brains. Existing residential areas will be needed
for conventional human living, so spaces such as Central Park might be
drafted into unforeseen service. The archival cockroach will be a
robust repository, able to survive almost all conceivable scenarios.
b)
The requirement that the time capsule survive rising oceans and other
ecological catastrophes presents a dilemma. Suppose a conventional
capsule was placed on high, sacred ground, such as the grounds of the
cloisters. As the seas rise, that ground will become ever more needed
for habitation and vital services; it will lose its sacred status in
precisely those scenarios in which that status would be most needed.
The archival cockroach occupies the whole of the island and is immune
to changing ideologies of land and resource use.
c)
The desire was expressed to have multiple copies of the time capsule,
including perhaps one in the basement of the New York Times. The
archival cockroach easily meets this requirement.
d)
The archival cockroach exceeds the materials specifications: it is
water tight, impervious to changes in weather, easy to locate,
impossible to destroy. The data will last for well beyond the initial
millennium specified.
e)
Because the archival cockroach will exist in so many copies, it will be
easy to read the data without altering or destroying the archive. This
is the most attractive aspect of the archival cockroach. No future
historical revisionist will be able to locate and destroy each copy.
Potential problems and solutions to them:
a)
Will there be ethical or public safety objections? The DNA in which the
archival data will be placed is nonfunctional. The cockroaches will not
have an altered biological function. They will also not be harmed or
distressed in any way.
b)
Will genetic drift erase the data? In order to combat this problem,
seven copies of each article will be placed in introns. This number has
been calculated to assure that data will be recoverable even after the
most severe genetic drift that might occur within the specified period
of 1000 years.
c)
Any single genotype, such as the archival genotype, would be vulnerable
to changes in the environment. This is why biodiversity is important in
wild populations. The initial population of archival roaches will be
generated from a wide ranging sample of roaches in residence in New
York City (Periplaneta americana). In this way, pre-archival
biodiversity will to some degree be represented in the archival
population.
d)
If other cities choose to adopt copycat archival strategies, there is a
danger that roaches imbedded with an archive of, say, the Washington
Post, would interbreed with carriers of the New York Times archive. In
that case the roaches of Philadelphia would eventually contain a mixed
text record. This is not as great a difficulty as it might seem. As
significant sequence similarity is required for recombination to occur,
genetic crossover between Washington Post and New York Times articles
is extremely unlikely. Indeed, if crossover were to occur, an earlier
of instance of plagiarism or reprinting would be implicated. At any
rate, as long as each article is stored with its proper reference data,
it will be possible for future historians to reconstruct both archives
from a sample of roaches.
e)
How will historians know that the material is present? The beginning of
each archival segment will be comprised of a digital sequence that
serves as the "masthead". This sequence will spell out "New York Times
Magazine Time Capsule, 2000AD". A "Rosetta Stone" graphic will be
widely reproduced. It will contain the masthead base pair sequence
represented graphically, along with the letters the base pairs
represent, pictures of the mouth positions associated with each letter,
and pictorial representations of the cockroach. This graphic will be
published in the magazine, of course, but will also be chiseled into
all future city monuments. It will also be etched in industrial
artificial diamond disks the size of CDs. One thousand of these disks
will be hidden in locations in Manhattan.
The team:
Lead
designer Jaron Lanier is joined by Dr. David Sulzer, Professor of
Neurology and Psychiatry, Columbia University. Dr. Sulzer will
supervise the design, sequencing, and ligation of the archive. Lisa
Haney, technical illustrator, is responsible for presentation graphics
as well as the design of the Diamond Disk Rosetta Stone.
Budget:
This
project could be completed for the given budget of $75,000 at some
point in the very near future, as the costs of biotechnology services
come down. In order to complete it before the year 2000, it will be
necessary to accept a significantly higher budget and make use of
available tools and services.
Operon
Technologies’ published charge for creating DNA sequences is 60 cents
per base pair, but we are confident we will be able to negotiate a
substantial price break due to the quantity we require.
Since
four base pairs are required to contain the information of one byte,
and one byte is used to represent each letter in the common ASCII
format, sequencing will cost $2.40 per letter, unless we negotiate a
discount.
A
selective archive should fit comfortably in a 1000 page book. Assuming
a rate of approximately $1 per letter after negotiations, a page of
text will be sequenced for approximately $1000. The archive can
therefore be created using existing commercial services for under
$1,000,000. It need only be sequenced once, even though it will be
inserted seven times into the cockroach genome in order to achieve
redundancy.
The
cockroach genome must be mapped. This might sound daunting, but it must
be remembered that the cost of genome mapping is falling rapidly. The
cockroach genome is presumed to be similar in size to that of the
grasshopper; around 10,000 million base pairs, or about three times the
size of the human genome. There are probably about 15,000 cockroach
genes with roughly 5 introns per gene. The cockroach easily has over a
billion base pairs in its introns, which will have a capacity to
represent over 250 million letters. That is far in excess of what is
needed for the archive, even with the requirement of redundancy.
Plasmids,
enzimes, vectors, and microinjection paraphernalia will be needed-
totaling approximately $126,500. Housing and care for the cockroaches
and their eggs will be first rate, but will still only cost only a few
thousand dollars. Even though DNA has not been introduced into
cockroaches before, the technique is already established for Drosophila
flies and some mosquitoes. A research staff will be established in
Manhattan in order to adopt these techniques to cockroaches. While the
initial DNA microinjections will be expensive, costs will fall once the
techniques are better understood. Total budget for staff and physical
plant should come in at approximately $1,132,000 up until the time of
the release of the archive into the environment.
The
Diamond Disk Rosetta Stones will cost approximately $193 per disk. This
technology is also becoming less expensive at a rapid rate, so it would
make sense to wait a few years to fabricate and place the disks.
It
must be re-emphasized that, while at today’s prices this proposal must
be considered as a "conceptual" entry, prices are falling so rapidly
that the given budget constraint can be met in the very near future. It
would be entirely reasonable to select and capture the cockroaches at
the present time, display them to the public for a few years, and then
insert the archive into their eggs once prices have come down to the
specified level.
Illustration:
The
Archival Cockroach is shown in top and side views. Inserts picture the
encoding of text taken from the May 2, 1999 edition of the New York
Times Magazine.
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