The Dead Media Notebook (57 page)

“During the day, the apes separate into small groups and forage for food, often travelling for miles and moving silently to avoid predators.

“And yet, when the day ends, members of the band find their way back together at a new resting place.

“Savage-Rumbaugh said this behavior shows that the animals communicate.
She noticed that whenever a trail crossed another trail, the lead group would stamp down vegetation or rip off large leaves and place them carefully
.

“’What they are doing is leaving little notes in the vegetation,’ she said. ‘Those notes are signals about where they are going to go.’ “Savage-Rumbaugh said the plants were disturbed only at the junctions of trails and it was clear that the lead group was leaving markers for those who followed.
Sometimes, she said, intersections would be marked by large leaves pointing in the direction of travel
.
“To prove her discovery, Savage-Rumbaugh said she twice followed the trail signs far behind groups of the apes. At the end of each day she found her way to the reassembled band’s new resting trees.” [Bruce Sterling remarks: It seems hard to describe bonobo trail blazing as anything less than a “medium.” While bonobos are not extinct, it seems quite plausible that our extinct protohuman ancestors also left “little notes in the vegetation.” While paleolithic notched bones are demonstrably 100,000 years old, the medium of trail blazing may well be several million years old and quite possibly pre-dates the human race.]

Source Apes Mark Trails in Jungle With Leaves by Paul Recer, Associated Press Austin American Statesman, Sunday February 15, 1998 page A20

From Bruce Sterling

“Although humans were present in Southwest Asia starting in the lower Paleolithic period as early as 600,000 years ago, no symbols have been preserved from those remote times. The first archaeological material attesting the use of symbols in the Near East belongs to the epoch of Neanderthal man, the Mousterian period, as late as 60,000 to 25,000 BC.

“The data are threefold. [Bruce Sterling remarks: the three varieties of these earliest known “symbols” were (1) red ochre (and other colored pigments) sometimes used to paint dead and possibly living human bodies; (2) Neanderthal funeral paraphernalia such as decorative flowers, teeth, pebbles and other knicknacks buried with corpses; and (3) etched bones, the world’s earliest dead medium.

“The third category of artifacts bears graphic symbols, bone fragments engraved with a series of notches usually arranged in parallel fashion.”

“Notched bones continued to be used in the Upper Paleolithic. Five deeply incised gazelle scapulae were discovered in an Aurignacian layer at Hayonin in Israel that date about 28,000 BC. The cave of Ksar Akil in Lebanon produced one bone awl about 10 cm long bearing some 170 incisions grouped along the shaft in four different columns. The markings consist of mostly straight strokes with some instances of overlapping into V and X shapes. The rock shelter of Jiita, also in Lebanon, also yielded an incised bone used as an awl that bears three irregular rows of markings arranged in a zig-zag pattern. The artifacts from Ksar Akil and Jiita are dated to the late Kebaran period, about 15,000 to 12,000 BC.

“Notched bones are also present in Europe during most of the Upper Paleolithic period, between 29,000 and 11,000 BC.
Incised bones were recovered... at the two Natufian sites of Hayonim and Ain Mahalla, Palestine, about 10,000 BC, whereas two other Natufian settlements in the Negev, Rosh Zin and Wadi al-Hammeh in Jordan, as well as Zawi Chemi, a contemporaneous site in northern Iraq, produced pebbles and various limestone and bone implements engraved with parallel lines
.
page 160
“In the Near East, as in Europe, the function of the Paleolithic and Mesolithic incised bones... can only be hypothesized.
From the earliest days of archaeology, the notched bones have been interpreted as tallies, each notch representing one item. According to a recent theory by Alexander Marshack, the artifacts were lunar calendars, each incised line recording one appearance of the moon. This interpretation cannot be proven nor disproven nor can it be ignored.
”
[Bruce Sterling remarks: Whatever people were up to with these notched counting bones, it must have been of considerable relevance and urgency to them, because this medium persisted around our planet for a record ninety- thousand years.]

Source Before Writing Volume 1: From Counting to Cuneiform by Denise Schmandt-Besserat University of Texas Press, Austin, 1992 ISBN 0-292-70783-5

From Carl Guderian

[Carl Guderian remarks: At a local used bookstore I found a Folkways record describing and featuring performances from the VORTEX, an experimental theater in San Francisco in 1957.]

“VORTEX: Entertainment for the Space Age “’Amazing!’ said a member of the capacity audience. ‘It’s hypnotic,’ said another. ‘Especially magnificent was the sense of space, limitless, incomprehensively vast, and awe-inspiring in its implications,’ wrote Alfred Frankenstein in the San Francisco Chronicle.

“They were talking about Vortex, a new type of theater, theater without actors, script or musicians, as presented at San Francisco’s Morrison Planetarium.

“The heart of Vortex is the dome, an entire ‘sky’ upon which can be projected patterns, colors, moving shapes of all kinds, and the acoustical system, forty high-fidelity loudspeakers which can direct sound at the audience from any one point of the compass, or from all points at once, or can rotate around the audience in a kind of ‘whirlpool’ of sound. This latter effect is what gave Vortex its name.
“Each composition is accompanied by visual effects projected on the dome by the elaborate planetarium lighting system and a battery of special Vortex projectors. These effects range from the small and humorous, as when a tiny planet and its moon do a ‘dance’ across the sky, to the grandiose spectacle of a whole sky filled with flashing patterns and colors.” [Carl Guderian remarks: “Folkways?” Of nerdy, SF-based experimental musicians? Not exactly a vanishing culture. Hey, maybe we need an oral history.

“Ya know, when Laurie Anderson first came to our little town.”. [The album features a diagram showing a top view of the VORTEX speaker layout. At each of 12 evenly-spaced stations along the inside wall are a woofer and two tweeters. At the center are two woofers, facing at 3 and 9 o’clock. There are also two more woofers, one at 12:30 and one at 6:30. The audience sits in two semicircles, presumably facing their respective sides of the wall. The sound can be switched to any or all of the speakers or rotated through all of them in sequence.

[According to the literature, the first performance of the Vortex was in May, 1957, sponsored by KPFA and the California Academy of Sciences. The music is your basic dry, but kinda interesting, compositions of blewps and bleeps you get when four white guys get synthesizers to play with. The musicians are:

Henry Jacobs, composer/engineer and organizer of the Vortex project. He had done weekly “Ethnic Music” broadcasts at KPFA for 5 years before this.

Gordon Longfellow, comes to us courtesy of Ampex Corporation of Redwood City, CA, and has worked with tape- recorded electronic music.

David Talcott, 6 years at KPFA and a huge Musique Concrete fan.

William Loughborough, worked with Harry Partch and helped design and build many of Partch’s instruments. He invented the popular commercial drum, the Boo Bam, and other highly complex percussion instruments.

[I guess I’m smirking a little, but this sounds like it would have been pretty cool in 1957, and these guys sound like they had a good time doing it. These musicians are probably still alive and there may even be some Dead Media readers who went to a performance, or know someone who did. Performances ran at least into the fall of 1957. There’s no mention of how much longer this lasted, though the record’s copyright date is 1959. The literature also says they’ve received inquiries from as far away as Japan, about reproducing this “theater of the future.” They mention Cinerama, too. So the technology died out, but not the concept.]

Source: Folkways album Vortex, Folkways Records FSS6301, 1959

From Richard Kadrey

“The Minifon P55 pocket-size magnetic-wire recorder (manufactured in Germany and marketed in the United Kingdom by EMI) is a notable example of miniaturization in the recording field. The recorder provides up to 5 hours continuous recording/playback; a choice of two recording speeds (9.1 in. and 4.55 in./second) is provided and the ratio of forward to re-wind speed is 1:6. The motor operates from 6-12 volt D.C. sources, and the layer-built 12-volt dry battery has an approximate life of 10-15 hours; alternatively, the Minifon P55 may be operated from a miniature accumulator (capacity 12-15 hours), or a transformer-rectifier (110/220 volts A.C.). The dimensions of the recorder are 1 9/16 in. x 3 15/16 in. x 6 11/16 in.; the weight, including batteries, is 2 lb.”

Source: E. Molloy, general editor, Radio and Television Engineers’ Reference Book, 1954, George Newnes Ltd. (pages 46-65, 46-66)

From Melissa Dennison

Here is what I know about Australian Aboriginal boundary trees and scarred trees. Boundary trees were created by tying gum tree branches (or in the case of very young trees, entire trunks) together with kangaroo sinews. With time the branches or trunks would knit together to form a very distinctive shape, undoubtedly man-made.

Such trees signified the boundaries between various tribes and clans. Sometimes they were also marked by carving various symbols into the bark. Scarred trees (usually just called “scar trees”) were created by cutting a piece of bark off a gum tree to use as a shield or other tool, or even a canoe. Usually an oblong-shaped piece of bark would be cut.

As the tree grows the scar grows, sometimes as much as 10 to 12 feet in length. The bark would be cut so that if you stood against the tree with your back to the scar, you would be looking in the direction of something significant, such as a water hole, burial ground, boundary tree, river, mountain, “women’s business” or “men’s business” site (sacred stuff, this).

Boundary trees and scar trees formed a system of signage throughout the Australian landscape. Aborigines would read the trees just as we read street signs and traffic lights. Unfortunately, European settlers cut down many of these trees and so there are now big gaps in the system.

I’m sure this information is well documented in various texts in Australia, but I got it from some young Aborigines who were generous enough to share it with me when I travelled down under.

[Bruce Sterling remarks: One can only speculate about the extreme age of this practice of using vegetation as media. It may pre-date humanity.]

From Richard Kadrey

“A low-price magnetic-recording tape has been introduced by the General Electric Co. It is manufactured by Salford Electrical Instruments Ltd. and sold under the trade name of ‘Puretone.’ It is a paper-based material with an output frequency response which compares favorably with those of plastic tapes costing almost twice as much.

“The new tape is wound on specially designed plastic spools slotted to facilitate rapid threading. The 1,200- ft. reels gives 32 minutes playing time at 7 ½ in./second. Twin-track recording is also possible. Highest-grade oxide with a particle size from 0.5 to 1.5 m is used in the magnetic coating. The base consists of a high-quality super-calendered Kraft paper.

“The coating has a high-gloss finish, which, coupled with the addition of a lubricant, greatly reduces the friction and wear on the recorder heads. On a typical recorder the response curve us substantially flat within plus-or-minus 1db over a range of frequencies from 50 c/s to kc/s. The tensile strength is about 6 lb. breaking strain, with a coercive force and remanence of 220 oersteds and 700 gauss respectively.”

Source: E. Molloy, general editor, Radio and Television Engineers’ Reference Book, 1954, George Newnes Ltd. (pages 46-65, 46-66)

From Richard Kadrey

Telephotography

In 1918 H. Nyquist began investigating ways to adapt telephone circuits for picture transmission. By 1924 this research bore fruit in ‘telephotography’, AT&T’s fax machine.

“The principles used in 1924 were the same as those used today, though the technology was comparatively crude. A photographic transparency was mounted on a spinning drum and scanned. This data, transformed into electrical signals that were proportional in intensity to the shades and tones of the image, were transmitted over phone lines and deposited onto a similarly spinning sheet of photographic negative film, which was then developed in a darkroom. The first fax images were 5x7 photographs sent to Manhattan from Chicago and Cleveland and took seven minutes each to transmit.”

Picturephone

“The first Picturephone test system, built in 1956, was crude, it transmitted an image only once every two seconds. But by 1964 a complete experimental system, the ‘Mod 1,’ had been developed. To test it, the public was invited to place calls between special exhibits at Disneyland and the New York World’s Fair. In both locations, visitors were carefully interviewed afterward by a market research agency.

“People, it turned out, didn’t like Picturephone. The equipment was too bulky, the controls too unfriendly, and the picture too small. But the Bell System was convinced that Picturephone was viable. Trials went on for six more years. In 1970, commercial Picturephone service debuted in downtown Pittsburgh and AT&T executives confidently predicted that a million Picturephone sets would be in use by 1980.

“What happened? Despite its improvements, Picturephone was still big, expensive, and uncomfortably intrusive. It was only two decades later, with improvements in speed, resolution, miniaturization, and the incorporation of Picturephone into another piece of desktop equipment, the computer, that the promise of a personal video communication system was realized.”