Captain Cathode and the Electron Gun Club

Brionvega Volans 17″, Mario Bellini, 1968

"The first four years of the course were taught with two Real-World Interface B14 systems, which we had shortened to increase mechanical stability at high speeds. The robots were controlled by a custom DSP/framegrabber combination (the DIdeas Cheap Vision Machine), for which we wrote a boot ROM with a variety of active vision subroutines and a simple LISP interpreter for scripting and debugging. LCD displays were mounted on top of the robots to display debugging information. These systems were probably the easiest of all our robots to program. You turned one on, pushed reset, and it was booted and ready to go within 500ms. If your program crashed, you dropped into a debugger. If the actual hardware crashed, there was a freespace follower in ROM that you could use to herd it back to home base. An important feature of this system was that the Lisp interpreter had a number of hard-coded safeguards to prevent students from damaging the robot. It implemented acceleration and velocity caps that could not be overridden. It also had low-voltage and over-current interrupts that would kill the students' programs if they tried to abuse the batteries. However, a serious disadvantage of the machine was that you could only conveniently program with the on-board Lisp interpreter. Writing new vision operators required off-board compilation and linking of C code, which was then burned into a ROM and tested. This is not for the faint of heart." – A Laboratory Course in Behavior-Based Robotics.

pete shelley’s ‘i like boys’ badge

Photos by Ian McCausland (x)

TO THE PATRONS OF THIS THEATER, I APOLOGIZE FOR INTERRUPTING YOUR SCREENING OF INLAND EMPIRE BUT I DO NEED YOUR HELP WITH SOMETHING. THERE IS A MAN IN ROW E SEAT 7 WHO HAS BEEN GOOGLING "INLAND EMPIRE EXPLAINED" ON HIS PHONE WITH FULL BRIGHTNESS ON, DISTURBING OTHER VIEWERS IN HIS VICINITY. HE HAS NO LOVE FOR FILM AND JUDGING BY WHAT HE HAS GOOGLED HE THINKS THAT ALL MOVIES ARE PUZZLES THAT HE HAS TO SOLVE LIKE THIS IS LOST OR SOME SHIT. I UNDERSTAND THIS IS AN UNUSUAL REQUEST, BUT I WANT YOU TO REMOVE THIS MAN FROM THE THEATER AND POSSIBLY KILL HIM. WHEN HE IS GONE, YOUR SCREENING WILL RESUME. YOUR PAL, DAVID LYNCH

The Velvet Underground and Nico performing on stage during Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable, 1960′s. Credit: Steve Schapiro

Like genuinely if you care about sound art and the way music is assembled from sounds and what music is and music that pushes boundaries and challenges conventional notions of what sound can do and how people can engage with it then you have fucking got to watch that film

The best music is the kind where you listen to it and part of your brain feels like it's doing homework