katerina,
to hear a text that becomes an image
aug 23, 2023
hi andre!
i’m not managing the weekly logs as i think i could, time is a crazy thing (‘: i should probably think of a better approach to timing and maybe limit the overthinking lol. now i'm home and hopefully life will get steadily calmer again. ## naive yearly i was at the [naive yearly](https://naiveyearly.com/) gathering in copenhagen last week, and even though i feel like the speakers were a bit more… maybe artsy? than me, the atmosphere and a feeling of closeness around was really nice. also, it was a great excuse to visit copenhagen again – i’ve never felt anywhere like i do there, even though i’m probably buying into a fairy tale that's maybe not so hygge in “deep” reality (looking into it). it's not a coincidence i’ve come across the event through kristoffer tjalve who has a copenhagen dedicated newsletter [wildflowers club](https://wildflowers.club/), but his probably more popular newsletter is [naive weekly](https://www.naiveweekly.com/), about “the quiet, odd and poetic web”. my favourite segment of the talks was probably when [benjamin earl](https://bnjmnearl.eu/) was talking about how he translated sound signal from a diy antenna and rendered a satellite image from it. i feel like it captures something important and sort of closes a circle for me somehow… `everything can be read``everything can be a text`
`everything can be a sound` excerpt from his [page](https://sasso.bnjmnearl.eu/) about it: > The next step is to transform the soft tones of the satellite into images. I'm working on that but having a bit of trouble with software still, but progress is being made. Today I will figure it out and I'll remember to make the sourdough today too. (…) Below is one of the images I've managed to untangle from the noise of the satellite. The image was taken yesterday as the sun was setting over the mountains. the image:  i’ll get back to in in a minute. i also made a few notes during [chia](https://chia.design/)'s talk: - to make space for oneself is to make space for one another - names are nothing, naming is everything - the history of space has always been that of hunger: where to locate, connect, move, survive, how to map these out, classify, spatially process, how to border, demarcate, and surrender to space to draw new worlds from others - when i wanted to know myself, i made myself a website - isn't story the original technology? - isn't it the inherent nature of technology to continue to scale? - the way to think about this worldmaking project, is to surrender to the kind of tender and poetic grace that words hold - my name is not my name until you call me by it - categorization, or over-categorization, is in itself a way to counteract the collapse of narrative all around us ## another little updates to the blog i’m still thinking about the blog in terms of “page of contents” and as a space for me to learn how to do some very basic (and very casual) coding, to observe a little bit of logic behind it and i also find it quite fun (: i added [a page for short notes](https://katerina.today/notes) that could maybe function as a space for more random, uncurated and immediate thoughts and things, and [a gallery](https://katerina.today/collections/gallery). it again takes data from my are.na channels and builds up on things i already collect. 〰️ what i wanted to try for a long time is to have and maintain my personal database of things i own and use. in the past i've already made a google sheet of all the clothing i have, with each item having different properties and so on, so i’m thinking what i could do with it, because the table is not so nice to interact with. i’ve started looking into javascript a little bit, and was thinking that maybe i could pick it up just by freestyling with the scripts i already have here (': i thought i wanted a simple thing: to copy the script for the images on the homepage, change the url (of the are.na channel), and then to somehow make it work with little adjustments. i couldn't do it, and when my friend send me the correct code, it looked quite different than the previous one. in my head the only major change was the type of content (text instead of image), but it changed so many things in the syntax (at least for me anyway). i couldn’t even reverse the chronological order of the “blocks” easily with the same line of code. okay i can maybe accept that coding and programming is probably more harder than how i picture it in my head, but on the other hand i don’t agree that it is something unnatural that doesn't happen anywhere else, as i’ve read in a random [note about intuitivness on quora](https://qr.ae/pyzl70) when googling “why is javascript so counterintuitive” (: now i’m circling back to the benjamin's antenna project and `hearing the text that renders as an image` and a few quotes from software and anarchy (which i finally finished!) and the project mage come to my mind: > A computer is a “universal simulator” and so with the appropriate peripheral devices, it is a form of meta-media, in which its users construct other forms of media, such as books, animations, programs, and so on. Reducing the forms of media one can produce is antithetical to the concept of computing itself, and makes any labour put into designing computers and their media look pointless. — Software and Anarchy > We don’t need a computer to publish text documents; pen and paper, and either patience or a photocopier would suffice. And, of course, you can draw and format the text however you like with pen and paper. What we need instead is a better book. — Software and Anarchy > You can't discriminate between things. You can't persistently identify unique objects. And you have barely any control over how you can enforce structure. If you don't have those powers, then you end up with the inefficiencies of interaction and performance. > Everything simply becomes hard if you don't have the powers of object identification and structural enforcement. — Project Mage, [The Elevator Pitch](https://project-mage.org/elevator) > We hope for the annihilation of odd constraints and the decentralisation of all things, and only then could we have properly liberated computing. To achieve this, we must dissolve hierarchies in our software, our means of production, and our social applications of software. What would be produced would be formless and incomparable to any computing systems that exist now; but what could emerge from such formlessness and adaptability would be absolutely beautiful! — Software and Anarchy and i’m thinking… why do we separate types of content, if we can read them in different ways anyway? and if it all comes down to everything being an electrical pulse (literally), or a text (symbolically)?