What are the limits of repetition? In two audio explorations from Wintersession 2014, I asked this quesion. In “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four...” a loop of a common drum pattern (known colloquially as the “rimshot”) was repeated with additional tracks of the same pattern offset by approximately 15 seconds for two minutes and mixed down. The new track was then repeated with additional offsets following John Cage’s advice to sustain the piece for 32 minutes. In other words, John Cage’s quote served as an algorithm for the construction of a piece which tests the limits of interest in repetition.
In “Glitch Repeat Algorithm” (aka Jenny Jenny Algorithm), the prompt called for re-mixing and re-performing an exisiting work from one of our studio mates. Here, I took the opposite approach in terms of duration when I looped selections of a classmate’s JPG data and audio from Kevin Slavin’s Ted Talk on Algorithms.