Scanner

Overall, I liked this article, but it was a really quick gloss over his work and was missing a crucial component, for the most part - links to video documentation and/or sound. It's very difficult to imagine what a soundscape is like without being immersed in it.

The concept of reality was interesting - what makes a sound "real"? It isn't based entirely in clarity, although clarity is a very important component. Likewise, what dates a sound, makes it sound old or fake? Scanner's concept of a "Sound Polaroid" seemed like an accurate way to describe it, although the temporality and "real"-ness of the sound can be shaped or faked. A modern recording can SOUND like it's from the 60s. But what's interesting is how our minds associate certain elements of a sound with certain time periods and locations.

I like how Scanner started his recordings in the early 90s by the way he lived his life - he had a ham radio and would hear transmissions over the music he was already listening to. I like that he was able to take that and transform it into music/manipulated sound. I also found one of the last pieces he talked about, his "Promotional Show" to be pretty interesting, in that, "one show was reviewed favorably in Germany without the realization that [he] was not in fact present." In this age of digital transmission and storage, the presence of the artist is becoming less and less crucial, but also it seems there is a trend toward ways of performing digital processes live, ways that entertain an audience rather than bore them.