We Start

A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oknxMPMhCLo


A direct link to the above video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jfRAF400-G0

Here's a video I put up on YouTube last week which seems to be one of those pieces that trigger a strong emotional response - some people love it, some people hate it, not a lot of middle ground here. Here's how I describe it at YouTube:

This presentation is best enjoyed with headphones, in an environment free from distractions. Think of this as a drug-free mind-altering journey through the complex patterns that can arise from simple repeating structures to create our universe or any other.

This is an 11-minute "six-dimensional" audio deconstruction/reconstruction of the five-word phrase that started it all for this project: "We start with a point".

This track draws its inspiration from a famous 1966 experimental piece by Steve Reich called "Come Out":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Come_Out...

What do I mean when I say "six-dimensional" in quotes? It's very simple. The phrase "We start with a point" was placed on six looping audio tracks, the tracks were very gradually moved out of sync with each other as they looped, and it took over eleven minutes for this process to allow the six tracks to reach a point where they all eventually re-aligned with each other. We can say that each of those six tracks is a dimension, providing a unique degree of freedom. Is this recording really six-dimensional? Only in a broad sense of the definition of the term. The point, though, is not what we call this process, but how amazingly complex we find the audio patterns created by this process to be, and how the sound gradually moves from recognizable speech, to an incomprehensible but finely detailed soundscape, and eventually back to where we started.

Last week, in You are a Point at the Center of Spacetime, we returned to the idea that our universe starts from a point, and ends with a point, and everything else between is created by the constructive and deconstructive interference patterns of various waveforms, fractals, and repeating structures. With the idea of you as the observer interacting with these patterns, this is the simple idea being conveyed with this project, and in an artistic way with the above video. Thanks so much to all the people who have written to thank me for this particular presentation!

And PS, as I say at the end of the video, if you'd like to download your own high-quality mp3 of this piece to play on you iPod or other favorite player, it's available for 99 cents from tenthdimension.com/digital . Thank you to tenth dimension fans around the world for your continued support of this project!

Enjoy the journey,

Rob Bryanton

Next: Placebos and Biocentrism