I was exchaning e-mails with Caro and it turns out that she was entertaining the idea of purchasing an iPod in the not so distant future. So I told her to stay the hell away from the them, since Apple products are for conformist Nazis. Oh Ho Ho Ho! I love controversy!! ^0^ Well, I'm half joking of course, but it's true that I'm not particularly in love with Apple's designs like many other people are. I dunno... It just gives me the creeps when I imagine a future where everyone is so in love with Apple products that everything is basically all pristine clean, white, shiny silver (any of the other monotones they use, makes no difference) and has slowly throbbing lights on them.... That's definitely not how I'd want my surroundings to be. Plus I don't like their attitude in general, either.

On the other end of the spectrum, I tend to love chaos, dirt, and the look and feel of hard core scrap metal parts interwoven into a complex yet completely intentional design pattern. So when I heard about this exhibition on NPR I had to check it out. So Jeremy and I went downtown to the woodstreet galleries on Saturday night. Man, it was AWESOME! Sure, there was the obvious "organic theme through a non-organic medium" vibe in the pieces, but what really intrigued me was the use of sound.

The question that I really wished I could ask the artist in person was whether the sound generated by a piece like the cave was intentionally composed as such or if it was layered randomly. It was fascinating to me because it gave off a scrambled ensemble of noise, yet it actually sounded somewhat melodic and even structured at times... And above all, I was almost able to relate to these seemingly random sounds. I think a lot of that comes from years of watching Japanese animations where sounds of robots and other types of mechs are quite common. It's already crazy enough to think that the sound designers of those animations may have gone through an extensive research phase to understand what kinds of sound a robot built in the future would make. I mean... they would have had to imagine what materials would be needed and in what way they would be used! So basically, in the end, they would have had to virtually build the entire mechanism in their heads in order to accurately portray the sounds! Phew~ And to see an actual incarnation of a large mechanical robot making those very sounds is quite stunning in person, I must say. Though I wonder if it was intentionally done this way to allow people to more easily relate... In other words, a real robot designer wouldn't have used these materials or at least not in the same way... leading to a generation of completely different set of sounds. Any robot experts around???