menu

my islandora for an archipelago

2021-02-13 :: Al Min
#archipelago  #islandora  #music  #Pearl Jam  #Footsteps  #covers  #open-source 

Around this time last year I deployed Islandora 8 on my server and created a few objects with the intention of exploring the stack further. I never quite got around to the getting-any-further part, and now a new open source digital repository (developed mostly by the indefatigable Diego Pino, a major contributor to Islandora) is on the verge of being released. I’ve decided, both for work purposes and also out of personal curiosity, to give it a go, and since there are port conflicts in running both together, I’ve halted the vagrant box that was Islandora 8, and deployed the docker container that is Archipelago 1.0.0-RC1. Anyway, here is the same audio recording I ingested then as an Archipelago file:

fractal praxis

2020-06-09 :: Al Min
#fractal  #praxis  #music  #pandemic  #George Floyd  #Black Lives Matter  #Harlem 

There isn’t much to say that hasn’t already been said about the recent protests and the fucked-up-ness we’re seeing and have been seeing by the militarized psychotic police against our fellow human beings who happen to be cursed and blessed by blackness. Maybe the inertia of immense sadness and anger (the electricity of which I could feel when we happened to pass by the above march) is finally uncontainable.

It’s a strange time but so has it always been. It only compounds as the years pass. But still the fragments of something remain at the fringes (or maybe ubiquitous/obivious but awareness always only at the fringes like Kierkegaard’s indirect communication), something barely understood, inchoate, a sound outside the field of vision, permeating, pulsing, and moving one from within but just beyond comprehension. Today I really sang for the first time in a while and was surprised to feel something that had been there the whole time, even without outward song.

Recursive Child

2020-05-08 :: Al Min
#pandemic  #covid-19  #coronavirus  #quarantine  #pregnancy  #my son  #sonogram  #memories  #philosophy  #music  #language 

The mother of my pre-born son (pictured above) is making me watch Back to the Future Part III, which I vaguely recall seeing in its theatrical release in the ancient year of 1990. It isn’t any better in this Covid era. Oh, and yes, voy a ser padre en Octubre. I’m trying to remember what 1990s me would’ve imagined about current me imagining 1990s me because that’s my eternal return. An early memory:

I’m 5. I’m in our first home in Jersey City after emigrating from South Korea. I’m reaching for something on top of the fridge. I become keenly aware of my physical growth. I project that growth to the future and try to imagine what it will be like to look back from that future self. It’s my first clear memory of experiencing recursion.

Another early memory:

I’m on the plane. It’s my first flight. We’ve just arrived from Korea. I’ve never heard a word of English in my entire life, and suddenly it’s everywhere. It’s my first experience of the oddness of a new language—the sound of language without sense.

Philosophy, language, and music—these are my archetypes. Where do I go now?

My Islandora

2020-02-22 :: Al Min
#islandora 8  #music  #covers  #Pearl Jam  #Footsteps 

As I’m starting to post to this blog, I’m realizing that I need some way to manage my content, e.g. images, audio, video. I could just add the files to the static asset folders, but as I’m wont to do I decided to overly complicate matters and host my own digital library. At the museum where I work, we use an open source project called islandora to manage our digital library collections. Islandora 8 is still being developed, and the first production-ready release is due any day now, but there’s a rad development version that runs in a vagrant box, which is sufficient for my purposes here. Anyway, it’s up and running, though I don’t really understand how it all works yet. But here’s a recording I made ages ago of me covering a Pearl Jam b-side called “Footsteps” (please excuse the bad reverb and histrionics):

EDIT: Islandora is pretty much defunct, but here’s my Archipelago:

All Teh Taaaaaaaags