INTRODUCTION Welcome to our Net Pirate Number Station. If you are a drug dealer or the agent of a national security group or of some kind of watchdog group or human rights organization or if you are a practicing socialist/communist spy, you are in the wrong place. You will be disappointed and should leave now.Otherwise, if you are just a plain person, welcome. We are happy to have you here. This "Introduction" page will be your guide to our site. We know you have questions. Everyone has questions. Whenever we invite someone to listen to our station, the questions start pretty fast. So let's get to them now.Q: What's a Prototype #44, Net Pirate Number Station? A: Basically, it is like a shortwave radio number station —on the internet— that broadcasts numbers. Q: Where do the numbers come from? Good question. We get our numbers from websites—any and all websites—big ones like cnn.com and little ones like that one you made in your room. Porno too! And gambling and sports. We go to all the websites to get our numbers. It's a very simple process. We have some software that takes us to these websites, grabs some text, converts it into numbers, filters the numbers and then transmits them to you using a prerecorded video host personality. Q: How long can I listen to your number station? Is there a schedule? A: There is a schedule, sort of. You see, we now have three different prerecorded video hosts. And each one has their own schedule. So sometimes you may come to our station and your favorite prerecorded host might be "off transmission." This will be sad for you. But don't worry--because your favorite host will be back soon! And in the meanwhile, the other prerecorded hosts will probably be working. So you will get to hear some numbers. There will always be numbers to hear because there are, in theory, endless webpages, more every minute. So you may enjoy our station forever, if you like. Q: Why do you believe that this will be entertaining? This is a question that you will have to answer for yourself. Q: The constant stream of data being fed into your station makes me feel sad--and the droning of the video hosts is eerie, and they stutter a lot too —are you trying to hurt us? A: No, not at all. Q: Are there already enough net art websites offering data-related content? Does yours "mean" anything? These are more questions that you will have to answer by yourself. Ultimately, we can only say that we hope you, the user, will look for meaning where there may not seem to be meaning. Like the medieval man before you who ate moldy bread that was full of witch juice and got messed up, we want you to see the world in a new way. We understand that it was probably easier to see the world in a new way a long time ago. But still, did you ever fall asleep on the subway? And when you woke up you had missed your stop but everything felt so good that you wanted to go back to sleep again? That's kind of like what we are going for here with our number station. Instead of just riding the subway like everybody else, we want you to be a different person. Does that make sense? Q: Is there a "paranoid" thing going on here? A: We have heard about a lot of so-called "internet conspiracies" and we think things have gone a little too far, maybe, but we are not ourselves paranoid. We like calming and trancelike stuff, not crazy stuff. Still, if you think there is too much mind-vomit on the internet, you have a friend at our station! Q: Are you angry about something? A: We don't want to talk about this. It's private. Now for some other good questions that we like to answer. Q: This seems a little confusing. Is it for "everybody"? A: Yes! It is for anybody who likes the hypnotic sounds of the prerecorded host voices. That means everybody! Q: Big picture question: Who thinks that there is an almost overwhelming amount of data on the internet and that anyone trying to find meaning in it is facing a hopeless task? Everyone thinks this. The "Introduction" page is now over. You are ready to have some fun at our station. Go click on the "Enter" button now. ----- More Information About Number Stations.
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TECH INFO In order to make this all work, we are using a PHP-based engine and Flash, XML, RSS feeds, socket server and some other cool stuff. But you do not need to know about this. Everything happens at the back-end. You don't have to see it or understand it. In another words, our station works like a live broadcast. Everyone who visits us almost looks at the same thing at the same time from wherever they are in the world. Our broadcasting schedule is randomly determined by our engine. There is no interaction. In other words, this is a one-way communication piece like a television or radio. You just sit and enjoy it. -----
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CREDITS "Prototype #44, Net Pirate Number Station" is part of an on-going series ofart projects which Yoshi Sodeoka initiated in 1997. There are more than 10pieces in the series to date. They have been shown variously at the WhitneyMuseum of Art's Artport, Thing.net, Soundtoys.net and Hotwired's RGBGallery and so on. In making them, Sodeoka has utilized differenttechnologies—including Shockwave, Flash, Quicktime and even DVD—alwaystrying to comment on issues of media, technology and humanity, whilecelebrating the analogue aesthetics of television and radio. To view thepast Prototype projects, please go to http://projects.c505.com/index.html. For more information on the prototype series as a whole, there is a very nice review by Curt Cloninger in the Intelliget Agent, an online net art zine by Whitney Museum of Art's curator Christiane Paul: http://www.intelligentagent.com/archive/Vol3_No1_reviews_netart_cloninger.html
C505 Yoshi Sodeoka: Concept, Artwork, Audio Sean Rooney: Programming, Audio "Prototype #44, Net Pirate Number Station" is a 2004 commission of New Radio and Performing Arts, Inc., (aka Ether-Ore) for its Turbulence web site. It was made possible with funding from The Greenwall Foundation. |