THE OUROBOROS COMPLEX REGULATIONS v3; 2/8/2008 All of the regulations given here are just ways to put big groups of problems behind jfm3, so he can worry and fuss over them in private without hindering anyone else. * Production Ultimate authority for decisions regarding materials produced by the Ouroboros Complex are held indefinitely by jfm3. This includes technical, legal, and logistical decisions, as well as creative ones. The Ouroboros Complex organizes its work into projects, each with a Schedule and manifest of recorded and/or performed results. * Anonymity The individuals associated with Ouroboros Complex projects maintain a high degree of anonymity. False names are used. In live performance, the face is obscured, and the shape of the body is disguised in some way. Individual voices are processed in such a way that they cannot be related back to the identity of the speaker. No interviews. * Distribution All works created by the Ouroboros Complex are distributed under a BY-SA Creative Commons license, in as many convenient data formats and over as many convenient data protocols as are reasonably available. Because of this licensing scheme, the authority of jfm3 may be usurped at any time. Simply demote the old name, select a new name, and subsequently disinclude jfm3. A lot of Ouroboros Complex projects fail, or are abandoned. Partial results may or may not be distributed. * Losses The Ouroboros Complex exists only to give structure to various creative activities. The decision to do a thing because it will profit you, and the decision to do a thing as creative expression, are so often mutually exclusive that profit is disallowed. The Ouroboros Complex makes the results of their work available to others at cost or loss, but never for the purpose of profit. Losses are the sole responsibility of jfm3. If there are accidental profits, they will either be spent immediately on the next project, given to an appropriate charity, or divided between those involved, all decided by jfm3 in a manner which may not be questioned. * Name The Ouroboros is a mythical snake, or dragon, which lives by consuming its own tail. This is meant to suggest the inescapable nature of the self, the original meaning of the term "cybernetic", and also that dreams can contain important insight (as F.A. Keule realized the chemical structure of benzene by dreaming of an Ouroboros). "Complex" is meant to invoke Freud, a large building divided into sub-dwellings, and more obviously the opposite of "simple". There may be more about any name that hasn't been discovered yet. But in general, the Ouroboros Complex names things very deliberately, with as much meaning packed into the name as possible. * Axiology Arbeit macht frei. It is important to disabuse yourself of any notion of being or becoming a rock star before entering into an Ouroboros Complex project. It will not make you rich. It will not make you popular. It will not make you sexy. It will not make you powerful. It will not glorify you. It will not make you more, or less, like anyone else. It will not repair you. It will not make you an intellectual. It will not alleviate your boredom. It will not give you something interesting to say. It will not reconcile you with the world. It will not save the world. It will not make the world a better place. It will not even decorate the world, or otherwise make the world more tolerable. It will not shut the world out, nor bring it in, nor declare anything regarding the world. Of course, there is always the chance it may do any of those things. If it does, it's a freak accident, it's not by design. In fact, if starts to do any of these things, it's a strong indication that you're doing it wrong. It satisfies, somewhat, a strange and difficult to comprehend creative urge. This satisfaction feels like freedom. It gives you a vanishingly small amount of a unique kind of self-understanding that is otherwise unobtainable. This self-understanding also feels like freedom. It gives you a means to put an impassable but legitimately transparent window at one end of that self-understanding, so that other interested parties (of which there will be precious few) may look in. That is absolutely, absolutely, absolutely, all this will get you. It takes hours, hours, and hours of frustration, failure, and depression. It is entirely not worth it. We're doing it anyway. That we're doing it anyway is not an act of poetic rebellion, iconoclastic catharsis, noble sacrifice, charming eccentricity, or significant psychological disorder. It's just plain old stupidity. We're doing it anyway. * The Schedule Every undertaking of the Ouroboros Complex has a very strict schedule to go with it. Invariably, this is the first thing to suffer catastrophic failure. Nevertheless, all involved must take The Schedule very seriously. You must behave according to The Schedule as if it were a medical treatment that sustained your life. Creativity can only be encouraged by certain kinds of psychological pressure. Given that any sort of rock star dream or mating dance related aspiration has been washed away from these projects, the only useful kind of psychological pressure left is imposition of strict order and discipline. For the Ouroboros Complex, the primary vehicle of this order is The Schedule. * Aesthetics Initially the Ouroboros Complex restricted themselves to audible results. More recent projects of the Ouroboros Complex are still centered around audible results, but occasionally venture into multimedia and/or performance. Calling these results "music" doesn't work. Using the word "music" in association with found sound pieces, indeterminism, and other avant garde techniques can insult and anger musicians who have invested a lot of themselves in the study of an instrument, style, or compositional form. The word "Music" also doesn't really describe the audible results to people who might otherwise be interested in listening. Ouroboros Complex projects avoid the following patterns in an attempt to break free of a few pernicious yet typical limitations on creativity. 1) Reproducing or accurately simulating sounds of traditional musical instruments. "Found sound" components may include traditional music, but not if that traditional music is the primary quality of the found sound. 2) Traditional narrative structures, political screeds, personal statements, rhyming verse, and in general word sounds that cause the mind of the listener to react as if a conversation were happening. Initially the Ouroboros Complex prohibited any narrative structure whatsoever. This has since been relaxed to include dream narratives, micro-narratives as occur in flash fiction, and other non-invasive narrative structures. 3) Deliberate copying of a musical style, or other intentional following of the influence of other specific artworks. Results must be authentic experiences, or at worst, clever means of pointing at authentic experiences. The Ouroboros Complex holds this kind of truth to be beautiful, or at least desirable. * Process Each project begins with this document and a blank sheet of paper. Some big questions then need to be answered as soon as possible. Can the project be accurately described in an elevator speech? If not, how will we know it? Do we have it all, or will we know by going where to go next? How does this relate to The Schedule? Are the results going to be audio, or multimedia? Will they be realized as a recording, as a performance, or both? If it is a performance, how much needs to go into the score? What parts of the results come from conscious deliberate action? What parts come from dream (sub/un) consciousness? What parts are left up to chance? Answering these questions leads to the development of project specific structures, and guides the construction of The Schedule. Regardless of all else, The Schedule must be put in place as soon as possible. * Equipment Ouroboros Complex gets very far by leveraging portable music technology against Hakim Bey's "temporary autonomous zone." This means that you must be able to box up all your equipment (minus a few things described below) and carry it with you for at least three city blocks without collapsing from exhaustion. Things are designed so work on projects can take place in any reasonably quiet room with electricity. Set up from empty room to a state in which real work on a project may proceed must take no longer than 15 minutes. Equipment can be generalized into broad categories; sound generation, performance controls, recording equipment, amplification, and glue. ** glue Glue means boring objects such as cables, boxes, small mixers, splitters, and so forth. The necessary glue is determined by what is being glued together. The most important thing to know about glue is that it must be managed very carefully, as the error of misplacing one seemingly unimportant cable can start an avalanche of failure that destroys an entire project. A mixer is much like the stone in the stone soup, except it is edible. The room must have a mixer with two channels per performer. ** amplification Electric signals form analogs of sound. Amplification is the process of enlarging those signals so that they contain enough energy to move speakers, which in effect translates the signal into audible sound. The most basic and essential amplification device is a pair of headphones. Each participant must have their own. Headphones must be comfortable to wear for many hours at a time. Some headphones are made for pleasurable listening, and some are made for accurate reproduction of sound. Serious work requires the later. Larger amplification systems have the advantage of being able to be heard by the whole body. There is research to suggest that we hear certain bass frequencies with our chest, for example. They have the disadvantage of being big and heavy, as any accurate air moving machine must be. If there happens to be an accurate amplification system in the room, we use it. Otherwise, a headphone mixer is brought. ** recording equipment There are two kinds of recording equipment required. One must be some kind of portable recording device, capable of recording at least two channels simultaneously for at least an hour, and somehow connected to one or two reasonably accurate microphones. This is for the purpose of capturing found sounds, and for recording performances. The other type of recording equipment is a computer with recording software and an audio interface with at least two channels per performer. If the project is to be recorded multi-track and edited, the recorder must be considered an accidental feature of the room which is then taken advantage of. There is no way to sufficiently set one of these up in 15 minutes. ** performance controls The usual performance control is a keyboard. It is important to think of the keyboard as the thing you touch, and of the sound production elements which may be housed in the same box as the keyboard, as separate. There is a wide variety of performance controls, try not to focus on one, but also not to focus on more than three. The only limitation as far as work in the context of the Ouroboros Complex is concerned is that the control surface must not require finger training. It may reward finger training, it may be more enjoyable with finger training, but it must be basically operable while wearing mittens. Performance controls may be "automatic" as in "automatic rifle". This is usually accomplished by augmented the object the performer touches with a small computer. ** sound generation The fundamental necessary sound generation device must be able to play back many pre-recorded short samples, and some means to modify such a sound in real time. It is also useful to have a more rudimentary subtractive synthesizer.