Sunday, October 29, 2017

Imagining Bestia Centauri "Live"



Technological innovation has made possible solo live performances that would have been unimaginable a decade ago. As a result, such excellent sonically immersive artists and comrades-in-arms as Lustmord and Black Mountain Transmitter are now able to offer very effective performances in concert.

This fact led me to imagine, hypothetically, what a live Bestia Centauri performance might be in an ideal world. Almost needless to say, the financing, the demand, and most likely the technology for such a performance is non-existent. But what if...?

One idea for a Bestia Centauri live event would be to create a wholly immersive environment using either holograms or VR headsets. Bestia Centauri would establish, say, a week-long residence at a difficult-to-locate venue, and audiences would be limited to fifteen or twenty persons per "performance". The venue would be decorated to resemble an old-fashioned mental institution, and audience members would be either seated in chairs or lying on gurneys (straitjackets optional for those especially adventurous audients who might want to try to replicate the out-of-the body experiences and past life regressions of Darrell Standing in Jack London's oneiric 1915 novel The Star Rover).

Bestia Centauri would play parts live, accompanied as needed by backing "tapes". Each audience member would be connected to monitors, so that Bestia Centauri would receive basic physiological information from random audients (brain waves, temperature, heart rate). Bestia Centauri would then modify the backing, the sound, the volume, the lighting, and even the room temperature accordingly.

Another idea would be to perform the music, as described above, but to have the audience in an induced hypnagogic state, in which they are balanced equally between waking and dreaming. Or perhaps the audience would be fully asleep, and the sounds would be adjusted according to EEG feedback, particularly during the REM stages of sleep.

An impossible dream for an impossible project.

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Absolutissimae Primi Mobilis Tabulae II


Absolutissimae Primi Mobilis Tabulae I


Unusual Star Discovered in the Lupus Constellation

"For more than four hundred years, astronomers have used telescopes to study the great variety of stars in our galaxy.

Millions of distant suns have been catalogued. There are dwarf stars, giant stars, dead stars, exploding stars, binary stars; by now, you might suppose that every kind of star in the Milky Way had been seen.

That's why a recent discovery is so surprising. Researchers using the Subaru telescope in Hawaii have found a star with spiral arms. The name of the star is SAO 206462. It's a young star more than four hundred light years from Earth in the constellation Lupus, the wolf. SAO 206462 attracted attention because it has a circumstellar disk--that is, a broad disk of dust and gas surrounding the star. 

Researchers strongly suspected that new planets might be coalescing inside the disk, which is about twice as wide as the orbit of Pluto.When they took a closer look at SAO 206462 they found not planets, but arms.

Astronomers have seen spiral arms before: they’re commonly found in pinwheel galaxies where hundreds of millions of stars spiral together around a common core.

Finding a clear case of spiral arms around an individual star, however, is unprecedented.

The arms might be a sign that planets are forming within the disk."


(First reported from http://www.messagetoeagle.com; original story no longer available.)