About

So, “The Analaogue Life,” huh?  What’s this all about?

I have always thought that analogue electronics seemed to have a certain organic and autonomous quality about them that their digital counterparts can never duplicate.  In an analogue watch, hundred of tiny parts somehow interact to keep perfect time, as if by Magick, whereas in a digital “beep beep, boop boop” watch, it’s just a small computer; nothing too exciting-everything we see these days is a computer.  Computers are wondrous inventions in their own rights, but you have to understand something: digital is only trying to reach the point of appearing to be analogue.  The way I see it, anything digital is nothing more than a tricker and a downright sham, trying to fool us into believing that it is the closest to analogue piece of technology out there that relies on a microprocessor or some other bit of science.  Analog is transistors and oscillators that rely on temperature and humidity; it is a physical signal in world full of intangible files.  Remember when a paper was written or typed?  Now it is simply an imaginary collection of 1′s and 0′s!

How can we ever lead happy, fulfilled, and well-adjusted (to what, though?) lives, if we can’t put our hands around it and turn some knobs for ourselves?  It is an impossibility!

Stay with me, now, as I go back to some more imagery.

Look at your record collection.  It’s wonderful.  Kind of old, some new ones mixed in.  Run your fingers along the grooves of the music contained in that black plastic circle.  Now pay your digital jukebox a visit.  Where is it?  You can’t touch all your downloads and I would bet my soul you won’t pass your torrent files on to your kids.  This is history, lost.  Part of your life, never to be seen again, let alone heard.

A photograph, alive with character, forged from light and some solution of Magick.  A digital representation of a a scene and the people most dear to you.  It loses it organic nature, because it is not of nature, it is of science.

The hammers and string of a piano, or the gigabytes of samples in your little computer.  You cannot recreate acoustic space or the amplification of a string or reed or tine or vocal cord through any use of digital approximation, because that is what it is-only an approximation of the real thing.

Any analogue object will require much more care and attention to detail than it’s digital counterpart, but the payoff is far greater than that offered by any binary-coded circuit board.  Choosing analogue means knowing every aspect of your item, and loving it for all of its quirks and peculiarities and, yes, even its “imperfections!”  Imperfections are only variances from the mold, the static digital assembly line which produces nothing new, and they make us who we are.

The goal of digital is to come as close to analogue as possible, so who could possibly deny the joy that could be offered by the real thing?  Analog is realtime control of knobs and switches and keys, before any terms like “digital latency” or “buffer size” ever had a place on our lips.

You still with me?  Good.

If we have an opportunity for to live The Analogue Life, then tell me, why do we settle for the digital one, the one with presets and default parametres?  Why don’t we step in and take control of our own lives?  Why don’t we want to be the artists who chose how we will paint our pictures?  I want to invent a new colour today!  So I will.

Why do we let everyone else tell us how things should be, because that’s how they have always been?

Why don’t we forget about any of these silly social constructs and just live on our own terms?

Why don’t we find the Truth and live for nothing but that?

Why don’t we find Love, the most organic and true thing there can be, and cling to it like life itself?

Why don’t we live The Analogue Life?

 

-Chandler Galloway