group ops

There’s been a lot of confusion about how exactly you capture the difference between two different media expressions of the same content. After a lot of hand waving I remembered the Pathfinder tools in Illustrator which address precisely this problem. Here is a diagram illustrating how the overlap of two media might be expressed.

Both expressions contain their own artifacts. 78rpm records take on artifacts (pops and hiss) every time they are played. MP3s aren’t changed by playing (though I have some ideas that could change that: sidebar) though they have plenty of artifacts if you’re willing to listen for them. The ur-media in 78s is also diminished on every play (this is illustrated as a hole in the star). Intersections and overlaps create something I’m calling ur-media, or media which restores something more like the original than either media may contain alone.