Still on catch-up.
– Google has open-sourced their machine learning system. This is sort of amazing, even if some of my academic pals are not impressed by it. Google is basically saying “even if you can match our code, you can’t match all of our data”.
– I mentioned China’s credit score / life score – here’s a more personal look at it.
– Other scary stuff: Mirriad can put ads into ad-hoc videos. How long until that can be done dynamically, depending on who is watching the video? Not long.
– “music / video social media” continues to be a thing: Fusic is a good example – and what happens as the tech from Mirriad becomes commonplace?
– And, lurking ‘way down the list is app streaming. Native apps, no install. Here we go again.
Late, again, but lots to talk about.
– Y Combinator is starting a research lab. Which is interesting in at least six ways. I, personally, hate the lack of speed in academia, but there are many things that said lack of speed enable.
– LineFORM, from the Tangible Media Group at MIT, is sort of neat. We currently think of our personal supercomputers as phones / black mirrors / etc, but they for sure do not have to be. (The actuation looks pretty cheap, to me, but the idea is particular)
– We went on an art field trip at work, and saw, among other things, the monumental Frank Stella retrospective at the Whitney, along with lovely things by Elsie Driggs.
– Ellen Jewett, on the other hand, is not much of a modernist, but is amazing.
– Biosciences just get more and more bonkers. I think I’ve mentioned CRISPR before, but it really can’t be mentioned too often. Note the money line of the “editable mouse” – that’s us in a few generations.
– Brian McFee pointed me at Neural Storyteller, which is terrifying and wonderful.
– If you’re not reading James Bridle, well, you can start now.
– Mat Dryhurst’s SAGA is super interesting and makes me feel like some Stack will steal it. But it’s also so XANADU-esq that it may be doomed to failure.
– Map projections, projecting.
– Uber, but for doctors. That’s basically Pager. Software is coming for your job. Look out.
– A black American man has applied for refugee status in Canada, citing unjust treatment by the police.
– I think I mentioned HOPSCOTCH, a mobile opera in 24 cars, before, but it sure is worth a mention again.
– The gyli continues to be amazing. That’s SK Kakraba.
– Saw the words “Long String Instrument” at Academy, was not disappointed by Ellen Fullman, who is the wizard behind it.
October 10, 2015 · by
thor · in
art
What a time we have, up here in Heaven.
– My man Stefan Maier turned me on to the music of Elaine Radigue, which is lovely.
– He likewise pointed me to the arcane folk at MSHR, who do…well, many things. “Ritual techno”? “Witch-house-hackathon”? Take a gander. (and think about LaMont Young, while you’re at it).
– Fugue Machine, by Alexandernaut, basically won the internet this week. Multiple play heads! Variable pitch / speed / direction! Amazing!
– While we’re here, Sonic Pi looks pretty great, as far as livecoding goes.
– GCHQ remain evil bastards who have no love. They’re watching you, now.
– But, China trumps the West: new “credit scores” in China are going to include social data, behavioural data, and the same data from your friends. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds.
– In slightly better news, some people are working on a mesh network for New York.
Once more with feeling!
– This Is My Jam is gone, but in the best way. Big love.
– Experiment.com is super interesting, and filled with some tricky things around conflict of interest and proof-of-expenditure, but has a bit of a huge ceiling.
– Novelty classical music performances generally hurt my teeth, but this Bach is … sort of amazing.
– Bret Victor is, as ever, not wrong.
– Say “forest megaphone“. See? (More to the point, the acoustic amplification of the tiny sounds of nature is super rad.)
– Always talk about nightclub history.
– I think these cats may have gotten blown up in the time between me reading this and me posting it, but a BitTorrent backed rogue / free streaming service has…lots of potential. (And some amazingly hard problems, but hey, c’est la vie)
– “Immerse yourself in synaesthetic alien vistas and control them like an ambient disco-god.” Well, sign me up for Panoramical.
– Stephanie Shirley on women and programming. Another amazing woman that I didn’t know about.
– More places doing the self-hosting thing: Known and Sandstorm.
– Went by Control today, and saw some gear by Mutable Instruments, and instantly fell in love. What’s not to like about a ‘Topographic Sequencer’?
– At the well-named Neocities, some neat words about IPFS and the “permanent web” – which is what I would call the distributed web, but a rose by any other name would be as much of a git / bitorrent backed filesystem.
– XENOFEMINISM. I mean, that’s an instant click, right?
– Some clever bunnies can do really scary good things with synthesizing photos from sketches.
– Twenty women who shaped electronic music. There will be a quiz.
– Wurrly is a bad name, but a machine that makes cover songs is…more compelling that you might think. There’s a future sneaking around here, somewhere, around hyperpersonalized music, edit culture, etc.
– If you’re the kind of person who is not instantly excited by a book called ABOUT TREES, well, I can’t help you.
Powers of two.
– I went to a PS1 Saturday show, and was really impressed by Rabit and JLin, who you can get hammered by here. PS1 also has the strangest, most awkward dancefloor setup of all time, for better or for worse.
– Libraries are running Tor nodes. Cue comments about tactical urbanism, etc
– James Holden famously made a patch for generating human timings from sequencers, which is black magic, but it got me thinking about the wow and flutter of real turntables. Do they have a similar impact on how rigidly sequenced music was heard?
– There are mics that can capture electromagnetic fields. Yessssss.
Polish, polish, hustle, hustle.
– Great articles on the current zeit by good people: https://medium.com/hand-brain
– The Pico-8 is a fantasy console that saves things in .PNG. It might be the best thing I’ve seen all year.
– Omenana is a magazine for African science and speculative fiction.
