All

Alex Schweder’s “The Sound and the Future” Grooves Out to Slowed Down Techno

Greg J. Smith
● 06/09/2021

Alex Schweder’s “The Sound and the Future” opens at Clifford Gallery in Hamilton, New York. Its name borrowed from its lone work, the exhibition offers a fun glimpse into Schweder’s world of “performance architecture”—dynamic architectural and sculptural forms. Here, a made-to-order very Detroit installation, first shown at Wasserman Projects in 2016, sways again; a homage to Motor City’s dance music genre, silvery nylon inflatables undulate, animated by blown air, to a slowed down techno soundtrack.

Clifford Gallery

Indestructable Santa Luzia Meteorite Becomes De Facto Mascot for 34th Bienal de São Paulo

Greg J. Smith
● 04/09/2021

A phoenix rising from literal ashes, the 34th Bienal de São Paulo kicks off. As described in an e-flux announcement, its curators were inspired in resilience beyond COVID-19: a 2018 fire that burnt Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro to the ground. Drawing on an artifact pulled from the museum’s ruins completely intact, the 2 metric ton Santa Luzia iron meteorite has become a de facto biennale mascot, and it sits prominently at the entrace to the flagship exhibition “Though it’s dark, still I sing.”

Bienal de São Paulo

4156: “Larva Labs Made the ‘Citizen Kane’ of NFTs”

Greg J. Smith
● 03/09/2021
“I really see Larva Labs as having defined the form—they made the Citizen Kane. But they made it three or four years ago and there hasn’t been a project that’s pushed the state of the art since.”
– Pseudonymous NFT collector 4156, tipping his hat to Larva Labs and citing CryptoPunks (2017) as the precedent for his recent Nouns DAO project, which rethinks the governance, economy, and duration mechanics of on-chain avatar communities
Proof

Sarah Friend Hatches NFT Lifeforms that Require Community, Collaboration, and Care

Alexander Scholz
● 03/09/2021

Canadian software artist Sarah Friend hatches her latest blockchain-based social experiment called Lifeforms, a series of NFT-based entities that, “like any living thing, need regular care in order to thrive.” If not given away within 90 days of receiving it, a lifeforms will die and no longer appear in wallets. The first batch is currently in foster care at Kunstverein Hamburg as part of the “Proof of Stake” group exhibition. “After this, these lifeforms will continue their perilous journey through many hands.”

Lifeforms

How Interdisciplinary Practice Offsets Hyperspecialization

Alexander Scholz
● 02/09/2021
“There is a cultural shift that acknowledges that hyperspecialization—the trend towards narrower fields of expertise—is not going to answer all of our urgent questions. We know we need better understanding between specialisations, too.”
– Artist and environmental activist Kat Austen, on the emergence of interdisciplinary practice “as a means of creating otherwise inaccessible knowledge” needed to affect people’s decision and policy making
Wissenschaft im Dialog

EPISODE 08—Benjamin Bratton

Alexander Scholz
The MUTEK Recorder
Episode 08: Benjamin Bratton
Speakers:
Claire L. Evans
Benjamin Bratton
Profile:
Benjamin Bratton
Benjamin Bratton is Professor of visual arts at UCSD in San Diego, and author of The Stack (2016) and The Revenge of the Real (2021), which, respectively, schematize systems of scale and governance after Big Tech, and consider what politics in a post-pandemic world could be. Bratton is also the Program Director for The Terraforming, an initiative at Moscow’s Strelka Institute that tasks design students with tackling the radical transformations required for Earth to remain a viable host for life.
Soundbite:
“Planetary, or planetarity, implies many different things. One of them is the scale of the astronomic condition of the earth—the 4.7 billion years or so over which biomes and ecologies, species and phyla have emerged. This includes us, and our peculiar capacity for sapience. And our peculiar capacity to construct machines that mimic that sapience. All of that is part of what a planet does.”
Benjamin Bratton, defining ‘planetarity’
Soundbite:
“Recording for me is, like most writers, being a packrat of ideas that get gathered and sorted, and rearticulated. Like jokes, they get told over and over until they are just right and then you move onto other ones. And they get arranged and sequenced, and become books.”
Benjamin Bratton, on how ideas are collected, iterated, and ‘exorcised’
Book:
Benjamin Bratton’s follow-up to The Stack (2016), The Revenge of the Real (2021) is a polemic about the abject failures of governance that we’ve witnessed during COVID-19. Drawing on the rise of populism and the resulting ‘mask wars’ that politicized what should have been uncontestable science-driven policy, Bratton argues for a global polity that does not reject ‘reality’ but honours it through a compassionate collectivism that transcends the borders of individual countries. Looking beyond the pandemic, he critiques the prevalent knee jerk response to surveillance culture and challenges us to think beyond data ‘extraction’ from our lives, and instead harness planetary computation to build and, crucially, act on new communal archives (and models) to mitigate the climate crisis.
Soundbite:
“What we call ‘planetary scale computation,’ all of the satellites and data centres and capacity for modelling and simulation, have provided another kind of epistemological accomplishment: the understanding of climate change as a concept. It requires the recording, and archiving, of millions and millions of data points that become a model, that can be interpreted.”
Benjamin Bratton, on how the concept of climate change emerged from computation
Reference:
The Blue Marble
Taken on December 7, 1972, by Apollo 17 astronauts Harrison Schmitt and Ron Evans while en route to the Moon, The Blue Marble is one of the most circulated photographs in history. Benjamin Bratton notes “what Frank White called the Overview Effect—it preceded Yuri Gagarin, it preceded not only the Blue Marble but humans in space. It was conceived and announced in advance in the 1940s and ‘50s.” Even before we had the iconic image we had an idea about how it would stir our imagination about planetary unity.
Soundbite:
“It’s important to understand planetary and planetarity not as a metonym for the global, but as something multi-scalar: the molecular matters as much as the atmospheric in scale. Unlike the logic of Eames’ Powers of Ten, where all the scales stay in the right place as you zoom in, reality has scales that penetrate one another and overlap.”
Benjamin Bratton, on how the interrelations between different ‘levels’ of reality are what makes it so complicated
Reference:
A film “dealing with the relative size of things in the universe,” Powers of Ten might be Charles and Ray Eames most enduring contribution to visual culture. Capping a multi-year collaboration with IBM, the film was completed in 1977 and produced to help (better) establish a sense of understanding of the magnitude of known existence—from the subatomic through the “limit of human vision,” a zoomed-out view of the universe “where whole galaxies of stars are seen as one.” Starting from the human scale of an idyllic Chicago picnic the camera zooms out light years to the macro, and back down to the micro—perhaps the most ambitious cinematography in the history of film.
Soundbite:
“I feel like The Blue Marble image has lost a lot of its power. Flat earth conspiracies, climate denial, evangelicals—we know the age of the planet and yet plenty of people refuse to believe it. Could a sapient planet have the will to refuse to look at itself?”
Claire L. Evans, on the tactical ignorance that is unfortunately so common today
Soundbite:
“The paradox of this moment is that the models of reality we have are unable to act back upon reality because other models of reality that we have deep cultural investment in are hogging all the oxygen in the room. And we have a body count to prove it.”
Benjamin Bratton, on the undeniable COVID-19 metric that measures our collective shortcomings

Creation Without Limits

Alexander Scholz
Keynote
Creation Without Limits
Speakers:
Viktoria Modesta
David Hershkovits
Profile:
Viktoria Modesta
Viktoria Modesta is a bionic pop artist and creative director. Brought up in London and now based in LA, Modesta is known for her multidisciplinary approach to future pop and performance art with a posthuman edge. Her work embodies sci-fi in real life bridging music, body art, sculptural tech-fashion, and an otherworldly narrative. Modesta changed the world’s perspective on post-disability when she performed as the Snow Queen during the Paralympics 2012, wearing a diamond-encrusted prosthetic.
Soundbite:
“At the age of twenty I decided to have a voluntary amputation in order to safeguard my health and that just opened a Pandora’s Box. At the time I was so inspired by Alexander McQueen, Matthew Barney, and the choreographer Ganesh Acharya–and I wanted to see what the modern interpretation of being your own creator is. What happens when you become your own muse.”
Viktoria Modesta, describing her artistic awakening
Takeaway:
Viktoria Modesta is a self-described ‘bionic popstar’ and the fact that framing is so singular is compelling. In all her augmented fierencess, she commands a spot in the pantheon of what a popstar (or anti-popstar) might be alongside fellow trailblazers Arca or Sophie. While pop stars might not have quite the same wattage they used to, they might be getting more interesting. And a line of reasoning Modesta kept returning to that was tantalizing was the idea of ‘constructing’ a popstar or diva as making an avatar or worldbuilding.
Takeaway:
As with feature films, pop stars are constructs that emerge from the collaboration of large multidisciplinary teams—but all too often erroneously attributed to a ‘lone auteur.’ Viktoria Modesta was refreshingly candid about how her ideas emerge from close collaboration with niche specialists spanning not just cinematography and production but wearable tech and software art.
Soundbite:
“After being born in the USSR and going through hell a lot of the time—being in and out of hospitals—I found myself in London at the age of twelve and at the epicentre of subculture. I spent time interfacing with the most extreme and underground performers, artists, body artists, performance artists, musicians. At the time, it was the perfect escape for me, really, to study how we can redesign our identity through the arts.”
Viktoria Modesta, on her formative years in London
Soundbite:
“In 2012, I played the Paralympics closing ceremony and shortly after that I was fronting the Channel 4 campaign for Born Risky, which was the first ever piece of content that had any kind of budget behind it that tried to tackle how to rebrand disability with a much more bold creative approach.”
Viktoria Modesta, on the two opportunities that put her on the map
Reference:
The release of “Prototype” (2014) was a breakthrough moment for Viktoria Modesta. Directed by Saam Farahmand for Channel 4, the video asked viewers to “forget what they know about disability” and foregrounded an intensely positive (and intensely aestheticized) vision of augmentation and empowerment. Modesta slides and struts on illuminated and diamond encrusted prosthetics, asserting “I’m the pro. I’m the pro. Im the prototype.” Instead of falling back on narratives of ‘overcoming hardship’ (less than) she confidently positions herself as more than human. The video struck a major chord on release, raking up millions of views on YouTube, and earned Modesta a global platform.

Like many creators Viktoria Modesta used the Foundation platform to capitalize on her pop culture cache at the peak of the first wave of NFT mania. Distilling her “Prototype” video ‘spike dance’ sequence down to its most iconic moments—stripping away the song entirely—it serves a posthuman ballet of measured footsteps and scraping metal. Given the video‘s cultural impact, the short animation commanded an expectedly high fee of 30 ETH (worth $52,000 USD, at the time).
Soundbite:
“I feel very distant from a lot of the traditional ideas of transhumanism, cyborgs, and all that. I hope, however, that the pandemic, a time of reduced mobility, inspires people to think about their body and how it interfaces with technology.”
Viktoria Modesta, on stillness and introspection
Profile:
David Hershkovits
David Hershkovits is the founder of Paper magazine and currently hosts The Light Culture podcast where he interviews cultural disruptors of the past, present, and future. Steeped in the legacy of New York in the 80s, he focuses on the crossover of creative scenes and movements from the underground to pop. He has written for many publications and taught at University of New Orleans and in the School of Media Studies at CUNY, Queens College.
Soundbite:
“You’re obviously brave, but from a business view: when your ‘Prototype’ video became a viral success story, and suddenly people wanted you to work with them and you had many offers that you could have pursued in music and pop culture—and you walked away from all that to the MIT Media Lab, which took you to another world.”
David Hershkovits, acknowledging how Modesta easily could have focused on stardom after breaking through
Soundbite:
“I went on to work with a number of incredible innovators and that was all thanks to the MIT Media Lab. I became a fellow there six years ago and I think that was the teleport moment. I went from hospitals in the USSR, to London’s wildest subcultures, to the Media Lab in America.”
Viktoria Modesta, plotting her geographic trajectory
Project:
In 2017, Victoria Modesta collaborated with a cadre of digital artists to produce Sonifica, a performance of “3D printed interactive instrumentations focused on the taxonomy of art, technology and architecture” that was presented during Art Basel Miami. Working closely with fashion tech designer Anouk Wipprecht and fabrication specialists MONAD Studio, the collective developed interactive kit for Modesta including a accelerator-equipped prosthetic leg and bustier tusks that allowed her to play and modulate samples based on here movement. Improvising with MONAD’s ensemble of digitally fabricated instruments (playing strange quasi-violins) she blurred the line between fashion, prosthetic, and instrument.
Soundbite:
“Thirty-three years ago, everything that was on the periphery of my imagination, all of those projects—I’m working on them now. Looking back on it, some of my initial designs and worldbuilding with my body and the wearables, I was designing an avatar before I ever really thought about it. At the moment, I’m leaning into this amazing collective energy of people exploring everything from digital fashion, to virtual production to using AI, to the introduction of crypto art—it’s sort of everything I’ve been waiting for.”
Viktoria Modesta, being excited about the present
Commentary:
Modesta’s disability, the fact that she is missing a piece of her biological body, has given her a sense of the body as a mutable tool, which can be adapted, refined, and modified to suit different purposes. It’s also given her a sensitivity to the experiential aspects of identity—how it feels to be able to swap out parts of yourself. She brings this perspective to the formation of her digital identity, and seems energized by the idea of porting her work to the metaverse. Modesta indicated that the pandemic has served as a catalyst for people to take virtual identity seriously, largely because virtuality has become a more embodied experience—we’re living on our computers, she says, and suddenly realizing “wow, this is real life.” She hopes that people, contending with the limited mobility of their quarantine experiences, will start to think more deeply about what their body is, and how it interfaces with technology. Of course, people with disabilities have always been at the forefront of these questions, particularly when it comes to embodiment in virtual space. I think it’s instructive to look at the disability community in Second Life, which has been thinking through these issues for decades. A key reference for me is Our Digital Selves: My Avatar is Me, a documentary exploring the experiences of 13 people with disabilities in the virtual worlds of Second Life, High Fidelity, and Sansar, which was the product of a three-year research study on embodiment and placemaking in VR.

EPISODE 07—Tim Maughan

Alexander Scholz
The MUTEK Recorder
Episode 07: Tim Maughan
Speakers:
Claire L. Evans
Tim Maughan
Profile:
Tim Maughan
Hailing from the UK and now based in Ottawa, Tim Maughan traces the contours of contemporary phenomena including logistics and complexity as a journalist and technology pundit, which informs his science fiction. His debut novel Infinite Detail (2019), which wryly imagined a post-internet future, was heralded as Sci-Fi book of the year by The Guardian. He has also written screenplays for the experimental short films Where the City Can’t See (2019) and In Robot Skies (2018), both directed by Liam Young.
Soundbite:
“With new technology or emerging trends I always ask myself this simple question: what could possibly go wrong? It’s become my slightly sarcastic and tongue-in-cheek mantra for thinking about the future.”
Tim Maughan, on a simple and effective way to speculate (pessimistic) futures
Soundbite:
“I want to push back against Silicon Valley optimism which takes science fiction imagery and uses it to sell products and ideas, but minus the critical reflection that good science fiction always provides.”
Tim Maughan, on how Big Tech reduces big ideas to mere marketing
Book:
Published in 2019, Tim Maughan’s debut science fiction novel Infinite Detail flips the table of platform capitalism and delineates a post-internet world. In the same way his earlier short story collection Paintwork riffed on and extrapolated based on what was happening in augmented reality over the last decade, here Maughan projects from the stormy media post-Trump and -Brexit media environment. While things get dire in what emerges from the rubble, Maughan ends with optimism, imagining new decentralized networks growing like weeds.
Soundbite:
“One of the ways it bubbled up and out of me into public view was on Twitter, where, for a number of years, I maintained an ongoing Twitter thread that retweeted wide-eyed tech news headlines, with the added question: ‘what could possibly go wrong?’”
Tim Maughan, on turing tech cynicism into laughs and retweets
Reference:
More method than catchphrase, “what could possibly go wrong?” is something Tim Maughan asks a lot. Not a fan on myopic ‘tech optimism’ emanating out of and responding to Silicon Valley, he began using the question generatively. Following Frederik Pohl’s adage “a good science fiction story should be able to predict not the automobile but the traffic jam,” Maughan looks at a tech story—AI, CRISPR, self-driving cars—and imagines outcomes ranging from banal to horrific. The exercise became a long (now deleted) twitter thread, that Maughan revisited—and resurrected—in 2020 for a HOLO-curated workshop at Poland’s Digital Cultures Festival. Under his direction, 30 participants engaged in speculative headline writing by looking at choice articles from Maughan’s collection and asking: “what could possibly go wrong?”
Soundbite:
“Defenders of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk demand that we remain respectful and quiet, as tech innovators and disruptors save the world. Asking ‘what could possibly go wrong?’ is an act of defiance. It’s a way to see through capitalism’s hype cycles.”
Tim Maughan, explaining that, no, Elon Musk is not in fact Tony Stark
Soundbite:
“Companies pay people to come in and say ‘everything is going to be great.’ I offer a radically different service to that. It was a hard sell for a while—until Trump came in. Now I get more business.”
Tim Maughan, on how his design consultancy has pickup in recent years

Blockchain Disruption

Alexander Scholz
Keynote
The Disruptive Potential of Blockchain
Speakers:
Michael Casey
Catalina Briceno
Profile:
Michael Casey
Michael Casey is Chief Content Officer at CoinDesk, the leading media platform for the blockchain and digital asset community. He writes CoinDesk’s weekly Money Reimagined newsletter and co-hosts the podcast. Casey is also cofounder of Streambed Media, a blockchain-based digital rights management platform. Prior to joining CoinDesk, Casey was a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and on-staff Senior Advisor at the MIT Media Lab’s Digital Currency Initiative, where he maintains a pro bono advisory role.
Soundbite:
“Until Bitcoin came along, we had no way of enforcing digital scarcity—everything digital could be reproduced. Rather than owning the MP3 or JPEG, you had a license to it. If you tried copying that and selling it—you would be sued.”
Michael Casey, on what digital copyright has historically looked like
Soundbite:
“Now we have a unique identifier connecting to both the creator and the history of the authenticated claim. On this, we can start to build a whole new legal framework.”
Michael Casey, on the provenance offered by the blockchain
Takeaway:
We live in an age of abundance where (some) have access to resources, content, you name it. However, one resource that is not abundant is attention. We all have myriad actors competing for our attention—which makes it tremendously valuable.
Takeaway:
An immediate benefit of the NFT economy is seeing marginalized creators flourish. A stodgy institution like Soethby’s is a gatekeeper, arbiter of taste, and caters towards a very particular (white) audience. Decentralized platforms make it easier for marginalized creators to bypass middlemen and all their historical baggage.
Book:
Published in 2018, The Truth Machine laid out a foundation for many of the idea discussed by Michael Casey in his keynote. Optimistically framing blockchain as a “society building tool” Casey broadly makes the case that the coming token economy, ‘digital plumbing,’ and shift towards a new era of (increased) self-sovereignty will be net-positive for both creators and consumers. While the changes underscored by Casey and other blockchain evangelists felt distant in 2017-8, it’s remarkable how real and tangible they’ve become in a few short years.
Takeaway:
After the NFT collectible craze we may see massive disruption in fundraising. The smart contract terms that direct a portion of secondary sales to creators can easily be used to seamlessly fundraise for worthy causes—piggybacking philanthropy on top of this booming corner of the economy.
Takeaway:
Decentralized Autonomous Organizations aren’t on the horizon—they’re already here. A tangible manifestation of crypto’s foundational decentralization, blockchain-powered governance is already being used in all kinds of communities. It’s early days (and a nascent toolkit) but we’re embarking on what will be an ambitious experiment in how organizations, fandoms, investor collectives, record labels, and you name it are co-managed by communities. Will this result in efficient synergy or more middling decision making? Time will tell.
Soundbite:
“We had the dot com bubble, people were throwing money at anything, but the reality is that all of that speculation—that capital—translated into brand new business models. We got Google, Facebook, and Web 2.0. To get to that with crypto we need to get through the speculative process in order to get to our new paradigms.”
Michael Casey, reminding the audience that the dot com boom was intensely speculative
Soundbite:
“You can own rights to a piece of digital real estate in the same way you can own rights to a house. Why does this matter? It relates back to Marc Andreessen’s famous essay ‘Why Software Is Eating the World.’ That process is intensifying and it’s speeding up economic opportunity.”
Michael Casey, alluding to the visceral thesis of the venture capitalist’s 2011 essay as the reason were seeing such explosive growth in crypto right now
Reference:
Earlier this year, Kei Kreutler wrote “A Prehistory of DAOs,” a sprawling history of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Noteworthy DAOs, both active and defunct get air time, as does the significant influence of game guilds; ultimately Kreutler schematizes DAOs as “tokens, teams, and missions,” and “compelling environments players want to inhabit, recognizing narratives, aesthetics, and goals held in common.”
Profile:
Catalina Briceno
As a seasoned Executive and Scholar, Catalina Briceno addresses the digital transition of the media and cultural industries in her research work. Her expertise is based on 20 years’ hands-on experience as an executive producer, followed by decision-making positions within government-related organizations. She is currently a professor for the School of Media at UQÀM where she teaches Media Economy, Strategic watch and Foresight, as well as Information and Network architecture.
Soundbite:
“You spoke about crypto kitties, there’s this current pop culture project called Stoner Cats that’s an animated series that has big Hollywood names—Mila Kunis, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Rock—attached to it. It quickly raised $9 million for NFTs based on that intellectual property.”
Catalina Briceno, on one of the more high profile Hollywood-adjacent NFT projects
Soundbite:
“Currently, the returns from the crypto boom are very concentrated. An immense amount of wealth is in the hands of a small number of early adopters.”
Michael Casey, calling for more diversity and a deconcentration of wealth within the noveau cryporich
Commentary:
Michael Casey cited Silicon Valley’s current buzzword of choice: the “metaverse.” As a longtime reader of science fiction, I’m bemused by the universal adoption of this term to describe the virtual real estate of the coming crypto-era. As the writer Brian Merchant recently pointed out in a piece for VICE, the “metaverse” has always been a dystopian idea. The word comes from Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash—in that novel, the metaverse is a successor to the internet, a massively multiplayer online game that entertains the desperate denizens of a world overrun by mercenaries and corporate overlords. While the metaverse serves as an escape from reality, it reaffirms its hierarchies and exclusions: the poor wear low-quality avatars and have limited access to the gated communities of the virtual world. This isn’t the first time that Silicon Valley has missed the point of its favorite science fiction novels—don’t get me started on cyberpunk—but I hope the leaders in this space take pains to ensure that the leap from IRL to the metaverse isn’t over another yawning digital divide.

Emily Watlington on Alison O’Daniel’s Map of a Space “Chock Full of Incomprehensible Sounds”

Greg J. Smith
● 01/09/2021

Art in America Assistant Editor Emily Watlington considers Los Angeles artist Alison O’Daniel’s latest installation. For “I Felt People Dancing,” the hard-of-hearing artist engaged Kunsthalle Osnabrück (a former monastary) by inviting two local Deaf residents to map its acoustics. Of the resulting reverberation symbols on the venue’s carpet, Watlington writes they “capture the absurd chaos of the building’s acoustics … the feeling of being hard of hearing in a world chock full of incomprehensible sounds.”

Art in America

EPISODE 06—Jürg Lehni

Alexander Scholz
The MUTEK Recorder
Episode 06: Jürg Lehni
Speakers:
Claire L. Evans
Jürg Lehni
Profile:
Jürg Lehni
Making his mark on digital art over the last two decades, Jürg Lehni has mobilized Hektor, Rita, and Viktor, a series (2002-) of quirky drawing machines, as platforms for research on representation and histories of technology. Parallel to his robotic storytelling, the Zurich-based artist and designer has made open software for others, including the prescient Adobe Illustrator plug-in Scriptographer (2001-12) and, more recently, the browser-based “Swiss Army knife of vector graphics” Paper.js (2011-).
Soundbite:
“I often struggle with defining my position between art, research, and technology. I like using the metaphor of crop rotation to describe how I keep the fields fruitful.”
Jürg Lehni, on framing interdisciplinary practice
Soundbite:
“Questioning the role of hardware, I created a series of custom-made plotting devices that draw with an imperfection that is almost human. These machines struggle with the task—there’s friction, there’s gravity, there’s instability.”
Jürg Lehni, on how embraces fallibility in the machines he designs
Soundbite:
“When Hector went to the MoMA in 2008, the drawing became about its own motion diagrams. I explained that it takes an ‘Elastic Mind’—the exhibition’s title—to be able to read it.”
Jürg Lehni, on turning the brief to render the MoMA exhibition entrance title “Design and the Elastic Mind” on its head

NFTs, Blockchain, Music

Alexander Scholz
Panel
NFTs, the Blockchain and the Changing Dynamics of the Music Industry
Speakers:
Damien Roach, Lindsay Howard, Matthew McQueen, Phillipe Aubin-Dionne, Shawn Reynaldo
Profile:
Damien Roach
Damien Roach records under the alias patten, and works more broadly across design, installation, film, and live performance. His recent work includes shows at the ICA and Tate Modern in London, an AV tour with SHAPE Platform in 2019, and creative direction and design for Caribou’s Jiaolong label & Daphni project, and animation & artwork for Nathan Fake’s ‘Blizzards’ LP. He is also the force behind the 555-5555 web forum following his creative agency of the same name.
Profile:
Lindsay Howard
Lindsay Howard is the Head of Community at Foundation. A distinguished curator and expert in contemporary art, Howard has spent the last decade organizing projects with the New Museum, Museum of the Moving Image, Kickstarter, Eyebeam Art and Technology Center, and Phillips Auction House. She has written and spoken extensively about digital art and new approaches to valuation, and serves on the board of Rhizome, an organization that champions born-digital art and culture.
Soundbite:
“Foundation is a platform that is bridging culture and crypto to build mutual support among these two different communities. In my work I’ve traditionally played the role of curator, working with digital artists to help sell their work. At Foundation, I’ve overseen over 20 million dollars worth of NFT sales.”
Lindsay Howard, on how her work at NFT platform Foundation is directly aligned with her with her mandate to help artists prosper
Soundbite:
“There’s always been a quiet, non-mainstream, point of contact to encourage people to enter into this space. The community aspect, in terms of creators, but also the way that collectors are engaging with the work and what it is they are actually doing when they purchase the work. It’s about mutual support, and patronage.”
Damien Roach, on the (enthusiastic) invitatations from supportive friends that got him into crypto and NFTs
Takeaway:
A common refrain amongst the musicians in this session was that in less than a year, everyone has had their understanding of what selling music is or could be turned upside-down. Albums now feel quaint, touring no longer needs to be a given. The direct connection between NFT creator and buyer eliminates layers of intermediaries (labels, publishers, festivals, venues) and forces a rethinking of what good or service musicians can make, and might want to make.
Takeaway:
Stepping back from audience reach and sales numbers, the panelists engaged in a broader conversation about value. There was considerable excitement about moving beyond the thinking associated with fiat currencies as cryptocurrencies like Ethereum (or Tezos, Solana, etc.) can serve as more than just ‘another medium of exchange’—but also enact different ways of conducting business and mediating relationships.
Soundbite:
“Just because things are decentralized doesn’t mean they are automatically better. Who has seats at the table is important.”
Lindsay Howard, debunking one of crypto’s founding myths
Reference:
she256
One of Lindsay Howard’s first Foundation projects was connecting with she256. Formed in 2018, the California-based organizations runs a steady stream of events—‘Crypto Taxes Tips & Tricks,’ ‘NFTs 101’—and a Discord to usher under-represented communities into crypto. The group’s goal: set an inclusive “culture and tone” while the blockchain space is still forming and ripe for influencing.
Soundbite:
“The headlines have been about huge sales and crypto’s environmental impact. But there’s a lot more going on here—the radical redistribution of wealth doesn’t get the same airtime.”
Damien Roach, alluding to the narratives that don’t get coverage
Soundbite:
“The ways that artists work is by pushing buttons. And I think that a lot of the critiques around the environmental impact of cryptocurrency were not as well articulated as they are are now. So bringing that energy into crypto has improved the space tenfold.”
Lindsay Howard, on how the influx of artists and musicians into crypto during the NFT boom has been a benefit to the broader ecosystem
Profile:
Matthew McQueen
Recording as Matthewdavid, Matthew McQueen is an experimental all-genre artist and musician from Los Angeles. He is the founder of Leaving Records, a label established in 2008 whose roster of artists includes Dntel, Laraaji, and Ras_G.
Profile:
Philippe Aubin-Dionne
Jacques Greene is the artist name of Montréal-born and raised DJ and producer Philippe Aubin-Dionne. Between producing for artists like Katy B, Tinashe, and How To Dress Well, he has remixed acts including Radiohead, Flume, Rhye, and MorMor. Aubin-Dionne’s productions include the genre defining “Another Girl,” a revered and widely imitated house anthem with future R&B leanings.
Soundbite:
“Right as I left my job and a label partnership a crypto-savvy friend jumped onboard with us: now we have a social token, a DAO, and we’re experimenting with NFTs. We still have a lot of work to do with educating the community but it just feels like it aligns with our ethos and values and why we started a label in the first place—to provide our artists with opportunities.”
Matthew McQueen, on Leaving Records’ foray into decentralization and community governance
Soundbite:
“I found a rhythm on how to engage those that are and aren’t interested in crypto. Now I’m pretty at peace with it.”
Matthew McQueen, on learning how to engage NFT boosters and haters
Project:
“As we explore the possibilities of art on the chain and the promise of web3, we can maybe begin to let go of old systems.” Thus reads the caption for Jacques Green’s song “Promise” which was sold as a 1 of 1 edition on Foundation for 13 ETH in February (then worth $23,000 USD). Interestingly, the song wasn’t all that was for sale and the purchase included the publishing rights, in perpetuity. Viewed in that light the transaction could be considered a thrifty purchase of a copyright versus an extravagant purchase of a short video.
Soundbite:
“I have had my ups and downs with the traditional forms of publishing in the music industry. And for me, my first NFT sale kind of boiled down the endless possibilities that emerge from these new protocols.”
Philippe Aubin-Dionne, on his Foundation NFT sale
Soundbite:
“For the last ten years in the music industry, it’s morsely been an unending series of conversations about the tyranny of Spotify and the streaming economy. It is thrilling to be having conversations about new possibilities.”
Philippe Aubin-Dionne, on how great it is to be optimistic again
Soundbite:
I appreciate the candor with which the panelists discussed the pushback they received as a consequence of releasing NFT projects during the peak moment of NFT hype in February-March of this year. Matthewdavid talked about losing sleep; Jacques Green observed that musicians bore the brunt of social media’s fire and brimstone. My own band released a series of NFT stems in March 2020, and I can speak to how heated that moment was—I didn’t get much sleep either. In retrospect, it feels like a moment of collective hysteria, compounded by an extraordinary irony: the one thing that promised to rescue musicians from a year of extreme financial precarity was precisely the thing that most enraged and alienated a substantial portion of their fanbase. Thankfully the conversation has evolved, along with the technology. We now have secondary markets, social tokens for fan communities, and new forms of collective ownership and governance. As Foundation’s Lindsay Howard pointed out, artists have pushed the space forward by pushing buttons and inciting conversation. We must continue to do that—while also making sure that we do not reaffirm the existing hierarchies of the art world or bring the music industry’s more pernicious policies with us into the metaverse.

Poetics of Interactive Clothing

Alexander Scholz
Conversation
The Poetics of Interactive Clothing
Speakers:
Ying Gao
Joanna Berzowska
Profile:
Ying Gao
A Montréal-based fashion designer and professor at the Université of Quebec in Montréal, Ying Gao questions our assumptions about clothing by combining fashion design, product design, and media design. She explores the construction of the garment, taking her inspiration from the transformations of the social and urban environment. Her work has been featured globally, at venues including the Textile Museum of Canada, the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design, and HeK Basel.
Takeaway:
For better or worse, fashion is is cyclical and animated by rhythms of obsolescence that drive consumption. What if fashion was a more sensitive register of what was happening in the world? We have haute couture, why not expand our conception of fashion to include clothes that are critical or speculative?
Takeaway:
Like with art, fashion is about sparking the imagination of the viewer. Designers in interactive fashion and wearable technology are acutely aware of the centrality of representation. Unlike disposable ‘fast’ fashion, more conceptual designs wiill never be worn, so what or how they work (or how they were made) has to be communicated in other ways. To work in this field is as much about being a creative director or filmmaker as a designer of clothing.
Soundbite:
“For me, the primary condition for practicing design is the capacity to assimilate the idea that an object comes before its image. That is to say, you don’t create an object with the goal of creating an image. You must think of the object first, and the image second. These days, especially with Instagram, we’re tempted to create an image quickly, before the object itself is fully conceived.”
Ying Gao, on focusing on concept before worrying about aesthetic
Soundbite:
“For once, the body is outside of the clothes. The body isn’t inside the clothes. The clothes do not cover the body. They’re separate. The object of consumption has left that which consumes it. You don’t consume my garments, you observe them.”
Ying Gao, on how her fashion resides in the imagination of the viewer
Project:
Whether intentional or not Purple Skin (2020), captures the PVC zeitgeist of post-pandemic life. Described as “artificial skin,” Gao’s silicon, glass, and polyethylene design creates a protective layer between wearer and world. ”Ambivalently evoking skin folds and wounds,” the thick pseudo-fabrics and helmet play with material expectations while projecting an aesthetic that simultaneously evokes the smartness of a Vogue spread and the cringe of David Cronenberg-style body horror.
Definition:
Soft sculpture: Ying Gao’s shorthand for fashion-as-object, clothing that is ambiguous enough to escape being pigeonholed strictly as either ‘art’ or ‘design.’
Profile:
Joanna Berzowska
Joanna Berzowska is the founder and research director of XS Labs, a design research studio focussing on innovation in the fields of electronic textiles and reactive garments. Her research involves the development of enabling methods, materials, and technologies—through soft electronic circuits and composite fibers—as well as exploring the expressive potential of soft reactive structures. Her work has been shown in the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum in NYC, the V&A in London, the Millenium Museum in Beijing, and other venues.
Soundbite:
“Viewers can’t touch, look at, or feel the sensations of your designs—they can’t inhabit them. How do you think about engaging an audience?”
Joanna Berzowska, on the fact that most folks that appreciate fashion will never wear it
Soundbite:
“The pertinent question that follows is that although this object isn’t meant or destined to be worn, it’s represented by videos and images. We don’t have access to the object itself. We can’t see it, we can’t observe how it’s sewn, how it was conceived, how it moves. Most people see these objects through a screen or in a newspaper. That’s why I make such an effort to produce images that are faithful to my garments.”
Ying Gao, on the work that goes into communicating fashion that is interactive or makes use of novel production techniques
Reference:
Gao cites Paul Virilio’s The Aesthetics of Disappearance as a key influence while paging through a slideshow of her works. Written in 1980, the book re-centres several of the French theorist’s central interests—speed, perception, violence—with the rapid shifts in worldview during globalization. He writes “with speed, the world keeps on coming at us, to the detriment of the object, which is itself now assimilated to the sending of information. It is this intervention that destroys the world as we know it…” While Gao‘s designs do not specifically address speed they all hinge on the notion of altered or radically transformed objects.
Soundbite:
“We should redefine the word ‘useful.’ What is useful? A philosophical thought is more useful to a designer than a pair of jeans.”
Ying Gao, underscoring that she reaches for her Virilio before her Levi’s
Project:
A pair of interactive dresses, ostensibly about absence (or at least ephemerality), (no)where (now)here (2013) presents formalwear that is constantly in flux. Made of photoluminescent thread that responds to eye tracking software, the dresses’ shimmer is tied to the gaze of its viewer. Stranger still, there’s no fixed form and the state of the dresses when they are not being viewed, becomes a vexing question.
Soundbite:
Is design ephemeral? Everything is ephemeral, but not everything is disposable.
Ying Gao, making space for fashion that isn’t ‘fast’
Commentary:
Gao does not see herself as an ‘haute couture’ designer in the traditional sense, but her garments, like haute couture dresses, are not meant to be worn. Instead, they are “soft sculptures,” and when she considers the body, it’s the body standing outside, looking in. There is an element of post-human strangeness to Gao’s work, in this sense of fractured perspective between wearer and viewer, and because her garments have their own agency, are reactive, appear to breathe, as we breathe, continuously and unexpectedly. It’s beautiful but alienating, which is perhaps why Berzowska was so keen to pinpoint biological inspirations in Gao’s work, comparing her garments to octopi, the fractured perspective of houseflies, and even artificial organisms. Gao refused those interpretations, claiming to draw more inspiration from atmospheric phenomena like clouds, reflections, and mists. These, too, have a lifelike quality—biologically dead, but fluid, mutable, and volumetric. The biological and the chemical, the living and the dead, the metaphoric and the literal, the inevitable and the accidental—as much as Gao professed to compartmentalize, these are ambiguous dualities, especially when expressed through clothing. Perhaps because clothing is the permeable boundary between the body and the world, it can exist in a state of perpetual negotiation.

EPISODE 05—Xiaowei Wang

Alexander Scholz
The MUTEK Recorder
Episode 05: Xiaowei Wang
Speakers:
Claire L. Evans
Xiaowei Wang
Profile:
Xiaowei Wang
Writer and designer Xiaowei R. Wang is driven by beliefs in the “political power of being present, in dissolving the universal and categorical.” They are the Creative Director of Logic, and author of Blockchain Chicken Farm, a book that looks to rural China—not their homefront Silicon Valley—as a locus of tech-innovation. Wang’s recent artistic works include Future of Memory (2019-), an exploration of language and algorithmic censorship, and Shanzhai Secrets (2019), which explores consumption and copyright by way of Shenzhen.
Soundbite:
“Blockchain Chicken Farm is a book about tech in China’s countryside that looks at a series of contemporary moments. At blockchain chicken farm, this actual farm that I visited, for example, all the chickens wore chicken fitbits that tracked their movements—they were heavily surveilled—and blockchain was used in order to guarantee food safety and track provenance.”
Xiaowei R. Wang, on looking to rural China rather than North American or European consumer electronics as the locus of tech innovation
Soundbite:
“In terms of recording, in the book I have a lot of speculative recipes. Recipes are a format that I see as a way of recording in the field. Whenever I visit people, I try to share meals with them and gather recipes.”
Xiaowei R. Wang, on breaking bread as research ritual
Project:
Published last year, Blockchain Chicken Farm is not specifically about any of the things mentioned in its title but a sustained analysis by Wang that looks to rural China as the locus of tech innovation. Decentering the white North American or European tech consumer as ‘the subject’ of innovation, the book looks to food, agriculture, and the East Asian (agrarian) citizen as sites where new technologies are integrated into the fabric of everyday life. Leaning into the centrality of food, Wang includes a number of ‘sinofuturist recipes’ that extrapolate different futures, based on shifting norms and scarcity.
Soundbite:
“I want to quickly show you some of the things I have in my kitchen right now. I have some osmanthus flower—I’m going to make a tea with it. It’s a lovely cooling drink to which I’ll add licorice root, some hawthorn slices, and some hibiscus.”
Xiaowei R. Wang, sharing a fragrant kitchen inventory with MUTEK Recorder viewers
Soundbite:
“I really love thinking about the kitchen as a studio or gallery. There’s always something that’s really feminized about the kitchen and often ignored. Recipes are often discredited because it’s seen as a form of feminized labour.”
Xiaowei R. Wang, on resisting the erasure of the kitchen—by foregrounding it
Choice Recipe:
Following the MUTEK Recorder conversation, Xiaowei shared the following recipe with HOLO readers.

RED-BRAISED PIG TAILS

In large scale hog farming, stressed piglets bite each others tails off. Pig tails are a delicacy in the age of genetically modified, industrial hog farming where pig tails are being engineered out.

Ingredients:

1/2 inch stick of licorice, 1 tbsp of ginger, minced finely, 2 cloves of garlic, minced finely, 1/2 stick of Chinese cinnamon (cassia bark), 1 tbsp green Szechuan peppercorns, 3 star anise, 1 tbsp sugar, 1 bay leaf, 1 cup of soy sauce, oil, 1 pig tail, 2 eggs, cilantro, scallions

Preparation

  1. First, make eggs (for ludan, or soy eggs), boil eggs for 7 minutes and 30 seconds. Remove from heat and immediately put eggs in a cooling ice bath. Peel eggs, set aside.
  2. Fill a large wok with water and bring to a boil. Place the pig tail in boiling water and poach the pig tail for a minute. Remove the scum that floats at the top of the water. Remove pig tail and set aside.
  3. Dump the water out from the wok, making sure to dry the wok. In the dry wok, pour some oil. Put the pig tail into the wok, along with 1/2 a tbsp of sugar. Turn the heat to medium to carmelize the pig tail on both sides. Remove the pig tail once exterior has turned brown.
  4. In the wok, keep the oil at medium. Add in the minced garlic and ginger. Stir for a few minutes, until ginger and garlic become fragrant.
  5. Put the oil, ginger, and garlic into a clay pot. Add the pig tail, the two peeled eggs and the rest of the spices: cinnamon, licorice, Szechuan peppercorn, anise and bayleaf. Add the other 1/2 tbsp of sugar and soysauce. Put clay pot on stove and cover. For a soft boiled egg with jammy yolks, don’t put the soft boiled eggs into the pot—use the seasoning liquid as a cold bath and steep the eggs in the soy sauce mixture for up to 2 hours.
  6. Simmer at medium just until slightly bubbling, then turn heat to a low simmer for up to 2 hours. The longer you simmer for, the more flavorful the meat and eggs will become.
  7. Remove tail and eggs from heat, plate and garnish with scallions and cilantro.

(Non-)Human Algorithmic Creativity

Alexander Scholz
Roundtable
(Non-)Human Explorations into Algorithmic Creativity
Speakers:
Celine Garcia, Nao Tokui, Noah Pred, Sarah Ciston
Profile:
Nao Tokui
Nao Tokui is an artist, DJ, and researcher, and the founder of Qosmo, an AI creative studio based in Japan. While pursuing his Ph.D. at The University of Tokyo, he released his first album and other singles, including a 12-inch with Nujabes, the legendary Japanese hip-hop producer. Since then, he has been exploring the potential expansion of human creativity through AI.
Soundbite:
“I’m not interested in imitating what’s already been created. Nor am I interested in streamlining production to make hit music more economically. AI is a tool that helps you make interesting, meaningful mistakes.”
Nao Tokui, setting out some ground rules for the session
Takeaway:
Part of artists’ responsibility is to misuse tools. Designers never anticipate what creatives will do with their inventions, and the tensions between designers and users pushes tools (and practices) forward. AI intervenes in this process, creating new opportunities for us to be surprised by art, and also necessitating new criteria for evaluating it.
Takeaway:
Like the lawsuits over sampling that happened in the early 1990s, computer-assisted creativity will soon be the site of serious litigation. Many questions of copyright, influence, and derivative works will inevitably soon be in the spotlight, as we re-draw the boundaries between protecting intellectual property while making space for algorithmic (co-)creation.
Takeaway:
Generative approaches to making art are liberatory. They free creators from centuries old rigid framings of where authorship begins and ends, while also creating some space between intent and execution—separating the artist’s ego from the work.
Soundite:
“If a tool is too well-packaged, it’s difficult to misuse.”
Nao Tokui, on keeping tools a little messy and dangerous
Profile:
Celine Garcia
Celine Garcia is a manager and publisher who has produced numerous innovative musical projects. She is the project manager of French musician SKYGGE, who is at the vanguard of AI technologies and music creation. In 2017, she oversaw the publication of SKYGGE’s album, Hello World; shortly after, she joined together to found Puppet Master Label & Publishing in 2018.
Soundbite:
“There are two types of AI outputs. The spontaneous—generated by AI—and the assisted, where the machine or system helps the musician.”
Celine Garcia, clarifying the (quite) different types of art we can make with machines
Profile:
Noah Pred
Noah Pred is a Canadian artist exploring generative audio-visual and multimedia installation work. A Juno-nominated producer, he has released on labels such as Cynosure, Highgrade, and Trapez LTD. Founder of the acclaimed Thoughtless imprint, Pred is an accomplished DJ who has toured worldwide. As a freelance sound designer, he has worked for Native Instruments and Ableton, among others.
Soundbite:
“For me everything ranging from the tiling patterns of ancient mosques to the cut-up poetry of artists like William S. Burroughs falls under the umbrella of generative art”
Noah Pred, pointing out that there has always been ‘automation’
Soundbite:
“Algorithmic tools give us the ability to create compositions with intricacy that even the most talented performers would struggle to perform.”
Noah Pred, on how digital audio workstation (DAW) software and algorithmic tools render traditional notions of musical virtuosity obsolete
Reference:
The third edition of MUTEK AI Art Lab took place in spring 2020 and set out to “explore AI conceptual perspective, to deconstruct popular assumptions about AI, and to investigate our relationship with this cognitive science and its ever-increasing place in our daily lives.” Led by curator Natalia Fuchs, along with organizers Maurice Jones, Peter Kirn, Max Frenzel, and Habib Hajimolahoseini, the team convened a working group of 14 artists from 6 countries including Alexandre Burton, Lucas LaRochelle, and Isabella Salas. “The character of this AI Lab is all about how to figure out where creativity and AI expertise can connect and what they might do together,” explains Kirn in the recap video on MUTEK’s website.
Profile:
Sarah Ciston
Sarah Ciston is a Mellon Fellow and PhD Candidate in Media Arts and Practice at the University of Southern California and a Virtual Fellow at the Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin. Their research investigates how to bring intersectionality to artificial intelligence by employing queer, anti-racist, anti-ableist, and feminist theories, ethics, and tactics. They also lead Creative Code Collective—a student community for co-learning programming using approachable, interdisciplinary strategies.
Soundbite:
“AI does not really understand the problem you want to solve.”
Sarah Ciston, quoting Janelle Shane on how our desire to anthropomorphize automation is misguided
Soundbite:
“There might not be machinic agency as such, but generative systems open up new thresholds of speed and scale. Nonhuman generative systems can also offset existing myths of the genius auteur and the omniscient, rational machine.”
Sarah Ciston, moving beyond the usual AI analysis tropes of ‘intention’ and ‘authorship’
Commentary:
Nao Taokui explains that the history of music technology is a history of misuse, misapplication, and misappropriation. The makers of the vinyl record had no way of anticipating turntablism, for example—that was an innovation brought by artists using records “wrong.” Another good example is the early history of the synthesizer and the drum machine, technologies initially created to replace live string sections and drummers for the purposes of creating inexpensive demo recordings. Many musicians at the time were seriously opposed to this. The British Musicians’ Union—bless their hearts—tried to ban synthesizers in the ‘80s. Ultimately, however, artists figured out how to use these tools “wrong,” pushing and bending them to create techno, hip-hop, New Wave, post-punk, house, and basically all the interesting music of the 20th century. This seems to happen again and again: technologies arrive that claim to simplify a process while implicitly displacing or automating creative workers, until creative workers stop that from happening by making the technology central to a new form of creative work that only they can do. It’s like defusing a bomb by turning it into an engine. Why should AI be any different?

Digital Detox

Alexander Scholz
Keynote
Screen Time and Digital Detox
Speakers:
Safa Ghnaim
Katja Melzer
Profile:
Safa Ghnaim
Safa Ghnaim is a member of Tactical Tech, an international NGO that engages with citizens and civil-society organizations to explore and mitigate the impacts of technology on society. Lead of the Data Detox Kit and the forthcoming Digital Enquirer Kit project, before joining Tactical Tech Ghnaim developed partnerships and led workshops around the world.
Soundbite:
“I’m thinking about the big C, Corona—and everything that goes along with it. Not just the virus, but the news, the environment, and everything I have to take in when I’m doom scrolling. That’s why I’m here today, to talk about screen time and digital detox.”
Safa Ghnaim, on why the pandemic has made conversations about digital wellness more important than ever
Takeaway:
Pop-ups, prompts, notifications—smartphones are attention magnets that demand constant engagement and interaction. The business model of the internet is to capitalize on your attention. With some education and introspection we can regain some of our agency in this (over) stimulating media landscape.
Takeaway:
We no longer have a clean division between online and offline anymore. The lack of a distinction brings complications with it—today we’re convening to consider that, as citizens and users, we need a digital detox.
Takeaway:
Screen time is potentially nonstop and we have to reconcile that with the rhythm of the day, and our physiological need to rest and rejuvenate at night. You probably shouldn’t engage the internet the same way at 10pm as you do at 10am. Putting some thought into how and what you engage at night—setting limits—is an act of self care.
Soundbite:
“We’re not only talking about a digital detox for people that spend too much time on social media—this is about our broader reliance on digital technologies. The point of a digital detox is to acknowledge that the technology we carry in the palms of our hands and in our pockets is complex and multilayered.”
Safa Ghnaim, on how detox doesn’t necessarily mean ‘refusal’ or (techno) abstinence—just introspection
Project:
Collecting everyday steps you can follow to control your digital privacy, security, and wellbeing, Tactical Tech’s Data Detox Kit is a comprehensive and accessible resource intended to educate users of digital technology. Spanning data protection, misinformation, and mental health, the kit contains exercises and inventories that any individual (regardless of tech acumen or age) can go through to manage, moderate, and improve what and how they use the myriad apps and services in their lives.
Soundbite:
“We’ve seen during the pandemic that technology amplifies existing problems, rather than necessarily creating new problems. The creators of systems code their biases into them.”
Safa Ghnaim, on how human-designed technologies and systems reveal structural flaws
Soundbite:
“It’s not a foreign and distant land that we’re talking about, every country is having a critical conversation about technology use right now.”
Safa Ghnaim, on the global backlash against Big Tech
Project:
“The Glass Room“ was launched by Tactical Tech at Berlin’s HKW in 2016. Fusing exhibition space with classroom, the initiative successfully combines a growing library of artworks that problematize digital technologies with accessible public programming. Several ‘editions’ of the space have been developed, addressing topics including the internet of things and misinformation. The exhibition has toured internationally with stops in New York, London, and San Francisco—and its future itinerary includes The Netherlands and Australia. The exhibition and a ‘pop-up version’ have reached an audience of 219,000, globally.
Soundbite:
“Take a pause and notice your body before sharing something online. Maybe you’re experiencing a negative red flag emotion. Find tools and practices that align with your vision. A digital detox shouldn’t be a checklist that you fill but a journey you go on.”
Safa Ghnaim, on how a simple self-check is a productive pre-post social media strategy
Commentary:
Ghnaim began by acknowledging that a “digital detox” is essentially impossible, since we increasingly rely on smartphones as a lifeline to connect us to essential services and to the social fabric of our communities near and far. We simply can’t just throw our phones into the ocean. Only folks in an enormous position of privilege can even entertain the notion, and, as Ghnaim pointed out—going cold-turkey isn’t sustainable, nor is it really the point. I couldn’t help but think of Jenny Odell’s book How To Do Nothing, which places digital detox culture in a historical lineage of absolutist refusal dating back to the Ancient Greek Epicurean garden school. The desire to drop out is all-too-common: Odell cites, too, the failed utopian communes of the ‘70s back-to-the-land movement and Silicon Valley’s current obsession with Seasteading. “Utopia,” of course, means “no-place,” and attempts to sidestep the world completely, however well-intentioned, lead to myopia, tyranny, and collapse. Instead of total renunciation, Odell argues instead for “refusal-in-place,” a way of “standing apart” from the world without running away from it. “To stand apart is to look at the world (now),” she writes, “from the point of view of the world as it could be (the future), with all the hope and sorrowful contemplation that entails.”

EPISODE 04—Dorothy R. Santos

Alexander Scholz
The MUTEK Recorder
Episode 04: Dorothy R. Santos
Speakers:
Claire L. Evans
Dorothy R. Santos
Profile:
Dorothy R. Santos
Dorothy R. Santos is the Executive Director of the Processing Foundation. Overseeing the foundation’s advocacy for software literacy in the visual arts, the San Francisco-based writer and curator has been integral in helping execute its mandate of increasing diversity in creative coding communities. In addition to her work for Processing, Santos is a co-founder of the REFRESH curatorial collective, which emerged in 2019 with a focus on inclusivity and promoting ”sustainable artistic and curatorial practices.”
Soundbite:
“Dorothy is the Executive Director of the Processing Foundation, whose aim is to promote software literacy within the visual arts, and visual literacy within technology. Processing just celebrated 20 years, so happy anniversary!”
Claire L. Evans, welcoming Dorothy R. Santos to the MUTEK Recorder
Soundbite:
“Since this is The Recorder: I remember meeting Casey Reas in 2011. He actually led a drawing workshop and you didn’t need a laptop. You just needed to show up with paper and pens.”
Dorothy R. Santos, reminiscing about her first encounter with the American software artist and Processing co-founder
Soundbite:
“Little did I know, that ten years later I would be working closely with Casey Reas, Lauren Lee McCarthy, Daniel Shiffman, Johanna Hedva, Cassie Tarakajian, Qianqian Ye, Saber Khan, Evelyn Masso, and Toni Pizza.”
Dorothy R. Santos, providing a warm roll call of the Processing Foundation team
Reference:
Processing, the graphical library and integrated development environment created by Ben Fry and Casey Reas in 2001, has grown from a niche tool into a full-on cultural force. Conceived as a ‘software sketchbook’ that made programming more accessible to visual artists, an enthusiastic community grew around the open source tool during its first decade, contributing libraries and building-out its capabilities. Processing the application was later subsumed by Processing Foundation, the charity, which stewards development but more broadly promotes software literacy and education (and access and inclusion) in the visual arts. The celebration of Processing’s 20th birthday was celebrated with the release of the first beta of version 4.0 (image).
Soundbite:
“We constantly think about how we can document the evolution of different programming languages beyond Processing—and be stewards.”
Dorothy R. Santos, on the Processing Foundation’s expanded mandate

AI-Generated “The New Yorker” Cartoons Test Limits of the Non-Sequitor, Creators Ilan Manouach and Yannis Siglidis Say

Alexander Scholz
● 29/08/2021
“The Neural Yorker explores the limits of an important feature in the history and the modes of address of cartoon making: the non sequitur.”
– Conceptual comic artist Ilan Manouach and AI engineer Yannis Siglidis, discussing their neural network cartoon engine. Trained on art and captions extracted from The New Yorker cartoons, Manouach and Siglidis’ The Neural Yorker pumps out instantly recognizable but nonsensical pastiches on Twitter—“with hilarious (and sometimes unsettling) results.”
Hyperallergic
$40 USD