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Retro computing blogger Josh Renaud reports the recovery of long-lost algorithmic music software developed by American-Israeli inventor and cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen in 1986. Magic Harp was a set of six thematic music disks to be bundled with the Commodore Amiga, each dedicated to a different genre. Found was a beta version of “baroque,” where a Bach-like “artificial personality” conducts digital organs and spinets (image). After the deal with Commodore fell through, Kirschen’s innovations were largely lost to obscurity.
“There is hope, of course, that humans may solve climate change. We have built cooperative governance before, although never like this: in a rush at a global scale.”
– University of Maine evolutionary biologist
Tim Waring , on how cultural evolution among sub-global groups works against our ability to tackle shared priorities. “To solve global collective challenges we have to swim upstream,” Waring says of his team’s
research into the links between cultural traits and environmental crises.
Niklaus Wirth 1934 – 2024
Swiss computer scientist and 1984
Turing Award winner Niklaus Emil Wirth dies, aged 89. The long-serving
ETH professor’s legacy includes numerous programming languages such as
Euler (1965),
ALGOL W (1966), and, notably,
Pascal (1970), a stint at
Xerox PARC , and his 1995 plea for “
Lean Software ” (now known as Wirth’s law.)
“Those minerals are not found in urban centres. They’re found on traditional territories, or you will need roads and access to traditional territories to get to them.”
– First Nations Major Project Coalition Sustainability Officer
Mark Podlasly , on how Canada needs Indigenous consent to access many of the rare earth minerals required to reach net zero emissions. “First Nations are not prepared to see what happened in previous gold, transportation, and industry rushes” repeat itself, says Podlasly of his apprehension towards mounting efforts to boost domestic battery production. [quote edited]
In anticipation of the Steamboat Willey (1928) version of Mickey Mouse entering the public domain in 2024, Matthew Plummer-Fernández ’ hack of the cultural icon, Every Mickey , resurfaces on X. First shown in 2015, at the British-Colombian artist’s solo show “Hard Copy ” at NOME, Berlin, the 3D-printed composite of found 3D models “circumvents copyright by being a compilation,” Plummer-Fernández explains on X. Compilations constitute “an exception in copyright law for the creative compiling of other works.”
“Copyright only works above a certain threshold of importance. That’s something you learn as an artist. Your voice doesn’t matter.”
– Artist and experimental filmmaker
Robert Seidel , on how little leverage artists have against data-hungry AI companies compared to major institutions like
The New York Times , which
sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement the day before Seidel’s talk at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3)
“Rather than worry about whether bots can do what humans do, we would do much better to raise our cultural expectations of humans: to expect and demand that art—especially art made with the help of new technologies—testify to the full extent of human powers and human aspirations.”
– Culture critic
Jason Farago , taking stock of 2023’s advances in AI artmaking and deciding to ask more of humans rather than fret about what machines can do
In a love letter to Deluxe Paint , the popular pixel editor Electronic Arts published from 1985 to ’95, Swedish programmer Carl Svensson dissects and celebrates the package’s powerful drawing, animation, morphing, and colour cycling features that defined the workflow of pixel artists and game developers well into the PlayStation era. “If you’re an old school DOS, Amiga or even console gamer, it will have helped create some of your fondest memories,” writes Svensson.
“The growing awareness that unchecked centralization and over-financialization cannot be what ‘crypto is about,’ and new technologies like second-generation privacy solutions and rollups are finally coming to fruition, present us with an opportunity to take things in a different direction.”
– Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, calling for developers to “make Ethereum
cypherpunk again” by focusing on privacy-enhancing tools and
public goods —not casinofication [quote edited]
The “Unleashed” edition of panke.gallery’s recent AR group exhibition, “Animal()City ,” pops up at the 37th Chaos Communication Congress (37c3) in Hamburg (DE), releasing CGI creatures by Joachim Blank (image: The restless lion/ess , 2023), Eva Davidova , Meredith Drum , exonemo , Jonas Lund , Sahej Rahal , and Ingeborg Wie Henriksen. The show, curated by panke’s Sakrowski, draws inspiration from the ghostly presence of urban critters that, like people being siloed by online platforms and AI, seem to live in parallel worlds.
“Your own sense of reality becomes increasingly specific to you and your synthetic friends, but this isn’t happening on a neutral plane. Your friends work for giant corporations and are designed to extract as much value from you as possible.”
The third edition of Japan’s Osaka Kansai International Art Festival ponders urban futures with a group exhibition that asks “STREET 3.0: Where Is The Street?” Curators Miwa Kutsuna and Yutaro Midorikawa present works by international artists that hack the city with technology (Aram Bartholl , Simon Weckert , AQV-EIKKKM), calligraphy, or olfactory. Bartholl’s over 1,400 node-strong network of Dead Drops (2010-, image), for example, inserts USB flash drives into the urban landscape for offline data sharing.
“The deluge of automation will amplify whatever it is pointed at. If we continue to value engagement above all else it will excel at facilitating 24-hour content avatars, sophistry, and distracting novelty.”
– American artist and composer
Holly Herndon , on how prompt-based AI music generators like
Suno AI will further homogenize culture. “AI may thrive in satisfying [middle-of-the-road] preferences but that does not answer the question of how to revive everything else.”
Martina Menegon ’s interactive self-portrait I’m sorry I made you feel that way (2023) opens at discotec, Vienna, exploring new forms of care for our hybrid selves. Menegon’s blobby CGI avatar, generated with AI and personal biometric data, will show signs of deterioration the more the artist’s physical needs are neglected. When stressed, for example, the virtual portrait will refuse interaction and, eventually, dissolve into glitched abstraction. An AR extension adds a sculptural layer, spilling Menegon’s failing frame into the gallery.
“Still, I couldn’t stop tracking. My spreadsheet was the only thing I could control in a life I no longer recognized.”
– Brooklyn-based data artist and information designer
Giorgia Lupi , on logging her life with long Covid. In an interactive essay for
The New York Times , Lupi, who first contracted Covid in March 2020, recounts recording symptoms, doctors appointments, emergency room visits, medical procedures and costs with paint. “Every day is filled to the brim with appointments, meds, needles, bills and pain,” she writes of her ongoing battle. “The brushstrokes of my illness are suffocating.”
Trevor Paglen ’s audiovisual installation, Behold These Glorious Times! (2017), opens at Matadero Madrid as the second arc of “Synthetic Imaginaries,” a series of exhibitions curated by Julia Kaganskiy that examines non-human agency, intelligence, and complex systems. The piece, augmented with synthetic sounds and voices by composer Holly Herndon , confronts viewers with hundreds of thousands of AI training images in transition: from legible to machine-readable and, effectively, “invisible.”
“Like Bartleby, we would all ’prefer not to.’ Maybe it’s fatigue-induced, seeking relief from the incessant demands of 24/7 capitalism, careening towards meltdown. Terminally online, we ‘can’t even.’”
– American writer and
Spike editor
Adina Glickstein , contemplating exhaustion and melancholia in a terminally online, crisis-ridden world. Existential inertia can engender a productive refusal, Glickstein writes in her final (deeply personal) “User Error” column: “a wildcat strike of the soul, against a world where all manner of activity is increasingly apt to be flattened into work.”
“Due to the high plasticity and adaptability of organoids, Brainoware has the flexibility to change and reorganize in response to electrical stimulation, highlighting its ability for adaptive reservoir computing.”
– Indiana University Bloomington engineers, on the AI potential of (lab-grown) human brain cells on a chip. In their research, published in Nature Electronics , the team trained brain organoids connected to an array of high-density microelectrodes to master tasks like speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction.
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