For his new album, Electronica Volume II: The Heart Of Noise, Jean-Michel Jarre, a pioneer in electronic and ambient music, collaborated on a recording with Edward Snowden, the former CIA computer analyst-turned-whistleblower. Cue up their song, “Exit,” above.
At first glance, it perhaps seems like an unlikely pairing. But if you give Jarre, the son of a French resistance fighter, a chance to explain, it all makes perfect sense. Recently, he told The Guardian:
The whole Electronica project is about the ambiguous relationship we have with technology: on the one side we have the world in our pocket, on on the other, we are spied on constantly. There are tracks about the erotic relationship we have with technology, the way we touch our smartphones more than our partners, about CCTV surveillance, about love in the age of Tindr. It seemed quite appropriate to collaborate not with a musician but someone who literally symbolises this crazy relationship we have with technology.
A lot of what Jarre and Snowden were trying to accomplish with the song–musically, conceptually, ideologically, etc.–gets explained in the video below. Listening to Snowden talk about the meaning of the song’s title (“Exit” means “things have to change,” “it’s time to leave, it’s time to do something else, it’s time to find a better way”), you’ll get the sense that “Exit” is an electronic protest song befitting our digital age. Out with the folk music, in with the techno.
It is the end of term this week and my film production students asked me to name my favorite part of filmmaking. I told them it’s directing, as it’s something I so rarely get to do (compared to writing) yet so involving that an entire day goes by in a flash. Regardless, I always pop out the other side knowing I was at my absolute creative best. I was in the “zone” or as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called it in 1990, “the flow state.” And in a wonderful bit of synchronicity, not a little while later, I have been charged with presenting to you this example of artificial intelligence (AI) creativity. It similarly uses this understanding of the flow state to create.
In the above video, the Flow Machine developed by François Pachet at Sony CSL-Paris has been fed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”, and then asked to orchestrate “cover versions” following the rules set down by a genre–say bossa nova or electronic chill music–or a song itself, in this case being the Beatles’ “Penny Lane.”
Previous attempts to create random computer music have resulted in exactly that–random notes, drawn from a selection determined by a programmer. But that isn’t how creativity works. When we create, we understand our parameters already, subconsciously, and not only that, we know what we and others have done before, what “pushes the envelope” compared to using a completely wrong element, and what makes our own creativity unique. (If we discover it and emphasize the latter over and over, it’s called style.)
The Flow Machine project aims to understand style and treat it as a computational object through which other information can pass. That’s what we’re seeing in the above video. For a more thorough explanation of Flow Machine, watch this video.
Supposedly, this will help us poor human beings in the end, as it might (it’s never explained how) help us get into our own flow state more readily.
But really, that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m more imagining a night club sometime in the future where Beatles androids play not just their hits, but the hits of others as if John, Paul, George and Ringo wrote them instead. (Yes, I know that has already been done. By humans.) And your local used record shop will have a lot of LPs full of classical versions of Beatles hits.
It’s an interesting video, but I wouldn’t pack up your guitars yet folks!
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
The Japanese term kaizen, which just means something like “good change,” has come to signify in global management culture a process of continuous small-scale improvement — an element of the “Japanese business philosophy” so enviously scrutinized during that country’s postwar economic boom. Toyota has done the most to associate themselves with the idea of kaizen-as-continuous-improvement, but it has made its way to countless other businesses, including foreign ones selling completely different products; even the American grocery store Trader Joe’s has worked the word into their internal customer-service lexicon.
These mini-documentaries take in-depth looks at the nuts and bolts (sometimes literally) of production systems that have evolved, small improvement after small improvement, over decades or indeed centuries. You can see in action every stage of these hybrid processes of advanced and highly specialized technology with skilled and sometimes even artisanal human labor, somehow at once elaborate and elegant. This goes for every product featured, no matter how important or trivial it may seem. (I got hooked myself after watching one on chicken-shaped sweets.)
Even non-Japanese-speakers can enjoy all of The Making’s clear and almost completely visual-driven episodes, but the JST has also made select ones available with English subtitles (see top playlist) in order to tell the world all about what it takes to make what it has come to see as quintessentially Japanese, like urban railroad cars, steel balls (of many uses, including but not limited to pachinko machines), and Hina dolls.
Any American old-timer will tell you that, back in their day — a time when the United States’ former enemy had yet to fully rebuild its economy, let alone to become a technological leader — the “made in Japan” stamp signified a piece of junk. These videos show us, in detail, what it took to refute that notion for good.
There is a perpetual argument among stringed instrument aficionados about the esoteric value of so-called “tonewoods.” Certainly, to most discriminating ears, the differences between an acoustic guitar, mandolin, or violin made of solid spruce or maple and one made of plywood seem sonically obvious. When it comes to electric guitars, the distinctions between materials can seem more negligible. In blind tests many of us might have some difficulty telling the difference between an electric guitar made of the finest woods and one made of cheap balsa, lucite, or even an oil can. (Not that differences don’t exist!) It’s hardly controversial to point out that acoustic instruments depend upon their materials and workmanship in ways electric instruments don’t.
So how might discriminating ears respond to an electric, digitally 3‑D printed acrylic violin, based loosely on a real Stradivarius? Can such an instrument replicate the sweet sustain of an acoustic violin, Strad or otherwise? You can judge for yourself in the demonstrations here. Created by French engineer and musician Laurent Bernadac, the “3Dvarius”—the world’s first 3‑D printed violin—is perhaps, reports Wired, “a harbinger of what’s to come for musical instruments.” Critics have shown how it falls far short of recreating the sound of a traditional instrument. (See violinist Joanna Wronko compare the two at a TEDx Amsterdam talk here). And yes, the 3Dvarius may look “more like an avian skeleton than a stringed instrument.” But it does have some advantages over traditional violins made of wood.
For one thing, synthetic instruments are highly durable and lightweight (violins and cellos made of carbon fiber have been on the market for several years). For another, the 3Dvarius can indeed make some pretty sweet sounds when plugged into Bernadac’s rig, consisting of various effects pedals and loopers. At the top, see how he uses his setup to create jazzy multi-layered, multi-track arrangements of popular songs with the 3Dvarius. And hear a few of those songs here, along with snazzy videos—including U2’s “With or Without You,” the Game of Thrones and X‑Files themes, and “Se Bastasse Una Canzone” by Italian singer/songwriter Eros Ramazzotti. (See many more on Youtube.) The 3Dvarius website has a step-by-step explanation of how the instrument is made, from initial design to surface treatment and final assembly.
Despite its name and inspiration, the 3Dvarius doesn’t claim to actually duplicate a Stradivarius, a feat long thought impossible by even the finest modern luthiers. Even computer scientists admit: no matter how good machines get at replication, replacing traditional, handmade violins with printed copies “would lead to digitally cloned instruments,” writes Wired, “and the loss of sonic character that makes music, well, music.” And it isn’t only sonic character that matters to musicians. Surprisingly enough, in blind tests, many violinists can’t tell the difference between a Stradivarius and a high-quality newer model violin, but these findings do not diminish the Stradivarius mystique. The look and feel of an instrument and its make and pedigree matter. As musician and writer Clemency Burton-Hill points out, much of our fascination with the Stradivarius violin has to do with the “story of Stradivari,” as well as those of the musicians who have owned and played his instruments.
And though it may be possible to come close to their tones with cheaper modern copies and digital technology, we still gush over Jimi Hendrix’s Stratocaster or Jimmy Page’s Les Paul. The 3Dvarius, I’ll admit, is a very cool idea, but it’s hard to imagine a digitally-produced plastic artifact ever acquiring the same intangible aura of not only the most famous instruments in the world, but also of unique, hand-crafted new instruments on their way to making history. As Walter Benjamin argued in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,” it’s the authenticity of “aura”—the specific traces of history and the fingerprints of artists and master craftsmen—that we treasure in art. These are qualities that elude the most advanced technological processes.
As depicted above, ink making is as voluptuous a process as making a high end candy bar. Having grown up around the printing floor of a daily newspaper, I know that ink’s pungent aroma is the opposite of chocolate‑y, but my mouth still started to water. Was it the commercial-ready classical soundtrack or hearing Chief Ink Maker Peter Welfare comparing the pigment’s gooey “vehicle” to honey?
I won’t be dipping my tongue in the ink pot any time soon, but the multistep four color process by which powdered cyan, magenta, yellow, and black hues become press-bound ink proved far more sensual than expected.
Ink making in the 21st-century is a combination of Old and New World techniques.
Workers at the Printing Ink Compnany use their fingers to test their product’s tackiness, a predictor of its on-press performance. Presumably, you develop a feel for it after a while.
State of the art computer programs provide further quality control, analyzing for consistency of color and gloss with an accuracy that eludes even the most practiced human eye.
The results can be seen on everything from brochures to fine art prints.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play, Fawnbook, opens in New York City later this fall. Follow her @AyunHalliday
We think of Leonardo da Vinci as one of the great humanists, a thinker and creator whose achievements spanned the realms of art, architecture, natural science, engineering, and letters. We less often think of him as an innovator of the tools of as destructive a practice as war, but a true polymath — and the life of Leonardo more or less defines that concept — knows no boundaries. The website Leonardo da Vinci Inventions lists among the machines he came up with an armored car (“precursor to the modern tank”), an 86-foot crossbow, and a triple barrel cannon (at a time when even gunpowder itself hadn’t yet attained worldwide use).
Many of Leonardo’s inventions, no matter how thoroughly he diagrammed their designs and mechanics in his notebooks, never got out of the realm of the theoretical in his lifetime — and some remain machines of the imagination. But as Nick Squires reported in the Telegraph a few years ago, a late 15th-century cannon dug up in Croatia “bears a striking resemblance to sketches drawn by the Renaissance inventor, notably in his Codex Atlanticus — the largest collection of his drawings and writing. Mounted on a wooden carriage and wheels, it would have allowed a much more rapid rate of fire than traditional single-barreled guns — in a precursor to modern day machine guns.”
He was a man of his time and the need for military engineers provided him with employment, travel opportunities, and the chance to continue his scientific work unhindered. Renaissance Italy was a collection of independent city states who became engaged in incessant warfare with each other.
“This provided a market for the technically advanced weapons needed to gain military advantage over the enemy” — and an opportunity for Leonardo to work out his ideas for “new weaponry, bridging, bombarding machines, trench draining,” and more. Leonardo’s work during this period included 15th-century blueprints for “an armored vehicle made from wood and operated by eight men” turning cranks, an antiquity-inspired “scythed chariot,” breech-loading and water-cooled guns not entirely different in concept from the steam cannons used in the World War II, and “a repeating ‘machine gun’ operated by a man-powered treadmill.”
You can see a real-life example of Leonardo’s leaf-spring catapult built by a Society for Creative Anachronism member here. But if you try to follow the instructions and assemble his other ingenious military devices, prepare for disappointment. The Telegraph’s Tom Leonard wrote up an early-2000s BBC documentary that claimed this Renaissance Man’s Renaissance Man “inserted a series of deliberate flaws into his inventions to make sure that they could never be used,” for instance, “when the tank, a tortoise-like contraption, was tested by the Army, it immediately became clear that its gears had been set against each other.”
Leonardo possibly crippled his own designs in order to serve the function of absent “patent laws to protect him from having his designs copied,” and possibly because he “was a pacifist who was aware that his warlord masters might try to find military uses for his inventions.” Either way, at least he died a few hundred years too early to witness the First World War, in which tanks, machine guns, and all the rest of it turned into surely more horrifying a spectacle than all the battles of Renaissance Italy put together.
All of us who saw Jurassic Park as kids, no matter how much skepticism we’d precociously developed, surely spent at least a moment wondering if science could actually bring dinosaurs back to life by pulling the DNA out of their blood trapped in amber-preserved mosquitoes. It turns out that it can’t — at least not yet! — but even so, we had to admit that Steven Spielberg and his CGI-savvy collaborators (not to mention their huge budget) achieved, on screen, the next best thing. Even so, people have long disagreed about whether to call the visual resurrection of dinosaurs in the service of a blockbuster adventure movie a work of art.
But what if we used the even more powerful data analysis and computer graphics technology now at our disposal specifically for the purpose of generating a masterpiece, or at least a piece by a master — by Rembrandt, say? A project called The Next Rembrandt has aimed to do just that with its attempt “to distill the artistic DNA of Rembrandt” using everything from building and analyzing “an extensive analysis of his paintings [ … ] pixel by pixel,” to performing a demographic study determining his conclusive portrait subject (“a Caucasian male with facial hair, between the ages of thirty and forty, wearing black clothes with a white collar and a hat, facing to the right”), to creating a height map to mimic his physical brush strokes.
“You could say that we use technology and data like Rembrandt used his paints and his brushes to create something new.” Those bold words come from Ron Augustus, Microsoft’s director of small- and medium-sized business markets, in the promotional video at the top of the post. His employer acts as one of two partners involved in The Next Rembrandt, the other being the Dutch bank ING — hence, presumably, the choice of painter to resurrect. Their combined resources have produced a wholly theoretical, but in a physical sense very real, new “Rembrandt” portrait, meticulously 3D-printed at 148 megapixels in thirteen layers of paint-based UV ink.
Despite its impressive plausibility, nobody expects the fruit of the Next Rembrandt project’s considerable labors, unveiled yesterday in Amsterdam, to hang in the Rijksmuseum next to The Night Watch. But it can, properly considered, teach us all a great deal about what, in the words of ING executive creative director Bas Korsten, “made Rembrandt Rembrandt.” And like any cutting-edge stunt, it also gives us a glimpse into what technology will sooner or later make possible for us all. How long could we possibly have to wait before we can 3D-print, on canvas with oil paint, portraits of ourselves as Rembrandt almost certainly would have painted us — or our very own Night Watch, indistinguishable from the original? Truly, we stand on the cusp of a golden age of forgery.
The auto industry continues to take steps forward, sometimes big, sometimes small. They’re tinkering with electric and driverless cars, and they’re finding ways to improve the safety of everyday vehicles already on the road. How much incremental progress have we made? Just watch the video produced by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. A 2009 Chevy Malibu crashes into a colossal 1959 Chevy Bel Air at 40 miles per hour. And despite its “Safety-Girder” cruciform frame (a safety innovation Chevy developed during the 1950s) the bigger Bel Air didn’t fare well at all. The same applies to the dummy inside.
Here’s how the Institute described what happened to the Bel Air to The New York Times:
This car had no seat belts or air bags. Dummy movement wasn’t well controlled, and there was far too much upward and rearward movement of the steering wheel. The dummy’s head struck the steering wheel rim and hub and then the roof and unpadded metal instrument panel to the left of the steering wheel.
During rebound, the dummy’s head remained in contact with the roof and slid rearward and somewhat inward. The windshield was completely dislodged from the car and the driver door opened during the crash, both presenting a risk of ejection. In addition, the front bench seat was torn away from the floor on the driver side.
The Bel Air got a “Poor” rating in every safety category; the Malibu a “Good.”
Although a lot of America seems stuck in reverse, car design is one area where we’re moving forward, hopefully with even better days to come.
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