November 15, 2021
Holly Herndon's SPAWN AI: singing with someone else's voice in real time
Herndon's remarkable software allows one person to sing with the voice of another. it's uncanny and spectacular. Herndon's videos from her @SonarFest presentation/collaboration. the collaborative possibilities! the ethical questions! Musical identities now way spongier with this new tool.
Like watching an emergent improv band forming around a cat drinking milk
It started with Leo the cat, happily and loudly lapping up milk from a spoon; using TikTok's duet feature, people added onto it and built an awesome song. [more inside]
"it was magical, like a ritual, like an exorcism"
Singer and songwriter Emma Ruth Rundle has released her fifth solo album Engine of Hell. [more inside]
Channeling Chansley
What all four have in common is the knee-jerk suspicion that all government and establishment-media narratives, all expert opinions are “propaganda.” This wariness is coupled, paradoxically, with a willingness to believe any “counternarrative,” no matter how dubiously sourced or implausible. In raising doubts about public-health authorities like Fauci, the CDC, and the WHO, Kennedy, Wolf, and Miller seem to see themselves as standard-bearers of the 1960s activism whose bumper-sticker slogan was Question Authority. Conspiracism is a counterculture—a counterculture of counternarratives. From A Close Reading of the QAnon Shaman’s Conspiracy Manifesto by Mark Dery [more inside]
Prehistoric animation
It turns out that prehistoric art included animation. All you need is bad enough lighting. For (hypothetical) prehistoric animation (disks set up to twirl between two images), see the Cass Neary books by Elizabeth Hand-- the last two books I think. All four are worth reading.
"Most of us weren’t ready for it. Some of us still aren’t."
Two science fiction stories in which mysteries about changes in human behavior and capability feel uncanny. "Sidewalks" by Maureen McHugh: "She offers me the pen and says something in a language that sounds liquid, like it’s been poured through a straw." "Clouds" by Brian Francis Slattery: "Roy was one of the people who couldn’t get the idea of an invasion out of his head. Everything the aliens did seemed to him to have an ulterior motive. When they did nothing, they were just biding their time, making us complacent."
Pouria Hadjibagheri and the Cascade of Doom
Cascade of Doom: JIT, and how a Postgres update led to 70% failure on a critical national service [more inside]
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