Musical eras are often defined by their dominant modes of production — analog, electronic, digital — each bringing about new styles and ways of listening. This era is marked by the release of the first AI-human collaborated album, Hello World, by the music collaborative Skygge. Skygge, led by composer and producer Benoît Carré and musician and tech researcher François Pachet, translates to “shadow” in Danish and was inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen story of the same name.
Tag: 10.02.18
Google At 20: It Changed Our Entire Relationship To Information And Became A Cultural Force In Its Own Right
It’s strange to consider that a company so fundamental to our world is still so relatively young. … Sergey Brin and Larry Page defeated their competition so soundly and so effectively that competitors like Excite, Lycos, and AltaVista are blips in the internet’s long history, despite once being hugely important platforms.”
‘Academic Grievance Studies And The Corruption Of Scholarship’: The Paper In Which The Hoaxster Professors Reveal Themselves
“Something has gone wrong in the university — especially in certain fields within the humanities. Scholarship based less upon finding truth and more upon attending to social grievances has become firmly established, if not fully dominant, within these fields, and their scholars increasingly bully students, administrators, and other departments into adhering to their worldview. This worldview is not scientific, and it is not rigorous. For many, this problem has been growing increasingly obvious, but strong evidence has been lacking. For this reason, the three of us just spent a year working inside the scholarship we see as an intrinsic part of this problem.”
How Bad Actors Are Using Pop Culture To Fire Up Culture Wars
According to a new paper from Morten Bay at the University of Southern California’s Center for the Digital Future, a large majority of the social media comments about the film were “deliberate, organized political influence measures disguised as fan arguments.” By analyzing tweets about the movie, Bay found a coordinated effort, similar to the one used in the lead-up to the 2016 election, to weaponize the debate about the movie to further the notion of chaos in American society. “Persuading voters of this narrative remains a strategic goal for the US alt-right movement, as well as the Russian Federation,” Bay writes.
After Years Of Decline, Video Piracy Is On The Rise Again. Here’s Why
Sandvine’s new Global Internet Phenomena report offers some interesting insight into user video habits and the internet, such as the fact that more than 50 percent of internet traffic is now encrypted, video now accounts for 58 percent of all global traffic, and Netflix alone now comprises 15 percent of all internet downstream data consumed. But there’s another interesting tidbit buried in the firm’s report: after years of steady decline, BitTorrent usage is once again growing.
Oligarch/Art Collector Sues Sotheby’s For $380 Million For Assisting In ‘Largest Art Fraud In History’
Billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev has spent years filing lawsuits around the world against dealer Yves Bouvier, whom Rybolovlev accuses of charging outrageous markups on dozens of artworks. (Among those works is Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, which Rybolovlev bought via Bouvier in 2013 and on which he made more than $320 million in profit when he auctioned it off last year.) Bouvier is not named in this particular legal complaint, which accuses Sotheby’s of knowing about the markups Bouvier was charging in the sales the auction house assisted in. (Rybolovlev, by the way, is the oligarch who purchased a Palm Beach mansion sight-unseen from Donald Trump for $95 million, by far the highest price ever paid for a home in the Florida resort town.)
After Two-Year Restoration, Bruegel’s ‘Triumph Of Death’ Is Back On View At The Prado
“With the aid of copies created by the painter’s two sons and the use of infrared reflectography, it was possible to eliminate the areas of repainting and reintegrate lost details. The removal of varnish applied during previous interventions has restored the original colours, recovering the characteristic bright tones of the blues and reds and the depth of the landscape.”
What Is Western Civilization? It Isn’t About The Monuments
Mutual aid, social cooperation, civic activism, hospitality or simply caring for others: these are the kind of things that actually go to make civilisations. In which case, the true history of civilisation is only just starting to be written. It might begin with what archaeologists call ‘culture areas’ or ‘interaction spheres’, vast zones of cultural exchange and innovation that deserve a more prominent place in our account of civilisation.
Soon-to-be Met composer Missy Mazzoli merges her selves in ‘Proving Up’
My guess is that Mazzoli’s Met commission was made on the strength of her formidable previous opera, Breaking the Waves. And this new one? It was not more of the same. It’s different. Really different.
Jane Fortune, Who Rescued The Works Of Renaissance Florence’s Female Artists, Dead At 76
“She founded a nonprofit foundation called Advancing Women Artists to find and salvage art created by women between the 16th and 20th centuries. Her resurrection of these works, many of them Renaissance treasures lost to history and secreted in Tuscan churches and attics for centuries, earned her, in the Italian press, the nickname ‘Indiana Jane.'”