Thursday, February 9 2012
Playing Guarde: Music Metacreation and the Vanguard
To create something or to create something that creates something; that is a question. But if you lead an electric horse to art, does it dream of the avant-garde?
Thursday, October 20 2011
Geniuses Are People, Too
Creative geniuses don’t succeed despite their flaws, they succeed because they are flawed.
Tuesday, October 11 2011
One Weekend, Thirty Geeks, Five Projects: ‘Hacking’ for a Good Cause
How a group of people hacked in to start-up culture to change the world.
Monday, October 10 2011
The Survival of the Industrial Sonic in a Deindustrialized West
In the '90s, industrial music crossed over into the mainstream with heavy guitar and massive personalities, but blue collar labor itself was disappearing...
Monday, October 3 2011
What’s the Word? With Obscure Language Like Music Speak, It’s Hard not to Feel Like a n00b
Music writers and IT guys have a lot in common – at least when it comes to their cultivated, insular jargon.
Thursday, September 15 2011
Stop Tweeting Sh%! and Buy This
They say art imitates life, but so does advertising. What does that mean when we live our lives online?
Friday, August 12 2011
Monday, July 11 2011
Techno’s Labor Force, Rock’s Betrayal, and the Birth of the Fascist Groove Thing
Electronic music has always maintained an ambivalent attitude towards labor, at once rejecting the notion of wage internment and creative inhibition while embracing the beauty of the cyborgian mechanics of the factory and the allure of discipline and dominance.
Tuesday, June 7 2011
Idle Chatter About Paul Lansky
With "Notjustmoreidlechatter", Paul Lansky attempted to make a piece that would withstand the monotony of archival recording, future-proofed against the technological developments in the field of digital sound manipulation.
Wednesday, May 25 2011
What’s the Value of Ownership in the Age of Cloud Computing?
My fiancée and I will soon move across the country with whatever will fit in our Honda Civic. This has brought up some discussions about which possessions are truly worth keeping.
Thursday, March 3 2011
The Extinction of Electronic Music Giants
The year 2010 saw two iconic music medium figures go out of production. Panasonic's Technics SL-1200 turntables, the primary tool of DJs since 1972, and Sony's cassette-based Walkman, which put mobile music in over 100 million ears since 1979. Both went the way of the dodo.
Thursday, February 24 2011
Duke Ellington Is Heard Loud and Clear on Old 78s, Across Decades of Time
From dusty old 78s placed tenderly on the console to reissue CDs spinning easily on the latest-model boom box, Duke Ellington's music spans generations of technology and memory, as told here by the son of a 90-year-old man who loved the Duke.
Tuesday, January 25 2011
The Bird’s the Word: What Does Celebrity Reporting on Twitter Say About Those of Us Who Follow Them?
Apparently, American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert was the most influential tweeter on Haiti, and Conan O’Brien and Ricky Martin reigned atop the list of those commenting on the Chilean miner saga. Sorry CNN, NPR, et. al.
Tuesday, September 21 2010
Twittervention: Intervention for the Seriously Twitter Addicted
Are you Twitter addicted? What looks like love to you might in fact be abusing -- and therefore losing -- your followers.
Friday, July 2 2010
The Future of Intimacy Is But a Text Message Away
One can't comfortably opt out of a social medium that has become part of everyone's standard reality, if you want to stay in their social sphere. With that in mind, I finally bought a cell phone.
Wednesday, June 30 2010
Amon Tobin Part 2: A Cool Acousmatic Cat
Tobin's goal as a composer was to create music that truly reflected the time in which it was made, and to see how far he could remove his samples from their sources before arranging them in new contexts. He achieved such an artifact with each album.
Friday, June 11 2010
iPhone 4: Wherein Science Fiction Once Again Becomes Sad Fact
Aside from lightsabers, proton packs, warp drive and teleportation, many of my favorite sci-fi gadgets have become a reality. The latest: iPhone 4.
Friday, June 4 2010
Cloud Computing: Seeding for the Coming Storm
We’re being led to believe that nearly everything would be better with the cloud in control of all our data. What could go wrong with a world in which we don’t own anything, anymore?
Friday, April 2 2010
I Won’t iPad, You Can’t Make Me
The arrival of Apple's iPad, the Moses tablet to their Jesus iPhone, is being treated with near-religious fervor but this otherwise early adapter tech geek is left wondering, "Is that all?"
Friday, February 19 2010
The Digital Surplus and Its Enemies
While we are building identity in social networks, our online behavior generates a plenitude of information, meanings and content that constitutes a "cognitive surplus" generated by the "hive mind".
