“In many scientific fields, from genetics to economics to palaeobiology, a kind of implicit trust is placed in the images and the algorithms that produce them. Often viewers have almost no idea how they were constructed. The complexity of computers has made data-analysis a black-box, something it’s hard for humans to peer into. At the same time, computer jockeys such as my dad have achieved a new cultural status – if not quite Indiana Jones, they still have a kind of power and authority most of us can’t access. Increasingly, with the advances in machine-learning and AI, even those authorities are sometimes mystified by how their algorithms work.”
Month: February 2018
Could Gagosian’s Mega-Gallery Empire Survive Him As A Brand?
Gagosian’s mortality might even have a silver lining if he can tap the right successor. As Galloway writes, “Dying removes the icon from the inevitable judgment of everyday existence, including aging, and elevates persona to legend—ideal for a brand.” Just think: Louis Vuitton (the company) was founded in 1854. Louis Vuitton (the man) died in 1892. So the brand has been stacking cash for 164 years, and the founder has spent 126 of them stitching in that grand atelier in the sky.
Zadie Smith Struggles With Fame And Middle Age
“The Amis that Smith herself resembles is Martin. What they share is the predicament of the former wunderkind. Both burst to fame in their early 20s as truly funny comic novelists. Both are dedicated students of literature, as good as critics as they are as novelists. Both are transatlantic liberals who grew up in public and have been compelled to wear the mantle of the public intellectual. But public seriousness has never been a comfortable fit for either of them.”
Artists Envision The Future Of Jobs
Last month, a team from the digital agency AKQA and the Misk Global Forum attended several panels at the World Economic Forum and used each discussion as inspiration to illustrate a job that could exist by 2030. Many of the jobs seem more like science fiction than reality, but a few are actually pretty grounded in where technology seems to be headed.
Why Isn’t The Orchestra World More Diverse? Because It’s Built That Way
Systemic discrimination occurs when biases like racism and sexism cut across unique organizations. It’s closely tied to, but distinct from, actions we associate with overt bias—a conductor claiming that men are better on the podium or an orchestra defending its discrimination against women and musicians of Asian heritage. Rather, systemic discrimination relies on the abdication of individual responsibility for its consequences, thus rendering it passive and plausibly deniable. In the world of orchestral music, “the system” sustains discriminatory practices even when individuals within it claim to be progressive.
We’re Quickly Becoming A Post-Text World
This multimedia internet has been gaining on the text-based internet for years. But last year, the story accelerated sharply, and now audio and video are unstoppable. The most influential communicators online once worked on web pages and blogs. They’re now making podcasts, Netflix shows, propaganda memes, Instagram and YouTube channels, and apps like HQ Trivia.
Australian Broadcaster To Break Up Historic Music Library And Ship It To Samoa
Guardian Australia revealed last week that the ABC is breaking up its historic music and reference libraries and making 10 librarians redundant to free up floor space and save on wages. Sources say management plans include packing up all 22,000 books in Sydney and Melbourne – apart from a few “special items” – and sending them to Samoa. The books have been targeted because management wants the library space for the IT division. But insiders have mocked the idea, saying developing countries do not always want discarded books because of the high cost of transporting and storing them as well as question marks over their relevance.
Watch The Unveiling Of Michelle And Barrack Obama’s Official Portraits
Barrack Obama called the process of sitting for a portrait “torturous,” noting that as far as he knows he’s the first person in his family to have a portrait done. “I tried to negotiate less gray hair, smaller ears,” Obama joked at the unveiling. “Maybe the one are where there were some concessions … his initial impulse may be in the work may be to elevate me … mounting me on horses … and I had to explain I’ve got enough political problems without you making me look like Napoleon.”
Audible Commissions Playwrights For “Audio Theatre” Project
Audible CEO Don Katz acknowledged that radio dramas have been around for nearly 100 years, but he emphasized that what Audible is creating is something different. It’s performative audio for the digital era, and Katz said the contributions of these playwrights could be transformative to industry’s landscape, which already includes established purveyors of recorded theater such as L.A. Theatre Works.
The Music You Like Is Greatly Influenced By The Year You Were Born
“For this project, the music streaming service Spotify gave me data on how frequently every song is listened to by men and women of each particular age. The patterns were clear. Even though there is a recognized canon of rock music, there are big differences by birth year in how popular a song is.”