"“Mark doesn’t care about publishers ...We will help you revitalise journalism... in a few years the ­reverse looks like I’ll be holding your hands with your dying ­business like in a hospice.”

( wtaf )

LOT2046.

PR: In 2014 your work – such as ‘Cyborg Singing’ – was questioning how one feels to be a cyborg. What’s the next question your work will deal with?

MM: Well at that point I was trying to disembody my own voice by triggering it with an accelerometer in my wig. The question here was more of agency and whether it is possible to carry emotional information through a program-aided means, and not through the mouth and the connected architecture of the body.

"cryptofiction"

"...we did a musical-comedy extravaganza every week with a 28-piece orchestra, 12 dancers and two guest stars a week, plus we had a studio audience. We'd do it in one hour and 15 minutes, and we'd be out in time to go have dinner. Also, the cost: You couldn't do what we did today because the cost would be astronomical."

Hong Kong is best known for its outside-the-box Cantonese slang. And as the curtains for 2015 are about to drawn, I can't help giving some new thoughts about “old seafood”. 
“Old seafood” obviously isn’t referring to seafood that is old, aged or stale. It doesn’t even have anything to do with seafood to begin with. The pronunciation of “old seafood” in English in fact resembles the Cantonese sound of lo see fut, which actually refers to "old anus" -- an ignorant, arrogant older person who occupies top positions in a society or company but thinks he knows it all and refuses to listen to others, particularly the younger generation.

"We probably have to start paying for stuff again. We probably have to start investing in the things we think are exciting earlier than we're used to. Because until we start supporting the underground from the underground, rather than waiting for it to land on a household name's shoulders, on their next album, on an advert for a new pair of football boots, we're going to see a lot of great work being stopped in its tracks."

"This year’s top-earning musician Katy Perry has made $135 million, not thanks to selling many records mind, but by tramping her way around the world to play more than 120 shows for her Prismatic tour.

This effort, where she grossed $2 million a night according to Forbes, bumped her all the way up from 23rd to the top spot.

It’s not clear how much she actually takes home from that amount, but if she pocketed half, that doesn’t leave much money made from album sales."

"I’m getting more radical in my view of the internet, this unconsciously-generated machine for unconscious generation. I’m feeling more sure of its cultural value and legacy, and more assertive about stating it. We built this thing, and like all directed culture of the past, it has an agency and a desire, and if you pay attention to it you can see which way it wants to go, and what it wants to fight. We made that, all of us, in time, but we don’t have full control of it. Rather, like the grain of wood, it’s something to be worked with and shaped, but also thought about and conceptualised, both matter and metaphor."

"As with the city itself, the promise of the internet is contact. It seems to offer an antidote to loneliness, trumping even the most utopian urban environment by enabling strangers to develop relationships along shared lines of interest, no matter how shy or isolated they might be in their own physical lives.

"But proximity, as city dwellers know, does not necessarily mean intimacy. Access to other people is not by itself enough to dispel the gloom of internal isolation. Loneliness can be most acute in a crowd."

"New sounds from South Africa and Nigeria’s urban science fiction could change the future of technology and the city"

"As the sun sets on the year that brought us a wealth of meaningless trends, let 2015 be the year that subcultures find their definition. Let kids put down their iPhones and go out into the real world and engage with the subversive, as opposed to listlessly posting a picture of it. Ultimately, let 2015 be the year we shake off our social media induced Narcolepsy and reignite our passion for music."

Some chance.

"This month we've uploaded linguistic descriptions of conversations about local speech in Warleggan, Penzance, Mawla, St Feock and Truro. Together they constitute the set of BBC Voices Recordings made by BBC Radio Cornwall. The descriptions list the participants' responses to a set of prompt words and, in the case of Mawla, St Feock and Truro, also include a detailed description of the phonology and grammar of the speakers. - See more at: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/sound-and-vision/2015/03/chacking-to-hear-some-cornish-dialects.html#sthash.W1f1038r.7dsOBKUD.dpuf"

"do you really see something if you don't have a word for it?"

"Silicon Valley’s move to make corporations more like cults, then, could be seen as a way of resisting the movement toward gender, racial, and sexual equality that may, at core, threaten executive power by asking that all employees, not just ones who look like their CEO, be treated equitably. Because another thing that cults offer is mystification: in a cult, you don’t ask, you just believe, and in a corporation, it profits the leadership for its members not to inquire or demand to be treated equally, but rather to accept their different placement in the corporate hierarchy. Cults then are an innovative, if deeply traditional, solution for what to do when the business climate threatens to become too equitable."

"For 75 years, Finland's expectant mothers have been given a box by the state. It's like a starter kit of clothes, sheets and toys that can even be used as a bed. And some say it helped Finland achieve one of the world's lowest infant mortality rates.

"It's a tradition that dates back to the 1930s and it's designed to give all children in Finland, no matter what background they're from, an equal start in life.

"The maternity package - a gift from the government - is available to all expectant mothers.

"It contains bodysuits, a sleeping bag, outdoor gear, bathing products for the baby, as well as nappies, bedding and a small mattress.

"With the mattress in the bottom, the box becomes a baby's first bed. Many children, from all social backgrounds, have their first naps within the safety of the box's four cardboard walls.


"Mothers have a choice between taking the box, or a cash grant, currently set at 140 euros, but 95% opt for the box as it's worth much more."

"“Home” was partly motivated by my disillusionment with how apathetic music has become as a field. It seems like such a waste, as in many senses musical discourse has embraced radicalism in terms of aesthetics, however for some reason seems more politically inconsequential than I can ever remember. What good are radical sounds if they do not attempt to communicate radical alternatives? Is this all just an exercise in escapism and click bait? This is deeply troubling to me. I really don’t want to accept a scenario where musicians are relegated to the realm of entertainment and toothless universal/retrograde posturing and gestures."

"Is the idea of the littlenet simply coded language for a kind of secret breakfast club which in turn only exists relative to the exclusion of the biggernet? "

"Media has become responsive architecture. Intelligent media artefacts are now embedded into the very fabric of our existence; they have become the structure of society itself. Ubiquitous computing creates informational environments in which material structures of communication become alive with agency. McLuhan's light bulb is now everyware: [1] technology that mediates by its mere presence"

"I’d fetch up in far-flung places and World Service listeners would come up and thank me for the work of the BBC. Not one to shy away from a free compliment, I’d graciously accept - and try to leave the impression that, in some small way, the wonder that is the World Service had something to do with me."

same

"Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann found that voice-hearing experiences of people with serious psychotic disorders are shaped by local culture – in the United States, the voices are harsh and threatening; in Africa and India, they are more benign and playful. This may have clinical implications for how to treat people with schizophrenia, she suggests."

"Judson rode his horse right into a bar and sat there—on his horse—for several hours, spinning his six-shooter and telling stories, while the bartender and the customers bought him round after round after round."

"It is a year after my first trial at Possible Futures Festival at Vooruit 100, of serving the extremely invasive plant Japanese knotweed that fortuitously happen to taste of rhubarb, as cakes. Enabled by the management of Timelab and participating in launching the Flemish Food Council, I wanted to reframe invasive species as local delicacies. After much awaiting, the project has finally managed to match a sustainable source of invasive raw knotweed ingredients to supply for the Cake artisan Julie’s House."

"This article explores the first phase of shamanic initiation among the Ikpeng, an Amerindian people living close to the Middle Xingu River in southern Amazonia. Submerged in a nocturnal river or lake and staring up at the dark water surface, the initiate absorbs a swarm of water and forest beings, attracted by the potent aroma of jatobá tree resin, dripped onto the surface above his (or her) eyes, turning the novice’s body into a living container for these spirits."

"I thought about titling this post, “Google Glass: The Beginning of White Flight from Smartphones,” but instead I’m going to propose a new term, status flight, to describe what happens when elites abandon a status symbol that’s lost its signifying power after becoming too quotidian and ubiquitous."

"It went undetected for five years on Wikipedia, but now a seemingly meticulous entry about a 17th century conflict between colonial Portugal and India's Maratha empire has been outed as a hoax."

@MelissaSterry: [The Really] Old School Ravers: New scientific techniques reveal how large tribal gatherings swept neolithic Britain http://t.co/dkEZkibO http://twitter.com/MelissaSterry/status/201609554155409408

"The Twenty-first century is invisible. We were promised jetpacks but ended up with handlebar moustaches. The surface of things is the wrong place to find the 21st century. Instead, the unseen, the Infrathin—those tiny devices in our pockets or the thick data-haze which permeates the air we breathe — locates us in the present."

"Things got a bit odd with Assange's last question, in which he asked the reglious extremist, "Isn’t Allah, or the notion of God, the ultimate superpower? Shouldn’t you as a freedom fighter also seek to liberate people from the totalitarian concept of a monotheistic god"

"China stands unique with a 4,000-year history of recorded surnames stretching back to the Xia Dynasty of the 21st to 16th centuries BC."

"But they were less agreeable about allowing Robovie civil liberties, like being paid for work. The children also said that the robot could be bought, sold and should not have the right to vote. "

"Once, on a trip to Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, he purchased a video disc from a tea shop. Unlike Starbucks, which once sold music intended to relax the listener, the offering in Tikrit was titled "Anger." It was a compilation of bloody images of U.S. and insurgent attacks that was sickening to watch. Anthony bought it not because of its shock value, but because he knew he needed to see it to understand how Iraqi public opinion was being shaped."

"Thoughts for today: the situations where the buyer or seller will shift a measurable value (cash, money) into other less comparable forms (fapioa, …) to disguise the real value of the exchange. Who they are disguising it from. The legal and social rules surrounding the exchange. Aftermarkets for the receipts."

"Tom and I were talking this morning about a new thing we're trying to push out of Newspaper Club - a way to let people easily transfer their individual reading from screen to newspaper. We realised that some people instinctively want to do that - they want to materialise stuff. And some instinctively don't - they want all their stuff to evanesce (as Adam puts it). And you can't really predict who will be drawn to what."

"Bennett-Jones railed against the BBC management's "twisted tyranny of data" and their "lack of faith in creative talent" he believes is smothering the TV industry."

"To start off, our goal is to do what lots of people have asked me to create: a wiki that catalogues everything related to resilient communities. We'd like to create a visual catelogue of the things (from DIY solar stills to an inventory of homes, farms, businesses in your community) that will be useful in the development of resilient communities."

"Matt Webb will be talking to Mark Leckey about his Serpentine show, the cult status of smart objects and the multiple relationships we form with technology."

"...shorter fame cycles don't allow for social cohesion to occur around the artist/brand. The nascent interactions around the briefly famous don't coalesce into anything enduring. The potential community member just moves on to the next titillation."