Lone Gunman

Andrew Keen, the so-called Anti-Christ of Sil­i­con Val­ley, tack­les his com­mon ground of tech­nol­ogy and cre­ativ­ity in a piece from the Tele­graph where he hopes to dis­cover Why are Artists so Poor? After a bit of Twit­ter­ing, Andrew found that his:

responses extended to every­thing from lucid one-worders like “over­sup­ply” to philo­soph­i­cal tweets such as “because they live in the moment” to Clay Shirky’s terse and ellip­ti­cally author­i­ta­tive “unequal dis­tri­b­u­tion of tal­ent + sup­ply and demand”.

The shift in the rela­tion­ship between art and tech­nol­ogy, as Andrew con­tin­ues to explain, is due as much to the lack of gate­keep­ers (agents, edi­tors, stu­dios) on the Inter­net as it is to the ease of per­sonal distribution.

With that being said, the (new) job of the artist is more or less strate­gic self-promotion:

In an age in which the old cul­tural gate­keep­ers are being swept away, the most press­ing chal­lenge of cre­ative artists is to build their own brands. And it’s the Inter­net which pro­vides cre­ative tal­ent with easy-to-use and cheap tools for their self-promotion.

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This is a guest post from Alex J. Mann.  You can sub­scribe to his blog here and fol­low him on Twit­ter here.

Seth Roberts recently reflected on the New York Times arti­cle The Future of Read­ing | A New Assign­ment: Pick Books You Like with his own piece enti­tled Stu­dent Power.  Seth deliv­ers his own con­struc­tive crit­i­cism regard­ing the Amer­i­can higher edu­ca­tion sys­tem (empha­sis his):

1.  Stu­dents in a class are treated all alike. They’re not. All hear the same lec­ture, read the same texts, do the same home­work assign­ments, take the same tests. I came to real­ize that my stu­dents dif­fered greatly in their tal­ents and career goals.

2.  Pro­fes­sors teach how to be pro­fes­sors. Most stu­dents don’t want to be pro­fes­sors…“Teach­ing stu­dents to think” was a com­mon way to describe teach­ing stu­dents how to be professors.

Seth con­cludes by stating:

Giv­ing stu­dents more power over what they learn solves, or at least reduces, both problems.

I’d add that one of the fail­ures of the edu­ca­tion sys­tem as a whole is that there is too much time, energy and money spent on forc­ing assign­ments and mate­r­ial on stub­born stu­dents.  “Stu­dent power” is a strat­egy to smooth these inef­fi­cien­cies, assum­ing the stu­dents learn­ing willingly.

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This is a guest post from Alex J. Mann.  You can sub­scribe to his blog here and fol­low him on Twit­ter here.

Audio sam­pling in con­tem­po­rary music is a form of bud­ding inno­va­tion that proves not only the evo­lu­tion of the indus­try, but a method to build on cre­ative works that inspire us.  The prac­tice of sam­pling is com­mon in most cre­ative indus­tries, but often less obvi­ous than it is in music.  Music sam­pling hap­pens to receive a poor, dis­taste­ful rep­u­ta­tion sim­ply because of how it’s per­ceived in pop­u­lar cul­ture, rather than under­stand­ing why it is a cre­ative tool.  The crit­ics and intel­lec­tu­als bash the sam­ple for its lack of orig­i­nal­ity. I praise it for its inspi­ra­tional tangibility.

My unique argu­ment is that we all, espe­cially those in cre­ative fields, sam­ple like music pro­duc­ers.  Sam­pling, as it’s embraced in music, just hap­pens to be a more con­crete cita­tion of inspi­ra­tion.  It’s a nod, an ode or respect­ful glance to those that did it before we did.  The sam­ple is why we do what we do.

The sam­ple is observed in a vari­ety of shapes, forms and fre­quen­cies.  Typ­i­cally, a snip­pet of another song is cut out, sped up, slowed down or looped, and finally mashed, forced or ham­mered into new, orig­i­nal sound bite.  Occa­sion­ally, the sam­ple is obvi­ous, even iden­ti­fi­able at first lis­ten.  Other times, the sam­ple is indis­tin­guish­able, tak­ing on a new cre­ative life form of its own.

The hip-hop music indus­try has embraced the audio sam­ple, and has sub­se­quently become an easy tar­get for the so-called crit­ics.  The crit­ics yell that it’s steal­ing.  My response is that it’s shar­ing.  The crit­ics cry that it’s not cre­ative.  I respond that it’s a new type of cre­ative.  Sam­pling is sim­ply fair use of the avail­able tech­nol­ogy to build and advance pre­vi­ous works of art, dis­play­ing lit­tle dif­fer­ence to how we embrace the same tech­nolo­gies in other industries.

My only per­sonal, and admit­tedly obnox­ious issue with sam­pling is the expected pub­lic igno­rance it pro­motes.  For instance, Kanye West (who sam­ples in nearly every one of his songs, some­times dis­taste­fully) rapped on the mon­ster, Just Blaze pro­duced, smash hit “Touch the Sky,” which bor­rowed nearly the entire back­ground instru­men­ta­tion of Cur­tis Mayfield’s “Move on Up.”  Like­wise, the Grammy nom­i­nated song “Paper Planes” by M.I.A. pulled the retro punk-rock intro­duc­tion from the Clash’s “Straight to Hell,” while adding styl­is­tic gun­shots and heavy drums for fla­vor.  Over­all, this is healthy for the indus­try.  But, while these songs have become main­stream hits, the ref­er­ences are ignored by most listeners.

Sam­pling has and con­tin­ues to expand past hip-hop.  Led Zep­pelin, arguably the most inno­v­a­tive rock out­fit in blues rock and heavy metal his­tory, were actu­ally sam­plers of their time.  They bor­rowed rifts, cov­ered jams and even trans­ferred lyrics into their own orig­i­nal music for the record­ing of their sec­ond album.  And, twenty-five years later, the Beastie Boys sam­pled the brave drum intro­duc­tion from “When the Levee Breaks” into a aggres­sive, break beat for their song “Rhymin’ and Stealin.”  Led Zep­pelin, the inno­va­tors, have been re-innovated.  The old folks scream blas­phemy.  To me, it is a slight con­fir­ma­tion that the Beastie Boys have good taste in rock ‘n roll.

Sam­pling is promi­nent every­where.  The Blue Note has a com­pi­la­tion of heav­ily sam­pled jazz tunes, most of which you will rec­og­nize.  Girl Talk devel­oped his entire album, Feed the Ani­mals, around snip­pets of sam­ples, pro­duc­ing entirely new songs from pieces of oth­ers.  When you watch a Quentin Taran­tino film, notice his sam­ples of clas­sic Kung Fu flicks.  Or, when you observe a paint­ing by Sal­vador Dali, attempt to under­stand his influ­ence from Sig­mund Freud.  The sam­ple is rel­a­tive in all forms of art and science.

My expe­ri­ence as an entre­pre­neur, specif­i­cally in man­ag­ing soft­ware devel­op­ment, has been sam­ple dri­ven.  Although I do more react­ing than plan­ning, large aspects of my job are sam­pling what has worked in the past with hopes that it will work again in the future.  The team I work with began our design process by review­ing numer­ous soft­ware dash­boards that had pieces rel­e­vant to our vision.  We then pulled and sam­pled these ele­ments into our sketches, and finally imple­mented the puz­zle pieces into an orig­i­nal design.

The goal of rec­og­niz­ing sam­ples in any form is to have an open, but defen­sive mind, and ques­tion not only the music, but how it is con­sumed.  Who are the artist’s influ­ences?  Who is sam­pled, delib­er­ately or uncon­sciously?  Rec­og­niz­ing sam­pled inspi­ra­tion is more than being aware or knowl­edge­able of his­tory.  It allows you to be a true, crit­i­cal observer of artis­tic foundation.

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This is a guest post from Alex J. Mann.  You can sub­scribe to his blog here and fol­low him on Twit­ter here.

A new break­through device, recently cov­ered in Sci­en­tific Amer­i­can, restores par­tial eye­sight to the blind by using sen­sors in the tongue to send sign sig­nals to the brain.  The research comes from neu­ro­sci­en­tist Paul Bach-y-Rita.

Exper­i­ments have shown that:

within 15 min­utes of using the device, blind peo­ple can begin inter­pret­ing spa­tial infor­ma­tion via the Brain­Port, says William Seiple, research direc­tor at the non­profit vision health­care and research orga­ni­za­tion Light­house Inter­na­tional. The elec­trodes spa­tially cor­re­late with the pix­els so that if the cam­era detects light fix­tures in the mid­dle of a dark hall­way, elec­tri­cal stim­u­la­tions will occur along the cen­ter of the tongue.

The the­sis behind the the device, known as the Brain­port, is that we see with our brains, not our eyes.  It comes down to how we learn, not what we learn.

“It becomes a task of learn­ing, no dif­fer­ent than learn­ing to ride a bike,” Arnoldussen says, adding that the “process is sim­i­lar to how a baby learns to see. Things may be strange at first, but over time they become familiar.”

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This is a guest post from Alex J. Mann.  You can sub­scribe to his blog here and fol­low him on Twit­ter here.

In the land of finan­cial mar­kets, the phrase too big to fail has been brought into a new light.  Two physi­cists from the Swiss Fed­eral Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy in Zurich did a physics-based analy­sis of the world econ­omy, find­ing in numer­ous cases that 80% of a country’s mar­ket cap­i­tal con­sisted of only a few shareholders.

The research con­tin­ued to explain that:

The most pared-down back­bones exist in Anglo-Saxon coun­tries, includ­ing the U.S., Aus­tralia, and the U.K. Para­dox­i­cally; these same coun­tries are con­sid­ered by econ­o­mists to have the most widely-held stocks in the world, with own­er­ship of com­pa­nies tend­ing to be spread out among many investors. But while each Amer­i­can com­pany may link to many own­ers, Glat­tfelder and Battiston’s analy­sis found that the own­ers var­ied lit­tle from stock to stock, mean­ing that com­par­a­tively few hands are hold­ing the reins of the entire market.

The invest­ment take­away is to tar­get investor influ­ence rather than mar­ket timing

“In this kind of sci­ence, com­plex sys­tems, you’re not aim­ing at mak­ing pre­dic­tions [like] … where the ten­nis ball will be at given place in given time,” Bat­tis­ton said. “What you’re try­ing to esti­mate is … the poten­tial influ­ence that [an investor] has.”

The final results from the study will be pub­lished in an upcom­ing issue of the jour­nal Phys­i­cal Review E.

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This is a guest post from Alex J. Mann.  You can sub­scribe to his blog here and fol­low him on Twit­ter here.