Sunday 11 January 2015

Replicants Are A Machine; Keeping those statistics quiet, The tree of our languages & Aphex twin interview

The last few years have seen a slew of revelations that have confounded, confused and alarmed in equal measure. From Edward Snowden, to the recent hacking and file/photo sharing scenarios of film stars and studio email exchanges, it's been one cannonball after the other. In effect, the bigger lesson is to ensure that your communication is as transparent as possible. Either that, or make sure you have a good reason why it isn't.

You can't keep people in the dark for too long anymore. That's down to the speed at which information is now disseminating. Furthermore,  We're all connected much more to each other than ever before , due to the power of the internet. Smartphones are now almost de rigeur, and that speeds the spread of information at an even faster rate. So when something tried and tested has changed in some way, then the headscratching happens a little earlier on in the process :-

What Apple isn't telling us anymore

When you're no longer trumpeting your own successes so loudly, then it's natural that there are two assumptions to be made. The first is that you're on the downslide and the second, less obvious one, is that you no longer want to give your competitors any metrics on your sales, in order for them to assess any target figures and work out any way to gain a competitive advantage. Both reasons are plausible, but one can hold more weight than the other, depending on the language and contextual arguements presented. In effect, how much wood can you see for the trees (and vice versa), is entirely up to you when iterating the rhetoric.

Our understanding of language and the way it is used, has a lot to do with our background. Not just socially, but culutrally too :- 

Feast Your Eyes on This Beautiful Linguistic Family Tree

A marvellous picture. And a great, quick way to brush up on some history, during a coffee or lunch break.

Richard D james has been on a long break since his last album. Actually, that's not true. He released the ANALORD series of tracks about a decade ago and has been involved in a slew of other projects, including an orchestra he conducted using his laptop and some custom software. Then of course, there's the (alleged) slabs of music he releases under pseudonyms, and there's.. :-

A Conversation With Aphex Twin

I've been a fan of his material for years, and own a few of his albums. The aforementioned ANALORD series are my all time favourites, for a number of  reasons; some of which, he has discussed here. And just like the man himself, the interview is laid out in a slightly cryptic manner. I'm curious as to what he does next, and hopefully it won't take another decade ( or more) to see the light of day.

Being an artist is essentially something all of us do everyday. Wether it's sitting at a desk, writing a report, or typing an article, or painting and making music, you are conjuring up something out of nothing. Or so it seems. What we're all doing is essentially distilling everything we have inside of us up until that moment of time. So whatever we're creating, is a snapshot of our thoughts and feelings, in those hours, minutes and days we spend on it.

Our art is a replication of ourselves. And unlike us, it can stick around forever. Having said that, we're then by proxy, also around for eternity. Wether you believe in the concept of god and souls or not, technology has allowed us to keep snapshots and facsmilies of our lives around for as long as we can keep on replicating the data. We're backing up our backups on a regular basis, in case we need them in the future.

And sometimes this goes on verbatim, for years ( even decades), worth of data. Imagine a lengthy chain of babushka dolls within each other, and you'll get the picture.

A little filtering out, now and then, is a good thing in my opinion. It prevents you from being burdened with too much information, as you move forward.

After all, you can't take everything with you, no matter where it is that you're going, for whatever reason that you're going there.

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