Like MUTEK a few months before it, The Gray Area Festival pushed the boundaries of visual art & music through technology. It felt progressive in style and message.
The most memorable panel was ZERO1’s, which brought together a handful of the top projects – and their creators – from its international artist incubator. Particularly memorable was Rashana Bajracharya with an immersive experience to help women explore their bodies and get a better understanding of common health issues like yeast infections. Rashana comes from Nepal, where the lack of education around women’s health is even (much) more problematic than in The States. It’s compelling to see how art can help break through the stigmas behind women (and men)’s health.
I have yet to find her work with ZERO1 online, but here is something she made with the WCA out of Hong Kong. It’s just as inspiring as her talk at Gray Area.
I had the enormous privilege to go to VentureBeat’s Transform 2019, an AI conference in SF. My mission was to find out how to make recommendation systems better. Services like YouTube, Facebook, Netflix, and Spotify use them to help people choose what to consume next, and the one thing they all seem to center it around is a person’s past behavior. It shouldn’t.
For Amazon, behavior should be a sizable part of the equation in recommending products to buy, but for ideas, stories, and any kind of content, it’s different. It should be different. People can go to their friends and family for what’s happening in their community and culture, but the greatest promise of the internet and other mass communication is being able to hear ideas & stories from people anywhere around the globe. Mind you, there’s a lot of them out there.
That’s where editors, curators, dj’s, and other domain experts come into play. It’s about gearing them up with the latest tools and technologies. They will be the ones best suited to program recommendation systems to help people get outside of their own filter bubbles. One of the speakers at Transform put it simply, this isn’t just about artificial intelligence, but augmenting (human) intelligence as well. First and foremost, the people who are at the forefront of a field. Someone who’s made it their life’s work. Next, democratize it to everyone else.
Expectations are on high when you get two talented musicians together, but the outcome usually doesn’t match up. Rarely do the two amplify the talent.
When I heard Michael Kiwanuka and Tom Misch collaborated, I was intrigued but tried not to set expectations too high. When I hype anything up, I feel like it always falls short. Money might be the exception.
Tom Misch is slowly gaining status as one of the best guitarists of our time, and leads Kiwanuaka’s voice in this disco melody. A departure from his usual soul music, it reminds me of a Mayer Hawthorne song with a bit of James Mercer’s voice on Broken Bells. That’s why I love the song so much. Not only does it exceed my expectations, but it’s a departure from what I’ve heard in Kiwanuaka’s past.