Bits

#VR is more like an answer to a question everyone has already answered, every single year, for four decades, and to which no one is willing to take no for an answer. https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle-columnists/arid-41163076.html

How can we apply #scifi storytelling as a tool for imagining and shaping the future of technology? https://csi.asu.edu/applied-sci-fi/

Tiny SciFi Stories #117

FotoAutomat has been working to preserve this photographic heritage by restoring and maintaining the last original analog photobooths in Paris, Nantes and Prague, mainly in spaces dedicated to art and culture. #photography https://fotoautomat.fr/en/

“There is a window of time when the mammalian brain is far more susceptible and open to learning from the environment .. this window will close at some point, and then, the brain becomes much less open to new learning.” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06204-3

The fact that crucial decisions about whether to keep or destroy data are kept in the hands of actors with profit motives, autocratic aspirations or other self-serving ends has a huge implication not only for individuals but also for the cultural at large. https://archive.ph/9T0cu

Sound & Music

a multitouch string simulator with a common chord progression #web #audio https://string.spiel.com/chords.html

A node-based graphical synthesizer #synth https://saharan.github.io/GraphSynth/

a reasonably violent interactive audio experience #web #audio https://asimplecardgame.com/

Confronted by increasing social dislocation and an escalating cost-of-living crisis, these artists are turning to the arcane mysteries of yesteryear to alleviate modern malaise. https://daily.bandcamp.com/scene-report/new-dark-folk-uk-ireland-scene-report

Keysette is an unholy combination of the 80s and 90s worst cheap #synth technology with the worst cassette adapter technology and – is kind of impossible not to love. https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1671176034035675136/pu/vid/480×510/UhuzsQYHdah-SE1Q.mp4?tag=12

new technologies to capture and analyze sound are leading to startling discoveries about what the eyes cannot see #data #sonification https://www.noemamag.com/the-sounds-of-invisible-worlds/

#plantwave https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9oiFn_6EHk

The life of musician Connie Converse easily reduces down to one of those Hemingway length sad stories: Before Dylan there was Connie Converse and then she disappeared. https://beta.prx.org/stories/472881

Arts

Conjurers of impossible visuals, Hipgnosis were at the white-hot center of the maddest, funniest and most creative era in the history of popular music. https://www.squaringthecirclefilm.com/synopsis/

“When we learn about that supposed golden age of globe-trotting American adventuring and archeology, and about how it felt to the people being “collected,” Indy becomes a sort of fun-house mirror.” https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/burying-indiana-jones

in a world where people have what they want, does having more matter? #solarpunk https://publishing.tor.com/apsalmforthewildbuilt-beckychambers/9781250236210/

We are still, in many ways, living in the world Reagan and Thatcher built—a neoliberal world of growing precarity, corporate dominance, divestment from the welfare state, and social atomization. https://slate.com/technology/2019/01/hopepunk-cyberpunk-solarpunk-science-fiction-broken.html

Politics & Economics

Dundon provides both a glimpse of a unique historical moment in American politics and an exploration of an American cultural phenomenon that might be more pervasive and longer-lasting. #photography https://archive.ph/y42iD

Each stripe represents the average temperature for a single year, relative to the average temperature over the period as a whole. Shades of blue indicate cooler-than-average years, while red shows years that were hotter than average. The stark band of deep red stripes on the right-hand side of the graphic show the rapid heating of our planet in recent decades. #climatechange #dataviz #showyourstripes https://showyourstripes.info/

Global primary energy consumption by source #dataviz #climatechange #energy https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/global-energy-substitution