Posts tagged new aesthetic
new-aesthetic:
Spotify appears to be creating and uploading x thousands of identical, procedurally generated songs under different names and cover art.
Other sources report that these are tracks licensed at low cost in order to fill playlists without paying record companies and their artists:
According to DN, Firefly Entertainment is doing a roaring trade in what some would call “fake artists” on Spotify.
These are the now-well-known pseudonymous artists on the streaming platform – artists with no discernible online footprint – whose music fills up many of Spotify’s own key mood and chillout playlists.
For a long time, music industry figures have wondered aloud whether Spotify has deals in place that see it pay less in royalties for streams of music from “fake artists” – whose cumulative streams now sit in the billions – than streams of artists signed to major record companies.
In its report (available here) DN obtained a list of 830 ‘fake artist’ names linked to Firefly, and discovered that at least 495 of these artists have music on first-party Spotify playlists.
This figure probably under-estimates the scope of Firefly’s artists on Spotify-run playlists, suggests DN, as the newspaper only examined 100 playlists out of the “several thousand [playlists] that Spotify is responsible for”.
“algorithm which is infinite in nature”
I collect Google Earth images. I discovered strange moments where the illusion of a seamless representation of the Earth’s surface seems to break down. At first, I thought they were glitches, or errors in the algorithm, but looking closer I realized the situation was actually more interesting — these images are not glitches. They are the absolute logical result of the system. They are an edge condition—an anomaly within the system, a nonstandard, an outlier, even, but not an error. These jarring moments expose how Google Earth works, focusing our attention on the software. They reveal a new model of representation: not through indexical photographs but through automated data collection from a myriad of different sources constantly updated and endlessly combined to create a seamless illusion; Google Earth is a database disguised as a photographic representation. These uncanny images focus our attention on that process itself, and the network of algorithms, computers, storage systems, automated cameras, maps, pilots, engineers, photographers, surveyors and map-makers that generate them.
http://www.postcards-from-google-earth.com/info/
So what I’m going to talk today, obliquely, about is a project that I’ve been sort of accidentally engaged in for the last six months or so, to which I gave the name “The New Aesthetic,” which is a rubbish name but it seems to have taken hold. And people are responding to it, which is good. And I’m going to try and talk through some of the symptoms of that, this project, this way of seeing, that is itself about ways of seeing. And this talk is about the aesthetics of that. So this idea extends in all directions and through all forms in media and technologies. But because I have nice big screens here, I’m going to show you a lot of pictures of it.
http://www.webdirections.org/resources/james-bridle-waving-at-the-machines/
