Coordinates: at my low table with an Oaxacan pottery mug of Tao of Tea Liquid Jade matcha
[tech] One of the hottest debates in anthropology is whether humans discovered fire. Wait, what? According to some scholars, Homo Sapiens don’t get the credit, Homo Erectus do. It was cooked food that changed Erectus into Sapiens. This allowed the body changes that mark the evolution of our ancestors – larger brain, smaller jaw muscles. Fire made them turn into us.
If this is indeed correct, humans are a fundamentally technological species, full stop.
Humans make technology and our technology makes us. Today’s edition features art + technology. We tend to ignore how deeply our tools shape us since the marks from our ancient tech are so indelible so as to be invisible to us until we learn to look more closely. Its effect on art is undeniable.
[robot art] I was such a curmudgeon when Instagram launched in 2010. I had a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a specialty in photography and frankly… I did not want Instagram to exist. I didn’t want mere “peons” having powerful tools like mine. What mess might they make? Would they fancy themselves to be artists when they have no skill?
What I was really asking was “will they ignore me?”
Well, that debate is playing out on a far grander scale with tools like MidJourney which make fascinating images given only some clever word prompts like “hologram motivational poster 1850 graphic.”
[sacred tech] The craftspeople of one village in India retain the knowledge of how to make a metal alloy that’s an even more perfect mirror than the glass ones we commonly use. They have agreed to keep the formula secret and the Indian government protects their right to make them. In the past, these distortion-free mirrors were only used by royalty and priests in rituals.
[film] I’ve never been such a huge fan of a film I haven’t even seen yet!! Everything Everwhere All at Once is now available on streaming on multiple platforms, but only to buy for $20. *le sigh* I will continue to wait until I can rent. Y’all send hugs. The struggle is real. Their special effects were done on a super tight budget. The hotdog hands just crack me up. I love seeing the creativity born of the restrictions; obviously, what they did worked really fine.
[music] Even if you can’t watch Everything Everywhere, you can listen to the unbelievably brain-tingling music from the fine folks who wrote the score, Son Lux. I’m especially enamored with their drummer, Ian Chang. He uses a rig called Sensory Percussion that uses AI to transcode his stick hits on a drum kit into digital samples. It’s not going to make sense unless you see it in action, so click the video if you’re curious.
I plan to order the sensors and setup today to add to my live looping rig! I hope to fall so far down *this* wormhole that I emerge unrecognizable on the other side. No pressure, ahem.
maiden journey : shenanigans in psychedelia
In today’s edition of The Microdose by UC Berkeley, they reveal the latest silly shenigan pulled off by the USPTO – granting a patent to candyflipping. Candyflipping, as nearly every hippie raver at the trash fence knows, is the combination of LSD and MDMA. There’s not a thing novel about it. Clearly, the patent examiner had never been to Burning Man.
This sort of thing was forecasted in a piece of speculative fiction called We Will Call It Pala by Here and Now Studios. For the second-wave psychedelic revolution to play out differently than this cautionary tale envisions, we will have to bring these shenanigans to a reckoning.