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Category: media & arts – Page 71

It’s not really a Star Wars story unless there’s a lovable or memorable droid stealing the spotlight. But, when you really stop and think about it, there’s also something profoundly tragic about the role artificial lifeforms play in the Star Wars universe.

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REFERENCES
• Race in American Science Fiction by Isiah Lavender III
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10364882-race-in-american-science-fiction.
• Imagining Slaves and Robots in Literature, Film, and Pop Culture by Gregory Jerome Hampton.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/26371201-imagining-slave…ar-culture.
• The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Literature (Chapter 15) Beyond the Borders of the Neo-Slave Narrative by Jeffrey Allen Tucker.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/39293853-the-cambridge-c…literature.
• Asimov on Science Fiction in Science Fiction Digest, October-November 1981
https://archive.org/details/sfdigest19811011
• Janelle Monae’s “Many Moons” music video.

NOVELS REFERENCED

Continue reading “The Tragedy of Droids in Star Wars” | >

Rats love to dance 🕺:3

The team had two alternate hypotheses: The first was that the optimal music tempo for beat synchronicity would be determined by the time constant of the body. This is different between species and much faster for compared to humans (think of how quickly a rat can scuttle). The second was that the optimal tempo would instead be determined by the time constant of the brain, which is surprisingly similar across species.

“After conducting our research with 20 human participants and 10 rats, our results suggest that the optimal tempo for beat synchronization depends on the time constant in the brain,” said Takahashi. “This demonstrates that the animal brain can be useful in elucidating the perceptual mechanisms of music.”

The rats were fitted with wireless, miniature accelerometers, which could measure the slightest head movements. Human participants also wore accelerometers on headphones. They were then played one-minute excerpts from Mozart’s Sonata for Two Pianos in D Major, K. 448, at four different tempos: Seventy-five percent, 100%, 200% and 400% of the original speed.

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Making room for optimism.

2bsirius video about:
Arthur C. Clarke formulated the following three “laws” of prediction:
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
For Shermer:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=shermers-last-law.
Full text of Shermers article:

Shermer’s Last Law

For background on Arthur C. Clarke:
http://www.technobohemia.com/techboblog/2010/2/5/clarkes-3-l…ction.html.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_C._Clarke.

Music “Wonders of Other Worlds: Ritual” by Kevin Macleod:
http://incompetech.com/m/c/royalty-free/

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With mathematical modeling, a research team has now succeeded in better understanding how the optimal working state of the human brain, called criticality, is achieved. Their results mean an important step toward biologically-inspired information processing and new, highly efficient computer technologies and have been published in Scientific Reports.

“In particular tasks, supercomputers are better than humans, for example in the field of artificial intelligence. But they can’t manage the variety of tasks in —driving a car first, then making music and telling a story at a get-together in the evening,” explains Hermann Kohlstedt, professor of nanoelectronics. Moreover, today’s computers and smartphones still consume an enormous amount of energy.

“These are no sustainable technologies—while our brain consumes just 25 watts in everyday life,” Kohlstedt continues. The aim of their interdisciplinary research network, “Neurotronics: Bio-inspired Information Pathways,” is therefore to develop new electronic components for more energy-efficient computer architectures. For this purpose, the alliance of engineering, life and investigates how the is working and how that has developed.

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Gallery QI — Becoming: An Interactive Music Journey in VR — Opening Night.
November 3rd, 2022 — Atkinson Hall auditorium.
UC San Diego — La Jolla, CA

By Shahrokh Yadegari, John Burnett, Eito Murakami and Louis Pisha.

“Becoming” is the result of a collaborative work that was initiated at the Opera Hack organized by San Diego Opera. It is an operatic VR experience based on a Persian poem by Mowlana Rumi depicting the evolution of human spirit. The audience experiences visual, auditory and tactile impressions which are partly curated and partly generated interactively in response to the player’s actions.

“Becoming” incorporates fluid and reactive graphical material which embodies the process of transformation depicted in the Rumi poem. Worlds seamlessly morph between organic and synthetic environments such as oceans, mountains and cities and are populated by continuously evolving life forms. The music is a union of classical Persian music fused with electronic music where the human voice becomes the beacon of spirit across the different stages of the evolution. The various worlds are constructed by the real-time manipulation of particle systems, flocking algorithms and terrain generation methods—all of which can be touched and influenced by the viewer. Audience members can be connected through the network and haptic feedback technology provides human interaction cues as well as an experiential stimulus.

While the piece is a major artistic endeavor, it also showcases a number of key technologies and streaming techniques for the development of musical content in XR. The spatialization system Space3D, developed at Sonic Arts and implemented to run on advanced GPUs, is capable of creating highly realistic spatial impressions, and recreating the acoustics of the environment based on the virtual models in real-time using advanced multi-processing ray-tracing techniques.

“Becoming” premiered at SIGGRAPH 2022, Immersive Pavilion in Vancouver, Canada in August 2022. Opera America and San Diego Opera showcased an early preview of this work as part of the first Opera Hack presentations in 2020.

Continue reading “LIVE — BECOMING: AN INTERACTIVE JOURNEY IN VR” | >

The recipe for the Imaginarium is locked behind the ancient doors. Three brave hunters are sent on a mission to get the three mysterious scrolls needed to open them… but somebody doesn’t like it at all.

Official Music Video for “Imaginarium” by Fish Basket.

But this track on Bandcamp: https://fishbasket.bandcamp.com/track/imaginarium.

This video was classically shot and modified using artificial intelligence.

Shot and edited by Kamil Arbuz (Arbuz Hyper Film) — https://www.facebook.com/arbuzhyperfilm @ARBUZ HYPER FILM
Directed by: Fish Basket and Kamil Arbuz.
Produced by Kamil Arbuz and Piotr Wicher.
Ai FX: Piotr Wicher.
Sound FX: Kamil Arbuz.
Screenplay: Fish Basket.
Additional editing: Piotr Wicher.
Costumes: Fish Basket.
Music recorded in Rombalnia by Adam Gajewski and Piotr Wicher.
Music Production: Piotr Wicher.
Mix and mastering: Nebula Studio.

Cast:

Continue reading “Fish Basket — Imaginarium (Official Music Video)” | >

O’Rourke soon started his own board, TacoLand, which was freewheeling and largely about punk music. “This was the counterculture: Maximum Rock & Roll[magazine], buying records by catalog you couldn’t find at record stores,” he said.

When he was younger, he was arrested on drunk-driving charges and played in a punk band. Now 46, he still skateboards.

Interestingly I played in Punk Rock bands in New Orleans, and used CDC’s BO2k to show my friend KJ that Southwest Research’s network was not safe. I also used it in Austin to show my friend Jacob Grimes’ boss that his network was not safe. It was a handy tool for hackers and security researchers back in the day. Texans know all too much about it. This gave Beto major cool points in my book. Hacktivismo still continues today with people like Johnny Long, and I would hope me too. I loved the Ninja Strike Force back in the day.

As Beto O’Rourke starts his run for U.S. president, members of a group famous for “hactivism” come forward for the first time to claim him as a former comrade.

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