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previous | 9 September 2006 | next
Interesting post-mortem on the Facebook scandal, via bOINGbOING:
In the tech world, we have a bad tendency to view the concept of "private" as a single bit that is either 0 or 1. Either it's exposed or not. When companies make a decision to make data visible in a more "efficient" manner, there is often a panic. And the term "privacy" is often invoked. Think back to when Deja made Usenet searchable. The term is also invoked when companies provide new information to you based on the data you had previously given it. Think back to the shock over Gmail's content-based ad delivery. Neither of these are about privacy in the bit sense but they ARE about privacy in a different sense
And via Colby, an interview with Cécile Schott, aka Colleen:
As far as the next full-length is concerned, she says, “I'm still doing the background work for the third album which I'm hoping to finish by Christmas and release by mid-2007. The EP is the end of a trilogy of sorts, as the first two albums were based on loops and a kind of 'tinkling' sound. The third album will be quite different because the viola de gamba and clarinet are taking me in other directions. I'll use the word 'jazz' to describe it which is going to sound strange because my records haven't been jazz at all, but the viola is actually a really versatile instrument—it's associated with baroque music because that's when it was used—but if you play it with your hands in a finger-picking kind of way or in a more experimental fashion, it starts to sound like lots of other things. The sound I'm developing is jazz in a very wide sense, more the spirit of jazz. Thus far there are three pieces I want to include: an orchestral-free jazz clarinet composition, one for classical guitar and clarinet that's already available (on a CD in the Italian art magazine Uovo) that I'm going to re-record, and a free-form viola piece that has a 'Baroque-African jazz' feeling, let's say.”
I had a really thoughtful conversation with Stephen Gardner last night, comparing and contrasting the ways that digital impacts images versus sounds. Digital is problematic for audiophiles for a variety of reasons that don't seem - at first blush - to have parallel in the visual world. Digital captures audio frequencies on the high end that, though they are not directly audible, have a noticeable effect on the tones that you can hear. I can't think of any way that capturing ultraviolet data - if that can even be done with conventional scanning equipment - would for example, change the highest frequencies of blue. Certainly, that's beyond the capacity of current process color reproduction; I don't know about various types of monitors. But whether that would even impact the raw data, apart from the representation environment is beyond me - food for thought. On the other side of the equation, Stephen pointed out that getting rich sound is just plain easier if you set up a mic - on the visual side, if you want a drawing, just get a pencil and paper.
Speaking of analog goodness, I got a peek at Robin Rose's new show at Hemphill this morning, checkit:
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