Three things every morning from the worlds of culture, storytelling and science that sounds like art:

Marc Weidenbaum on Nathan Ho’s “A Preliminary Theory of Sound Design” –

The piece takes as its title “A Preliminary Theory of Sound Design,” and he notes Disney’s “12 Principles of Animation” as a model. The traits are, in alphabetical order: Contrast, Directionality, Fidelity, Regularity, Space, Transients, Verticality, and Vocals. They appear in a different sequence in Ho’s post, beginning, appropriately, with Transients (specifically the “initial” transient: “A tiny click,” he writes, “or burst of noise added to an attack, or a fade in, can make a huge difference”) and closing with Verticality (which he associates with other concepts, such as “arrangement” and “layering”). Whether you make sound or just think about it, the divisions he points out provide a useful classification system. 

Very much on my mind too, as we enter the sound design phase of our audio drama THE DEPARTMENT OF MIDNIGHT. (Which will now be this summer, due to scheduling issues!)

Che Lovelace.

From “Nothing But Time,” 1926. There’s a copy of the complete 45-minute film on Dailymotion.

Three things that started my day at the computer:

Lina Kusaite.

We live in a time of hypernature. Technical knowledge and organic life are merging in new ways. Boundaries between reality and simulation are blurring. New dependencies and symbioses are appearing. Nature itself is becoming art. Over a period of nine weeks, the exhibition Hypernatural Forces will show artistic positions around the theme of hypernature in the Mixing Plant from June 2 till August 6, 2023.

Visitors enter the territory of a roaming robot pack. Listen to the beguiling song of invasive plants. Or wander through deserted landscapes of electronic waste and organic fiction.

Late style: a thing I’ve been thinking about of late:

What do we mean by “late films”? For Theodor Adorno, the maturity of late works of art did not resemble the kind one finds in fruit: “they are, for the most part, not round, but furrowed, even ravaged.” Granted, Adorno was writing about Beethoven, but this idea of contrarian lateness still survives in debates around the term’s use in cinema. Intransigent and confrontational, late films are both a summation of a filmmaker’s oeuvre and a stripping down of their style. They’re masterful distillations of decades of craft, sheared, in a senescent bid for simplicity, until whatever’s left is honed and impenetrable to the point of alienation.

Scientists discover mysterious cosmic threads in Milky Way

Horizontal structures, up to 10 light years in length, appear to point in direction of galaxy’s black hole

Astronomers have discovered hundreds of mysterious cosmic threads that point towards the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way, after a survey of the galaxy.

The strange filaments, each of which stretches five to 10 light years through space, resemble the dots and dashes of morse code on a vast scale. They spread out from the galactic centre 25,000 light years from Earth like fragmented spokes on an enormous wheel.

“Whirling Colour” by Jon Foreman, from this piece here.

“1972 cover art for ‘La Force Mystérieuse,’ by J.-H. Rosny aîné. Possibly by Henri Lievens.“

Voidopolis is meant to culminate in loss. Its images are created by digitally “wiping” humans from stock photography and the text is generated without the letter ‘e’ using a modified GPT-2 text generator. The book, adapted from a series of Instagram posts that was ultimately deleted, is likewise designed to disappear: the book’s pages are garbled and can only be deciphered with an AR app, which, after enough readings, decays the images and words just as memory would. The printed book, with its unintelligible pages, remains as a leftover artifact. By disappearing, the story makes a case for the collective amnesia that follows great cataclysm.

I have a memory of a piece William Gibson wrote that deleted itself after reading: ah, here it is:

Gibson’s text focused on the ethereal, human-owed nature of memories retained over the passage of time (the title referred to a Kodak photo album from which the text’s memories are taken). Its principal notoriety arose from the fact that the poem, stored on a 3.5″ floppy disk, was programmed to encrypt itself after a single use; similarly, the pages of the artist’s book were treated with photosensitive chemicals, effecting the gradual fading of the words and images from the book’s first exposure to light.

Above, the work of Ay-O, age 92.

I really need to find time to cull my RSS feed subscriptions, because they’re overrun with posts about AI, and the only AI story I cared about lately was the one where AI might have identified a new antibiotic. (Try replacing “AI” with “clever use of spreadsheets” in every story you see about AI.) This is the sort of thing filling my RSS reader:

“AI generated inflatable skyscrapers.” One suspects this comes from the same techbro k-hole as the time networked clothing was described as “wearable shirts.” Apparently the above is “fresh inspiration” and not “there are a lot of condoms in the image library learning model.” Look closely and you will see that the speculative city of the future is ribbed for your pleasure.

Can’t resist a space science story that begins with “new images of the sun.“

“When you throw something into a black hole, information about it gets scrambled and cannot be recovered,” says Goto. “This scrambling is a manifestation of chaos.”

The team came across “magic,” which is a mathematical measure of how difficult a quantum state is to simulate using an ordinary classical (non-quantum) computer. Their calculations showed that in a chaotic system almost any state will evolve into one that is “maximally magical”—the most difficult to simulate.

This provides the first direct link between the quantum property of magic and the chaotic nature of black holes. “This finding suggests that magic is strongly involved in the emergence of spacetime,” says Goto.

Belkis Ayon.

We were particularly interested in whether supernatural explanations focused on “natural” phenomena—events that had no clear human cause such as disease, natural disasters and drought—or whether they focused on human-caused “social” phenomena such as wars, murder and theft.

We found explanations for all these various phenomena in our survey. For example, the Cayapa people of the Ecuadorian rainforest attributed lightning, a natural phenomenon, to the Thunder spirit, who carried a large sword that glinted when he used it in combat.

And the Comanche people of the great American plains explained the timing of war, a social phenomenon, using dreams from medicine men.

However, our results also revealed a striking gap: supernatural explanations for natural phenomena were much more prevalent than for social phenomena.

A few years back, photographer Sho Shibata traversed the frozen landscapes of Aomori’s Hakkōda Mountains documenting the otherworldly formations that cover the slopes. Heavy, icy snow cloaks the countless trees that populate the region, morphing the arboreal vistas into frigid hoodoo-like characters. “This is my favourite place to visit when it is cold like this because it transforms into a wonderland,” Shibata says. “When I first saw them, I actually thought there were lots of snowmen. What’s incredible is how they all look so similar. They look like snow monsters, like they are ghosts.”

Currently we know of only one guaranteed way to create black holes. That’s through the deaths of massive stars. When they collapse in on themselves at the end of their lives, they reach high enough densities to overwhelm every other force and trigger the formation of a black hole.

But the early universe may have been exotic enough to make black holes in its own way. When inflation ended and the universe began to cool off, it was not a smooth and gentle process. Instead it was incredibly violent, with massive shifts in energy and mass from place to place. It’s possible that pockets of the universe may have spontaneously reached high enough densities to form black holes directly on their own, without having to go through the formation of stars first. These are the so-called primordial black holes.

Virginia Mori – gallery.

Being almost separated from reality, the city and its entertainments, people rushing and everything that usually takes my attention I could fully concentrate on the music and soundtrack, spending most of the day with my own thoughts and having enough space to experiment and be free in a creative process. This soundtrack would probably be a very different thing if composed in a place that I am usually living in. I took this a chance to explore something new about myself as a composer and human being, taking the opposite direction that I would usually choose for myself.

No matter how “repellent” the subject matter of this book, John Gregory Bourke (1846–1896) believed it to be “none the less deserving of the profoundest consideration”. Marked as “not for general perusal”, its topic is the use of human and animal excrement in religious and medicinal rites (or, “Filth Pharmacy”), and the survival of sanitized rituals into the present day. To arrive at his conclusions, Captain Bourke consumed a bizarre mélange of anthropological learning, from “The Urine Dance of the Zuñis”, through the “Tolls of Flatulence Exacted of Prostitutes in France” (mostly collected at bridge crossings), to Christian Stercorianism, which held that the blessed sacrament is processed into ordure like ordinary food stuff.

Wangechi Mutu.

The hands were found in three separate pits in what would have been the entrance court of the palace directly in front of the throne room. The severed hands placed in such a location were likely intended to be seen and would have made an impactful sight. Whatever business a visitor to see the king might have was certainly placed into a new perspective at the sight of so many dismembered hands.

“In quantum matter, electrons shed their particle-like character and exhibit strange collective behavior,” says condensed matter physicist Arun Paramekanti, a professor in the U of T’s department of physics in the Faculty of Arts & Science. “These materials are known as non-Fermi liquids, in which the simple rules break down.”

Now, three researchers from the university’s department of physics and Centre for Quantum Information & Quantum Control (CQIQC) have developed a theoretical model describing the interactions between subatomic particles in non-Fermi liquids. The framework expands on existing models and will help researchers understand the behavior of these “strange metals.”

As I’ve said before, science can be the greatest speculative storytelling and cultural invention, and that’s why I always save the good stuff here.

Tora Schultz.

Kathleen Ryan.