Björk, the Icelandic singer’s Biophilia project incorporates handmade instruments, iPad apps, David Attenborough’s nature films and an album too – and she’s showcasing it all at Manchester international festival.“There will be an album in September, with an app to go with each of the 10 songs“.Extraordinary.This article titled “Björk: ‘Manchester is the prototype’” was written by Alex Needham, for The Guardian on Monday 4th July 2011 19.00 UTCOriginally formulated by scientist Edward O Wilson, the biophilia hypothesis suggests that human beings have an innate affinity with the natural world – plants, animals or even the weather. Yet it’s not biophilia but good old-fashioned fandom that has drawn a small band of Björk obsessives to queue outside Manchester’s Campfield Market Hall since 10am this morning. Not that there’s anything old-fashioned about the woman they are here to see. Biophilia is the Icelandic singer’s new project – the word means “love of living things” – and promises to push the envelope so far you’ll need the Hubble telescope to see it.A collection of journalists have already had a preview at a press conference in the Museum of Science and Industry over the road. Björk is absent, preparing for tonight’s live show, her first in the UK for over three years, which will open the Manchester international festival. Instead, artist and app developer Scott Snibbe, musicologist Nikki Dibben and project co-ordinator James Merry talk through Biophilia’s many layers. There will be an album in September, with an app to go with each of the 10 songs. There will be an education project, designed to teach children about nature, music and technology – some local kids will embark on it next week. There will be a documentary. And then there will be tonight’s show, performed in the round to a 2,000-strong crowd including journalists representing publications from New Scientist to the New York Times, as well as the diehard fans waiting outside. One, 20-year-old Nick from London, is a classical violinist who has loved Björk since the age of 14. “I wasn’t really into pop at all until I heard Medúlla,” he says, citing her most challenging album. “It was like a gateway drug from me liking difficult 20th-century western art music to liking pop.”It’s a journey in the opposite direction from the one most music fans make, and one which speaks volumes about the complexity of Björk’s work. “More classical musicians respect Björk than any other pop star,” he adds.At the museum, Snibbe is demonstrating the apps. The app that goes with the first single, Crystalline, includes a game in which you collect crystals in a tunnel, through which process you alter and customise the music. The app also includes an abstract version of the musical score; and an essay by Dibben that explains, in this case, how the structures of crystals relate to the musical structure of the song. The app for another song, Cosmogony, presents a 3D cosmos you can navigate. Each app has been created by a different – often rival – developer. “To me, it feels like the birth of opera or the birth of cinema,” says Snibbe.Yet Björk didn’t have such lofty aspirations in creating the project. “My main aim is to not get too bored myself,” she says, via email (she rests her voice between shows). “I feel that if I’m curious and excited there is a bigger chance the listener might be. At the end of the day, it’s more about the feeling of an adventure rather than the details of the adventure itself. So in short: whatever turns you on.”That said, the change from a passive to an active listening experience is a radical one. “The apps are mostly made for headphones and a private experience,” says Björk. “What you see live is only us playing our version. You can play a totally different versions at home.” If you’ve no desire to do that, Merry is at pains to point out that Biophilia will still exist as a CD or download – and indeed only those with access to an iPad or iPhone can experience the apps. So far, the project has been too expensive to adapt to other handheld devices.At the show venue, the journalists are being given a tour of the new instruments that have been specially built for the project. One contraption looks like a giant silver mangle decorated with two massive ear trumpets, but is called a sharpsichord. There are two giant pendulums, which have strings plucked by a plectrum as they swing past. There’s a Tesla coil that descends in a cage from the ceiling; two prongs that emit purple flashes of lightning – and, with it, sound. There’s also a celeste, which has been gutted and fitted with the pipes of a gamelan. These fantastical devices are controlled by an iPad. Above the performance space is a circle of screens that show the apps for each new song; moving tectonic plates for Mutual Core; invading pink cells for Virus (“Like a virus needs a body, as soft tissue feeds on blood, I will find you, the urge is here,” go the lyrics).It must be one of the most complex pop shows ever, and according to Björk, it could have been more elaborate still. “Manchester is the prototype,” she says. “We had to leave many things out because of budget and time and stuff.” As it is, the whole project has taken three years and cost so much money she told Rolling Stone that “we’ll be lucky if we earn zero”.Yet, on purely artistic grounds, it’s hard to regard Biophilia as anything other than a success. As the lights go down, Björk’s childhood hero David Attenborough’s unmistakable voice, recorded just that day, fills the room to explain the songs. The show includes Björk’s favourite footage from BBC nature documentaries playing when she performs older songs. Hidden Place is illustrated by a beautiful but disturbing clip from Attenborough’s Life – of a seal’s corpse being devoured by psychedelically coloured worms and starfish. All 10 tracks from the new album are played. Such an onslaught of new material would try the patience of most audiences, but this one is rapt – no one even goes to the bar.Much of this is due to the sensory bombardment of music, images and costumes – not least Björk’s bright orange wig, which a comment on the Guardian’s review says makes her resemble a tamarin monkey. Her decision to ban cameras and other recording equipment from the venue has also played its part. “I feel since everyone has made such an effort to be there all together at the same place and time, we might as well go for it,” she says. “It can be hard to play music for people who are filming you for Twitter or whatever. It’s like going to a restaurant with someone who keeps texting their friends while you are speaking to them – hard to concentrate.”Then there’s Björk’s extraordinary voice, once compared by Bono to an icepick, and still imperishable at 45. “My voice has changed,” she says. “I thought it had gone a little deeper. On my last tour I got nodules [on the vocal cords] but managed to stretch it out with three years of vocal work, so I’m back to my old range now.” Björk “adores” a whole range of singers: “Chaka Khan, Beyoncé, Antony” – the latter being Antony Hegarty, a former collaborator who is here in the audience – though her “favourite singer alive today” is Azerbaijani devotional singer Alim Qasimov. She is accompanied by a 24-piece Icelandic choir she discovered on YouTube.After spending so long meticulously making Biophilia, performance feels liberating. Live shows and making an album are, says Björk, “extreme opposites. After noodling for ever on an album, gathering together the best moments, it’s refreshing and healthy to have to do it all in one whack. Then you sort of have to take real life into it and accept that you only have whatever you have that day – and that is enough.”Right now Björk is at the intersection of music, nature and technology, exploring how the three together might help build a more sustainable future. But is it still pop? “Yes, absolutely!” Björk claims. (Dibben, who wrote a book about Björk, says the singer is wary of having her music hived off into the rarified world of the academy.) “Or perhaps I would rather call it folk music – folk music of our time. I was never too much into Warhol and the whole pop thing – it felt a bit superficial. I prefer folk. People. Humans.”• Bjork plays Manchester international festival on 7, 10, 13 and 16 July. Biophilia is released in September<br /> <a href=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” _mce_href=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/click_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” rel=”nofollow”><br /> <img src=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” _mce_src=”http://oas.guardian.co.uk/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.ads/guardianapis.com/music/oas.html/@Bottom” alt=”Ads by The Guardian”></img><br /> </a><br />guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogBjörk: ‘Manchester is the prototype’Related posts:who is itExclusive Radiohead artwork plus The King of Limbs album streamCanterbury Cathederal
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Björk: ‘Manchester is the prototype’
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/07/05/bjork-manchester-is-the-prototype
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July 5 2011, 8:45am | Comments »
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SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/14/sxsw-2011-can-facebook-photos-be-used-commercially
Facebook is asked whether businesses and advertisers could make use of the equivalent to one Flickr‘s worth of photos being uploaded each month. SXSW report
This article titled “SXSW 2011: Can Facebook photos be used commercially?” was written by Jemima Kiss, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 16.41 UTC Much of the focus of this discussion was inevitably focused on Facebook’s photos product manager, Sam Odio, who disappointingly played the “not my remit’ card when asked the most interested and pertinent questions about Facebook’s use of users’ photos, including facial recognition and how images might be co-opted by advertisers. • Facebook sees “a Flickr’s worth of photos uploaded every month”, said Odio. But it’s worth considering the different values of those two services: Flickr includes some high-quality, well edited photography, while Facebook focuses on storytelling over quality. It doesn’t matter, said Odio, if that first photo of your newborn nephew is blurry: it’s the social context behind the photo. • Odio fielded a question by one delegate about how businesses and advertisers might start appropriating photos for commercial use. “We’re not in the business of selling ads through people’s photos and we want to prevent businesses having free rein over users,” he said. “But businesses are users,” pushed the delegate. Odio said Facebook would want the people in the photos to be telling the story – which means advertising would be there but more subtly, and directed by users. • As for ownership of photos, Odio said that comes down to the need to build the API in such a way that it can access your friends’ photos. If each of those users retained ownership, that would become very complicated. “There are worries we are going to use photos in advertising but it doesn’t really benefit us that much given how sensitive the subject is.” • Yan-David Erlick, a serial entrepreneur who founded Mophot.to, predicted that social photos will become even more integrated with our lives through different sorts of tagging. “Timelines between items will mean that over time, these entities are not viewed as individual pieces of media but will have contextual attributes tying them to other pieces.” • Odio explained how after struggling to keep his startup photo site Divvyshot going in 2009, ploughing in all his own savings, he got a random email one Sunday night. It was from Blake Ross, who later turned out to be co-creator of Firefox, at an address at Facebook. “He said ‘Sam – your site looks interesting. You should come here.’ I was living with six developers at the time and they were all looking over my shoulder to figure out if the email was fake or not.” It was, and Facebook acquired Divvyshot in April 2010. • Feature requests aren’t always the best way to develop a product. Odio said nobody asked for Instagram, which just raised $7m in funding, but now it is taking off. Facebook’s engineers also have a monthly hackathon where they can work on whatever they like; that doesn’t determine product direction but features such as drag-and-drop organisation have come out of that. • On facial recognition, all Odio would say is that Facebook “hasn’t been able to move quickly on it given how sensitive it is”, which does seem to imply it would have liked to do plenty if it could have got away with it. • Odio said a startup should make the product extremely simple; he had got distracted when trying to add too many features and functions. “Focus on one thing and do it extremely well. In early days the product needs to be explained to users in 10 seconds or less.” • One delegate said he was concerned that Facebook is becoming such an important repository for his life, and that photos are the most easily accessible part of that archive compared to status updates or messages. Erlich described the web being used as an external memory for us all, from photos to phone numbers; this ties in with Clay Shirky’s idea of cognitive surplus – if machines can take over the mechanical parts of our brain function, what can we do with the space and energy that frees up?
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March 14 2011, 6:33am | Comments »
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Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’
Marissa Mayer of Google products expounds at SXSW on Google and the proliferation of products. Where will it all go next?
This article titled “Google’s Marissa Mayer on the location-based ‘fast, fun and future’” was written by Josh Halliday, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 17.18 UTC Dubbed “the gatekeeper of Google products”, Marissa Mayer knows what she’s talking about. Ultimately, it falls at Mayer’s door to ensure the internet giant remains as agile, innovative and willing to experiment as it was a decade ago. “The challenge is how to stay true to what originally built this big and successful brand, with a lot of experimentation and still moving really fast,” Mayer said on Friday. “Now, when new people come in [to Google] who say their products are ‘not good enough for the Google name’ you have to tell them that the Google name was built on building stuff, throwing it out there, getting feedback, seeing how it works, ramping it up, making it a success and then managing resource afterwards.” What you end up with, then, is a proliferation of products. This is where Google has fallen short, Mayer admitted. “Some of our products should be features, like Latitude and Google Hotpot,” she said. “One of the things we need to do more is merge these products into core technologies, consolidate into Maps or Places. There’s probably more than one product [Latitude and Hotpot could fit into] but we still need to condense somewhat.” Mayer, an upwardly mobile Stanford University graduate who joined the Mountain View company almost 12 years ago, also admitted that Google Maps needs some form of customer support. (Late last year, Nicaragua refused to withdraw troops from a disputed parcel of land along its border with Costa Rica after Google Maps wrongly labelled it Nicaraguan territory.) “We do need to have some support there, and step up our customer service,” Mayer said. About 40% of Google Maps usage is local, according to Mayer, with 150 million people using the mobile Google Maps. (And drivers across the world travel 12bn miles a year using Google Maps navigation – who needs satnav?) Location-based services, including new releases of Maps for mobile, check-ins, deals and augmented reality, are evolving into quintessentially Google products. The world of “contextual discovery” – organising information, reviews and deals around a given location – is the local play on Google’s longest-standing ambition. Asked by the Guardian how Google manages to assuage privacy fears with cutting-edge consumer products, Mayer said that its Street View technology had got “better and better at blurring” licence plates and other opt-outs. Mayer said Google is “transparent” about the data it needs to inform its products, adding: “There are actually a lot of places that have a lot of data about you that people don’t know. I read the other week that credit card companies know with 98% accuracy two years before that you’re going to get divorced – that’s crazy. “But it means that there’s things that you don’t even know about, like changes in your spouse’s buying power. The real question is: because that data’s always been there but now it’s been recorded, the question is how are they handling it?”
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March 14 2011, 6:28am | Comments »
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