The Null Device
Posts matching tags 'brian eno'
2009/11/26
The idea of the "End of History" is one which never goes away; every so often, it'll come back in a new guise. Its latest incarnation comes from none other than Brian Eno, who claims that nothing is "uncool" anymore.
We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness.That makes sense (after all, when your aging parents used to be punk rockers, the shock value of music-as-generational-rebellion is somewhat played out). However, to extrapolate from this to the "death of uncool" doesn't quite follow. Granted, the old and foreign are no longer "uncool", partly because the idea of defining oneself against them has become passé (and thus in itself "uncool"). But nothing being uncool? What about Coldplay? U2? Or even Kenny G (proof, perhaps, that there are some things so uncool that they are immune to the process of reclamation into the Goldmine), or the Christian Side Hug rappers; the list goes on.
2008/6/20
Kevin Kelly (one of the original WIRED contributors) and Brian Eno (no introduction needed) have a game where they try to come up with improbable trends for the near future and extrapolate them. While some of them are (at least nowadays), somewhat lacking in the "improbable" aspects (computer power plateauing has been predicted for a while, people are avoiding American citizenship for tax reasons, Sao Paolo in Brazil has already banned billboard advertising, a deadly airborne plague has been feared since SARS and bird flu and there are predictions that the end of cheap oil will enrich inner cities whilst turning formerly affluent suburbs into impoverished backwaters), others (particularly some of Eno's) are thought-provokingly out-there:
Everybody becomes so completely cynical about the election process that voter turnout drops to 2 percent (families and relatives of prospective politicians) until finally the "democratic process" is abandoned in favour of a lottery system. Everything immediately improves.
Suicide becomes not only commonplace but socially acceptable and even encouraged. People choose when to die: living too long is considered selfish and old-fashioned.
A new profession -- cosmetic psychiatry -- is born. People visit "plastic psychiatrists" to get interesting neuroses and obsessions added into their makeup.
A new kind of holiday becomes popular: you are dropped by helicopter in an unknown place, with two weeks' supply of food and water. You are assured that you will not see anyone else in this time. There is a panic button just in case.
A highly successful new magazine -- Ordinary People, edited by the nonagenarian Studs Terkel -- focuses only on people who have never done anything in particular to deserve attention.
A new type of artist arises: someone whose task is to gather together existing but overlooked pieces of amateur art, and, by directing attention onto them, to make them important. (This is part of a much larger theory of mine about the new role of curatorship, the big job of the next century.)
Manufacturers of underwear finally realize that men have different-sized balls.
(via Boing Boing) ¶ 1
2005/5/27
Music Thing has a feature on how various tiny, ubiquitous sounds and pieces of music were created. The Mac startup sound, for example, was a C Major chord played on a Korg Wavestation, whereas Brian Eno created the Microsoft sound during a creative dry spell.
(via MusicThing) ¶ 0