Maybe a bit of background. Virtual Futures was a conference which took place in 1994, 1995, 1996 at the University of Warwick in England. And there's a panel in 1995 called The Future of Music in which a selection of people discussed how the idea of the future music looked back then or sounded back then in 1995. So today we're very lucky to have three original members. from this panel to revisit ideas of the future from 95 and look at it how it looks now in 2013. So I'm just going to introduce Luke and he's going to introduce the rest of the panel members.
So Luke is currently based at the Centre of Fine Arts Research in Birmingham and he's doing an MA in media arts philosophy practice and he's the director of virtual futures. He's actually responsible for resurrecting virtual futures conference. Yeah, as I said, there was a gap of, so between 96 and 2011 didn't exist. Luke discovered it and brought it back to life, invited many people from all around the world including Stellark and who else did we have? Many great people. Yeah, so, and it's happening again. And this year, in October, in the US of Ulrich. Unsurprisingly, one piece of technology dominated virtual futures 1995,
and that was the internet. Have you ever been on the internet, someone asked. Yeah, it was completely boring, full of useless information. Firstly, I'd like to thank Annie and CTM for bringing us together today. Virtual Futures, for those of you who've never heard of the name, was the UK's possibly the first cyber culture conference. And by the mid-90s, it was probably the largest cyber culture conference that was hosted at the University of Warwick, where the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit, or C-Crew, were based at the time. By the time I revived the conference in 2011, the idea of the conference had escaped the
constraints of academia and the dominance of the web had been realized. But why revive a mid-90s conference 11 years after the new millennium? Well, I would like to explain that with a passage from Oil Miller's short story, Tweet. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brevity, over-connectedness, emotionally starving for attention, dragging themselves through virtual communities at 3 a.m., surrounded by stale pizza and neglected dreams, looking for angry meaning, any meaning, same hat-wearing
hipsters. Burning for shared and skeptical approval from the holographic projected dynamo in the technology of the era, who weak connections and recession wounded and directionless sat up micro conversing in the supernatural darkness of wifi enabled cafes, floating across the floating across the tops of cities contemplating techno who bared their brains to the black void of new media and thought leaders and so-called experts. If you were at Mark Fisher's talk on Wednesday or even the talk that was today, it seems the title of our panel reeks of techno-utopianism
and all the while simultaneous obsolescence. If Mark is indeed right, it's hard to imagine a future of music. Of course, music will exist in the future, perhaps. But the flattening of time that he described suggests the possibility for the long tail of music consumption to infect the sonic ambience of the presence. Choice is abundant, and of course choice can be paralyzing. Equally, to make predictions of the future is a dangerous business, and a business I've got no doubt that none of the speakers on this session will enter into.
It's impossible to know the aesthetic quality of the future music, its form, its tone, its timbre, its tempo. It's much easier, however, to extrapolate the cultural and technological developments that may cause dramatic disruption in the way in which music, or indeed any cultural artifact, is produced and distributed. And I know that Dan will speak more about that in a moment. It seems that we cannot escape our past, and if we can't reach escape velocity, which allows us to leave the past behind, how can we build the future? But then comes the paradox. Why is it that the 23-year-old kid fell for the romanticism of the mid-90s?
And more importantly, since when was the mid-90s fucking romantic? Well, for me, it's perhaps the fact that the three people I've brought together for today's panel are from the generation who were perhaps the last to make change rather than simply witness change. We're gathered in Berlin for CTM 13 to talk about the golden age And I'm instantly reminded of Woody Allen's character, Jill Pender, in the film Midnight in Paris You see, the protagonist is haunted by this thing called golden age thinking A type of thinking used to describe a kind of nostalgia for a time period that you can only access through literature, art, and music
This thinking is the erroneous notion that living in a different time period is better than the one you're currently in. And when Virtual Futures 95 happened, I was probably around five or six years old. But should we consider golden age thinking a flaw? Is it a flaw in the romantic imagination of those people who find it difficult to cope with this present? Does nostalgia operate as a form of denial? Denial of this indeed painful? present, as Mark was describing it earlier? Or does it just allow CEO Kevin Systrom to sell a bundle of code that allows you to add digital filters to your photographs for $1 billion? Let's not forget that the past we desire to experience, to understand, is a mediated simulation.
The artifacts of sound, music, and writing are a way of unlocking this past. But then many of these artifacts are coded in such a way that they become inaccessible to the present. And present divorced from the perceptual tools and technologies, and here I also refer to drugs, that unlock the meaning of much of the music and the text of the age. And anyone who attempts to read that text up there linearly often drifts science fiction techno theory novel Cyber Positive in 2013 will understand exactly what I mean. And this is the problem with embodying theory that was painfully evident at the relaunch of their book in 2012 at the Cabinet Gallery in London.
You see, it was an event characterized by the absence of orphan drift. None of the original members were there, and we have one of the original members here today, however. They attempted to turn the cyber positive book into a historical curiosity, an artifact of the bygone age. Well, as you're about to see after this presentation, orphan drift is very much alive. The mid-90s, as we can understand it in hindsight, was an era defined by the limitations of technology. The promise that soon anything could be possible. But perhaps the most painful thing about the present is the end of limitations.
Technology, if it indeed wants, no longer wants to accommodate glitch or accidents. Instead, software is debugged and the optimization of electronic music is preferential. Limitations are dead. Long live limitations. This is something I know that Christoph will draw on more, possibly unpack in his presentation in a moment. So it stands that this simulation of the past defines the present, but it's a low-resolution reproduction because we live in culturally different times, fractured by an anticipation for the future. The past exists in the present, but it can't help but look like an air stat, a performance or a reproduction.
We're tourists in time, and the past of our imagination possesses something of a faux theme park quality. Exit through gift shop full of vintage clothing and LPs. Authenticity is now for sale. This is evidence most painfully within my generation in the UK when we take a look at the role in which people take of being a radical in the hope that they will lead them and compel them into radical action. And at no time was this clearer than in the student protests in the UK in early 2012. A generation infected and inspired by the images of the 1960s knew exactly how protests looked,
and they went to the streets to recreate the aesthetic qualities of protests. Although I'm sympathetic, and of course I'm sympathetic to the cause of many of the protesters were fighting, you can't help but feel disenchanted by middle-class university kids holding up their mobile phones at arm's length to take the photograph to prove that they were there and then share it on the social network that Annie says we're not allowed to mention, Facebook. These kids are the same Russell Group University students and unfortunately some of my peers who then go back to the campuses and spend their student loans on booze whilst filling in graduate career application forms for, and I quote,
careers in dynamic investment banks with an innovative entrepreneurial culture. Irony doesn't even begin to hide the painful disappearance of ideology. And let's not forget the effect of this event, CTM 13, has our own remembering of the past. Each of the presentations you're about to witness alter and contribute to your construction of the golden age. We can't know the future. We can't control the present. The only thing we can change is the past. We've been asked to speak about future music,
but it's important to remember that beyond music, however you define music, sound also seems so omnipresent in the golden age. This is evidenced by the oral experience of the exhibition downstairs in that weird age. Our present in contrast is uncomfortably silent. Noise in 2013 is pollution. Our devices have become unnervingly hushed. The whir of laptop fans has been rendered extinct by solid-state hard drives. When was the last time we heard a dial-up tone? Your tablet works silently,
ever more ubiquitous, and yet functionally fails to contribute to the ambience of this age. Who remembers what fax machines sound like if it wasn't for exhibits like the one downstairs? Flatbed scanners are increasingly faint. USB pen drives don't rattle and screech like three and three quarter inch floppy disk drives. Even the noise of the button press is undesirable. Touchscreens don't click anymore unless you enable that skeomorphic option to have the sound effect of clicking. Because you know what? Humans kind of like that gratification of the sound of the clicking.
You don't hear the buffering of a YouTube video. You see, the way in which we access the internet is a very visual medium, accessed through a wide range of shiny, glowing rectangles. Cyberspace is currently deathly silent. Nowhere is the silent future more evident in the debate over the noise electric cars should make, which was one of the big debates on campus at the University of Warwick when I left in 2011. You see, today's human is a smartphone addict, a meanderthal. cybernetically attached to their iDevice, not paying attention to the world around them.
Thus, these electronic silent cars pose a new danger, where there's no roar of an engine to warn pedestrians of approaching vehicles. It's going to be a heck of a lot easier to get run over in the future. But of course, instead of allowing Darwinism to take its course and kill off a load of hipsters on iPhones, The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has mandated that all electric cars should make an alert noise. But what noise? Well, that's been left up to the individual car makers, and the choices include the sound of a spaceship, the sound of a motorboat, the sound of a Star Trek teleporter, or the sound of a flight jet.
I mean, if this is the fucking future, don't you want your car to sound like something out of Flash Gordon? Or if you're my generation, who the fuck is Flash Gordon? The future is not what it used to be, and this is evidenced by this. You see, this is how they imagined the iPhone in the mid-90s, except it wasn't the iPhone, the small, smart, confusing device made by Apple. It was the iPhone, the EY ePhone, quite literally a phone for your eyes. You see, the most exciting thing about mobile phones before that application infrastructure and the inevitable angry birds was the ability to change its alert sound.
The way in which you could customize a Nokia 3310 with the latest polyphonic MIDI ringtone. How exciting. But today our focus on the phone is less sonic and more visual. And the reason why? Because vision allows us a greater bandwidth of information. And in this economy of attention, information is the new currency. But you see, vision is already proving to be a limited way to receive information, as proved by this project here. That's dark. I'm not sure if you can see that, but that's Brick Lane in London. Now, Brick Lane in London is statistically the place in the UK where most people end up walking into objects
because they're staring at their devices. So if you can see this here, a telephone communications company, 118118, have padded the lampposts for our own safety. You see we forget that sound offers an escape from the shiny glowing rectangle. It provides a medium of information communication, a way to augment our perceptual capabilities and further understand the information environment. This project here, Status Tones, by a bunch of guys in San Francisco called Outer Body Experience Labs, looks again at receiving sound notifications. So instead of taking the phone out of your pocket when you get a notification,
looking at the screen, you can hear the sound. I don't know Super Bowl is coming up. Any Americans in the room? You can hear the sound of who's just scored in Super Bowl or at any other sports event without having to look at that blasted screen. But sound can also be used to dramatically alter perception and thereby change human phenomenological awareness, as is the case with Neil Harbisson. I'm not sure how many of you know Neil Harbisson, but in this image he's wearing a camera that allows him to hear color. Nia Harbison is a colorblind artist. This prosthetic device allows him to turn color spectrum into musical notation.
Technologies such as this offer the possibility of bespoke synesthesia, the ability to cross our senses and turn visual inputs into sound inputs. The future of music may see sound leveraged for its functional capabilities. as an information processing medium and as a way to navigate the world. But as music is reduced to information, while simultaneously our desire for the golden age is seemingly rife, it raises a whole range of challenges for the music industry. And this was seen most recently in the digital resurrection of Tupac at the Coachella Music Festival.
You see, this is one of the first examples of this future, this possible future in action. His projected post-humorous performance, 15 years after his death in 1996, saw the performer take to the stage to re-perform his hit California Love. And you see, although this illusion is nothing new and hearts back to John Pepper's ghost, it's the fact that companies like San Diego's AV Concepts can successfully turn our modern cultural obsession with the past into something like this that is seemingly worrying. But it could be argued that all musicians live on through their music,
mediated by the music, but here it's becoming increasingly literal. Already many pop sensations such as Elvis have had, I think it's five number one hits after his death, including the Little Less Conversation by Junkie XL in 2002. So you see, today the past is being revived thanks to internet-based documentation, the click-through culture promoted by some of the documentation that Lee Gamble was talking about, the YouTube documentation that allows for this exploitation of the long tail of consumption. And this is a byproduct of the late 80s, the remix culture of the late 80s that means rappers from the mid 90s can become new internet sensations.
The reappearance of Tupac raises some interesting questions about the future of an industry that is both reaping the advantages of the digital age whilst also suffering from it. The music industry machine has never been such a fitting metaphor. It is an industry at the mercy of auto-tuning, airbrushing, and lip-syncing. The idea of projected stars as the next stage of the simulacrum doesn't seem so futuristic, when in actual fact, in Japan, the world's fakest pop star is already hitting the charts. Hatsune Miku, I think best described, of course, by Wikipedia,
as essentially a singing synthesizer application with a female persona, is a holographic star that has performed multiple sold-out concerts in her home country and abroad. You see, Miku is a product of the technocracy. The music industry is no longer in the hands of the musicians, but new agencies given over to the programmers, information scientists, and fucking market researchers. Miku, originally a corporate mascot, had her entire persona generated by the fans. Krypton Future Media, and you can't make that up, created the 16-year-old girl with flowing green-blue hair
as a mascot for their virtual voice program. Her name, Hatsune Miku, is Japanese for first sound and future. Miku is the ultimate future music star. Instantly reproducible on demand and bespoke for each and every follower. Already the fans of the Vocaloid software have created 3,000 Hatsune Miku songs on the Japanese iTunes and Amazon, as well as thousands of YouTube videos, which all feature her hologram. With the increasing use of these tools for algorithmic music composition and the availability of software synthesizers,
could the music chart of the future be populated by non-human artists? I almost hope not. But with this world of sound being sampled and categorized through systems like YouTube, which I should add is owned by Google. Could any song be instantly recreated or reproduced? Marcel Mars on Wednesday described different industries that Google is currently infecting. Could it be that unlimited music library, a library without constraints, is going to be the equivalent of a record collection for the Google bot musician of the future. And if this bot can kick out an endless stream of audio,
who's going to be listening? Waiting in anticipation for that something new to emerge out of what's basically old information. As Dan noted in the bar on Wednesday evening when we were sitting with Christoph, there is no more information. So how can there be anything new? Unless we discover UFOs, we're all fucked. And on that note, I'd like to introduce our speakers for this session. Dan O'Hara, who's a philosopher of technology, was the original organizer of virtual futures in 1995, was part of the Cybernetic Cultures Research Unit while Nick Land and Sadie Plant were there from 94 to 96.
Christoph Fringelli, responsible for the Dataside magazine and Praxis Records, and Tony Marcus, who has been working for the last 10 to 15 years in this journalistic space to do with Rave and Future Music and was previously of ID Magazine. But I'd like to hand over firstly to Christoph. Christoph Fringelli, responsible for the Dataside magazine and Praxis Records, and When I took part in the Virtual Futures Conference at the University of Warwick in 1995, it was as a part of a group that included Jason Skeet, Howard Slater, and Paul Kitt, aka Nomex.
the four of us constituted at the time also the collective responsible for the dead by dawn parties held at the one-to-one center in Brixton from 1994 to 1996 that was an anarchist squad that existed for about 18 years until it was evicted there we combined holding talks presentations or discussions followed by a shrill out lounge as we called it rather than a chill out lunch and with a party downstairs playing the latest hardcore, acid speedcore, some hard jungle and early breakcore. Jason and Howard also were writing, as they called it, a glorified flyer called TechNet and it was one of their texts called Techno, Psychosocial Tumult that
was the basis of the presentation at Virtual Futures. But we didn't want to present it in the form of a traditional talk, we decided to create a kind of mix of audio, video and words instead. I seem to remember that the room was darkened and the strobe was switched on and I'm quoting from the beginning of that very text from TechNet. Nobody knows where you're at. We could begin anywhere. A history of techno would be too obvious and would imply that the creative phase was over. Any attempt at a genealogy, a hierarchical archaeology, or a precise pinpointing of musicians prohibits an understanding of the simultaneity of multiple codes, of overlappings between styles and forms.
Techno cannot be allotted a place as either pop or avant-garde music. On the whole, it doesn't take refuge in art and slips away from categorization as the net of naming is unfurled. It avoids the discipline of nostalgia, which keeps people in the thrall of the past, unable to think of the future, but always referring back. Nostalgia is a language of lack, a language that fills people with longings for a past that never happened, a present that never comes, for the gift that never arrives. TechNet and the Invisible College as we called the presentations at Departdown was just one node in a network of like-minded fanzines and newsletters
there was Fatuous Times, Communist Headache the Praxis Newsletter, Alien Underground Data Sites, Breakflow, Leisure Underground, Autotoxicity, DMAC and others including some non-music-based groups and newsletters on the fringes, such as, for example, the Near East Alliance or the London Psycho-Geographical Association or the Association of Autonomous Astronauts. A whole pool of discussion on electronic music and social revolution. This was a heterogeneous network which existed on the fringes of the rave scene as well as on the fringes of the radical left. One of the aims was to self-theorize the movements and invigorate it by devising new strategies connected with this milieu of course also a number of sound systems, of record labels, of DJs, and so on.
Around this time, to widen the picture, there had been an attempt by the government to criminalize large sections of those who by necessity or choice, to a greater or lesser degree, lived outside of the systems like travelers or squatters, or enjoyed their free time in uncontrolled free events like festivals or so-called illegal parties as the ravers. TechNet formulated, I think in the earlier talk, the criminal justice bill was already briefly mentioned, and TechNet formulated under the head of crackdown, quote, the criminal justice bill is testament to the government's need to silence noises that scramble its codes and lead to its dysfunction.
A free party enjoyed by many is to them a nightmare. There is no profit to be had, no consumers passively watching the entertainment, there is no respect for property. The bill is a response to the political nature of people coming together in groups where there is a greater chance for inspiration, creativity and disturbance. But they also criticized the left response that was saying the bill was an attack on our so-called civil liberties. Quotes, instead of focusing on the injustices of the state, we want to explore the poetics of altered states. The proposed criminal justice bill, which later became the 1994 Criminal Justice Act, invariably politicized and often radicalized many ravers.
They took part in demonstrations against it. Some of them were quite large. I think the largest was maybe about 50,000 people or something, if memory serves me right, and some of which turned into riots as well. This kind of continued throughout the decades, even after the CJA had become law, with actions such as Reclaim the Streets, which used to use sound systems and music as a part of the protest. But techno as a whole was soon fraught with contradictions, as someone said mentioned in the panel just before, that even after one year, cigarette brands moved in for sponsorship.
And again, a small quote from TechNet, many aspects of it are highly commercial, glib and self-seeking. There are careers at stake, scenes simply inspired by conformity to the behavior and standards of the music industry. Indeed, this process of recuperation had set in almost immediately, assigning the new forms of music to their place in the culture industry. As far as the underground record labels went, they were trying to build on the counter-cultural essence of what they saw of this early 90s movement, but move away from it as a genre as it increasingly became a part of the spectacle,
which was reaching new highs with the large commercial raves, with lots of sponsorship, like mentioned, and for example with the Ziggurat brand Camel, organizing Camel airwaves in airplanes. They tried on the one hand to create escape velocity, becoming ever more faster, harder and more experimental to escape this recuperation. On the other hand, they tried to create alternative distribution networks, swapping records between each other to locally distribute them to a point where at a certain time, at the beginning of the second half of the decade, records almost became a kind of currency in some scenes, like in some of the technical scene, for example.
The subnets were, however, not just about being suppliers to a fringe, small underground scene, but try to create larger networks, be a part of a larger network, to challenge the music industry as such. So the development of the music was extremely rapid in the first half of the 90s, and still perhaps a bit less so in the second half, again and again formulating new styles as the new sound of the day, which is often also seen as the latest sound for the future. This was not always optimistic. The future was often not seen as a utopian nice place.
It was often seen as a dark and doomy time to come. And so what I tried to outline here, obviously we don't have that much time to go into details, was what could be argued was maybe the last music-related counterculture before the Internet. The Internet, as it is claimed, is responsible for a situation where a generalized collective focus on a new musical wave, such as happened with Rave for so far last time, has become effectively impossible. Indeed, it is the case that after the turn of the century, the developments were not so much successive anymore, but we experienced the branching out into myriads of different directions.
The probability that a whole generation comes together with a particular music cultural experience, as in rock and roll or psychedelic rock, punk or rave, seems very slim now. These faces are now seen with a lot of nostalgia and the internet kind of cheated us out of experience yet experiencing yet another big wave of new pop culture. The tumult these faces created did make it possible that certain new and antagonistic ideas would be spreading and would be received by a wider audience than usual. However, generally, they went under again by a way of recuperation very quickly
or reified themselves as a safe kind of sub-genre with its own rules and hierarchies. At least it was temporarily possible while we do sit in a niche of a niche now and when we insist on certain radical qualities of what we do we may well be seen as sectarians. Guy Debord wrote in 1998 the following. In all that has happened in the last 20 years, the most important change lies in the very continuity of the spectacle. This has nothing to do with the perfecting of its media instruments, which had already reached a highly advanced stage of development.
It means quite simply that the spectacle's domination has succeeded in raising a whole generation molded to its laws. Now we experience a situation of a user-generated spectacle with all the social networks and so on. And even before they existed, Jean Baudrillard wrote that, quote, we no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. Now, I would contradict that. It rather seems to me that this ecstasy of communication is one of the ways that the drama of alienation is playing out. So the important point is that even if there is a substantial change of technology,
but no change in the economic system, class relations remain fundamentally untouched and we remain in a commodity-based economy called capitalism. Now when was that actually challenged? In fact, on a global scale, I would say it only happened twice in the last century, once in about 1917 to 1923 and once in roughly 1967 to 1977 depending on which country we are looking at. These two global revolutionary waves had completely different preconditions. The first happened in a situation of total destruction after the First World War a collapse also of the legitimacy
of the old ruling classes and elites. The second happened at the end of the post-war boom and before capitalism entered its crisis in around 1973. But both had endless and severe implications in all fields of the social, political, moral and the arts, including music. You think it can't happen now? If television couldn't prevent 1968, then I would say social media can't prevent a coming revolution. And as you can see, I firmly reject the postmodernist notions of an end of meta-narratives or even an end of history. The case in point is also that even a few years before these events started unfolding,
no one could predict them. Who in 1913 would have predicted the worldwide revolutionary movement to happen five years later? Even less people would have expected it one year on in 1914 when a nationalist mania had gripped Europe for some time at the beginning of the war. Who would have predicted 1968 etc. in 1963? And of course I don't want to proclaim any mechanical law of history that something like that would repeat itself automatically. Five years from now or whatever. But whether a revolution is going to happen at any time, soon or not,
music will remain an important aspect of human life. And in good music you can see a plan of action, a principle of life, a criticism of business as usual, and you can hear fragments of the future. Well, I'd like to talk about these possibilities or impossibilities, and I want to begin by
noting that today's theme, the death of Rave, has been about a death. And I want, therefore, to consider what comes after death. What is the afterlife we are inhabiting now? The purgatory, perhaps. And by doing so, I want to actually bring us back to talk about two real deaths, to human deaths. And in doing so, to talk about music and the future of music, but almost totally by analogy. But I'm not going to talk about those deaths yet. First of all, I'd like to talk about life.
Life as it is lived now, in terms that we all know. I want to talk to you about the ideology of sharing. and I put that in scare quotes, sharing, and the open access movement, about which a great deal has been talked over the past few days. The ideology of sharing and the open access movement is generally stated as being that information wants to be free. That which is publicly funded should be available publicly to everyone. That's an ideology born of two different elements.
The one element is free market thinking. The other element is our reconception of information since the Internet came into being. We're all perfectly aware, however, that information comes from somewhere. There is something that must generate information. And I think we're also all generally aware that we generally consume more information than we produce individually. We're also perfectly well aware that we share far more than solely public-funded information.
We share, in this age, books, music, films, all sorts of cultural constructions and artworks. And these artworks are not generally publicly funded. I share, too. I have shared. I confess, I'm willing to bet that every single person in this room has shared. I've downloaded and torrented, and sometimes I've even actually consumed both publicly funded information made by groups such as Cryptome or WikiLeaks,
such as classified government documents, but I've also downloaded and torrented and sometimes consumed music and books and films. When I've done the latter, I'm perfectly well aware that whatever my personal view of the inequities of the various culture industries, ultimately, the artist who made the work is getting precisely nothing from me. Indeed, in many cases, I'm just transferring profit
from a recording company or a publishing company to an online piracy website. I'm just moving the money around. But in either case, it's not ending up with the artist. Needless to say, I don't really agree with doing this. I don't feel comfortable about it. I think it's morally wrong. So why do I keep on doing it? Why do we all keep on doing it? because I'm willing to bet that we all feel some tension here between our actions and the consequences and our ideologies.
Certainly, nowadays, the simple, ubiquitous possibility of copying and distributing, given that everyone in the Internet age possesses a networked Gutenberg machine, call the computer. Certainly, this simple, ubiquitous possibility makes it probable that it will happen. If it can happen, it will happen. And it's also often noted by artists who complain about things like copyright, that isn't it too late anyway? Shouldn't you get with the program? The cat's already out of the bag. The Internet's real, live with it. We share nowadays. Find another way to make money.
But there have been stronger arguments also voiced in favor of such open culture. And again, I would place open in scare quotes. Firmer ideological arguments. This ideological argument in favor of open culture takes two forms. First of all, the one that, as piracy, is inevitable and has always been with us and can't be stopped. Artists should simply start to give away their works for free and find alternative ways to fund their art.
Secondly, as a consequence of this inevitability, what is being enacted in piracy's enforcement of open culture is the acceleration of the contradictions and paradoxes inherent in capitalism itself. itself. There's this ideological argument that we need to speed up, accelerate these contradictions in order to bring about the collapse of this very unequal, very unfair capitalistic system.
Three weeks ago, a young man committed suicide. There's an image there. No image on the screen? Oh, well, you'll have to live without images. A young man committed suicide, and his name was Aaron Schwartz. And here he is. You probably all know the story. Aaron Schwartz was one of the figureheads of the open culture movement and the open access movement. And what he'd done was he'd, in his capacity as a Harvard research fellow, downloaded 4.8 million academic articles from JSTOR.
For this, he was quite brutally and inhumanely persecuted by the U.S. attorney until, sadly, he committed suicide. He was being threatened with 35 years in prison for downloading these 4.8 million academic articles. Now, I don't want to comment on what Aaron Schwartz did, though I find his treatment appalling. What I want to do instead is take another death that happened three weeks ago. On the same day, the Chilean artist, Celarón,
also committed suicide. Celeron in 1990 began to construct an artwork in Rio on the La Paz steps and I think there's yeah, a bit hazy but never mind and this image this image is of his staircase and what he did was he collected tiles and beautified what was an existing rather dangerous and unpleasant staircase at the time. He beautified it by inserting his tiles that people gave him or sent him or that he found,
creating a mosaic of the staircase, initially to resemble the, in the colors of the Brazilian flag. What I want to note here is these two very sad suicides. The similarity and the difference between the actions of these two people. As I say, Aaron Schwartz downloaded 4.8 million articles with the view of distributing them. Nothing more. He presumably did not intend to read them all and then write a book. Celeron was also committed to public art.
He collected, but then did not distribute, units, these tiles, and composed them into a public artwork, which is still there and hopefully will be preserved by the local government. I'm interested here in our attitudes towards these two suicides. Aaron Schwartz has been very widely covered. Celeron's hardly at all in the West. It was covered on the day after his suicide and then five days later, on the day of his funeral, in the Rio newspapers and in two Chilean newspapers.
there was a follower particle in Guardian in the UK, otherwise there really hasn't been a lot. In the coverage of Aaron Schwartz's death, Schwartz has been described as a creative genius, which in the light of Celeron's suicide on the same day, I personally found a bit sick. Schwartz has also been celebrated as a digital Robin Hood though as far as we know Robin Hood used to steal from the rich and give to the poor rather than stealing from the poor to give to middle class students there seems to be a tension here
there seems to be some kind of ideological struggle which we're getting just a little bit wrong We're fucking up badly. Our priorities are leading us to celebrate a saint, people who may have valuable and deeply held and important beliefs, but who are not necessarily doing what we hope they will do. The science fiction author, Pat Cadigan, she's known as the queen of cyberpunk. She's recently commented on the sad state of the open access movement. And there's a quote here. And what she said was, people who demand a drastic change in a system they don't like
are very much like a conservative government hell-bent on reform. Somehow, whatever it is, it won't affect anyone who's rich or well-off, and it always involves taking something away from those who don't have much, like me. Pat is still hoping to earn enough to pay tax, even though she's one of the best-known British sci-fi authors of the past 20 years. Pat also directed me to where the actual notion of information wants to be free comes from, this ideology. She directed me to Stuart Brand, and this is what Stuart Brand actually wrote.
He wrote, information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy and recombine. Too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient. That tension will not go away. It leads to endless wrenching debate about price, copyright, intellectual property, the moral rightness of casual distribution, because each round of new devices makes the tension worse, not better. It seems to me, therefore, that even those people who support open access,
as in fact I do, have been somewhat ideologically confused. We're fighting a battle for equality in which the cannon fodder are the artists, writers, and musicians of our age. And the promise, the kind of vague promise, somewhere in the background, somewhere in the future, that what this is actually leading to is open access to, for example, I don't know, essentials like food or water or medicines or clothing or legal representation and so on. that seems too distant and too unrelated to what we're doing to artists to really hold sway with me.
As such then, I want to propose to you that the open access movement, however well meant, is in fact serving the very objects of the very system it proposes to oppose and dismantle. It's merrily distributing cultural information as a kind of anesthesia, doing half the emperor's work for him. Thanks to open access, we may end up with no bread, but we'll happily have plenty of circuses. I have, of course, been talking about Schwarz and Celeron earlier, not just as examples of current attitudes towards artistic practice, production or distribution,
but also as a kind of analogical talisman of two points in recent musical history. And I think this is fundamentally related to the problem we have at the moment with open access. The difference between Schwarz and Celeron illustrates a continuum of development from the golden age to the present, from 1980s sampling through 90s DJ culture, through 21st century mashups as discrete objects, right up to our current trend in the 2010s of pastiche and, as Simon Reynolds has called it, retro-mania.
If the principal musical genre of the past 20 years has been collage, the units of collage over the past 20 years have steadily become larger and larger, from the smallest of parts to the simulation and distribution of holes. In other words, we have Celeron and his kind of practice at one point, and Schwarz and his kind of practice at the other extreme point. And this practice exists in a continuum, a line of development.
What looking at this historical distinction between the two does for me is to illustrate the flaws of and potential remedies to the ideology of open access as it currently exists. What Manfred Schneider here on Wednesday called the dream of transparency is this very same ideology that reduces all cultural artifacts including music, literature, and film to the flat ontology of information. The two tendencies combined of ever larger replicable units and open access must result in the sharing of simulacra only, creating cultural status. And I'd suggest
to you that it's this tendency that needs breaking. Otherwise, when all forms of culture have been reduced to the same medium, the same ontological status of just information. Their futures must, of necessity, all be identical. By way of conclusion, and to point forward to Tony's talk, I want to just show you one last quotation. And this comes from Jacques Attali. Attali said, music makes mutations audible. It has always been in its essence a herald of times to come. If it is true that the political organization
of the 20th century is rooted in the political thought of the 19th, the latter is almost entirely present in embryonic form in the music of the 18th century. Thanks. Great. Ah, that must be the sweet spot for the microphone. Great. That's great. Thank you. Yeah, I got a text from Luke a few days ago about what people have been talking about here over the last few days. And he said that quite a few people had expressed a kind of maybe a disappointment or maybe a frustration that there hadn't been another movement, like there hadn't been another
techno or rave, and maybe there was a hope that there would be something coming. Interesting. You know, I mean, I worked for a long time in kind of youth culture, fashion-y magazines, and we love those hooks. You know, we love creating these kind of year zero history moments. So suddenly there's punk. Suddenly there's rave. Suddenly there's acid house. Things become organised around these events which are either real or partially real. Because in the years that followed the so-called realness of the events, you get books and research that say, well, there are antecedents.
I'm sure some of you have read like Grille Marcus on punk, saying, well, it doesn't really begin with Johnny Rotten and Malcolm McLaren. You know, you could hang out in New York and look at people like Richard Hell, who, you know, who never quite got over missing the boat, you know, in a strange way. But, you know, you could look at Iggy Pop and the Stooges. You know, you could even look at Rambo. You could find many, many threads and antecedents which would lead you to, ah, there's punk. Similarly with rave and techno, if it's characterized by lots and lots of people dancing on drugs for 10 or 11 hours in a kind of immersion with a seamless flow of music, well there are historical and cultural antecedents and many of them have been well remarked upon or well
written about, whether it was like Larry Levan in New York and the American kind of gay dance music underground or whether it was even things that happened here that haven't been that well discussed. I remember talking to the English DJ Mixmaster Morris who used to tell me about coming to Berlin in the 80s and going to huge warehouses where people would dance all night long to bands like, is it DAF? I don't know how to pronounce it and people would take drugs and it would be very very loud and dark and it would never end. Or there's been less work that's been done I think on the drug MDA in the late 60s culture. If you read books about the late 60s, every now and again, you'll come across a reference to MDA, which was a chemical precedent of MDMA and apparently was known as the love drug. Every
now and again, you'll come across a hint of a reference that maybe John Lennon or someone took this. But again, I haven't come across a paper where someone's pulled all those strands together. So for these so-called year zero moments, punk and rave or acid house, there are antecedents. So just if you were expecting another one, whether it would happen or not, you would have to assume, based on what's happened before, that there would be elements in the present that would, you know, in the future, you'd go, those would, of course, of course. So I mean, I kind of thought, well, you know, what is there in the present that you could pick out? Even though always being aware that it's very hard to predict what will happen.
And that's the delight. That's the delight, isn't it, that you really don't know. There's a quote by the playwright Joe Orton that I love where he says, just when you least expect it, the unexpected always happens. Which is kind of nice. anyway so I thought I would have a think about only one one more thing in fact just one about both punk and so-called rave both of them were launched by very crude events I mean there's a very sophisticated punk subculture in New York but punk becomes the punk that people know because Malcolm McLaren works in a very clumsy way with the Sex Pistols and he wasn't a sophisticated marketeer, not by present standards. He wasn't trademarking things. He wasn't market researching
things. He wasn't test marketing things. I don't know what all the other things that, you know, sophisticated marketing people do, but he didn't do those things. He just did a very crude, kind of rather loud explosion. And for some reason, what he set off, many people were able to replicate it, you know, all over England. Within months, funny little punk clubs appeared and people formed bands and dressed up and played the music. And yet he didn't organise that, nor did he control it nor profit from it. So he kind of launched a kind of, I guess you could call it like a kind of homemade bomb, if that's a kind of, you know, it must be some kind of marketing phrase for that, but like a very crude, homemade marketing DIY bomb. And the same thing happened with rave culture, in the fact that rave culture was kind of launched by a couple of English DJs
who aggressively marketed what had been going on, you know as we've already covered you know all night parties with immersive music DJs drugs that had been going on in Ibiza in New York for a long time but I think this guy Paul Oakenfold and one or two others and all this is covered in Matthew Collins book is it called altered state that they almost did a very crude deliberate kind of marketing push to kind of launch in London a couple of all night clubs with DJs with all this stuff going on and I think Matthew Collins also hints that they were colluding with certain drug manufacturers to make sure there was a large supply of ecstasy so that everything, you know, they launched a little thing in London. But again, like Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols, they were crude marketeers. They weren't trademarking
things. They didn't control it nationally. Somehow, this thing managed to, again, like with punk, mushroom in other parts of England and replicate itself. And again, somehow large quantities of ecstasy were present. I don't know who organised that. Again, in terms of the research on this culture, I've never seen good interviews or good research with the people that were manufacturing the drugs and about the kind of decisions they were making and how they were getting them and what kind of quantities they were deciding to produce. But someone was making those decisions. Or again, maybe the nature of the manufacturing meant that it could be done very quickly. You know, we are very creative, aren't we, when it comes to making things and making money. sometimes things happen fast. So that might be one thing to look for,
is a kind of crude, sort of homemade marketing bomb that could bring some elements that are kind of waiting to be pulled into shape together. So I asked myself, what kind of things are in the present that could generate a possible future? I didn't find... Well, I guess it's like an endless party game, right? just when you least expect it. What are they? God, I can't read my notes. Isn't it terrible? Well, we will start then with the one I can't read. I mean, drugs. It's always possible there'll be another drug. I read something recently about a lot of the new designer drugs coming from China. And that may be, you know, I mean, it's possible that someone could design a drug to deliberately destabilize certain Western countries.
You know, it could be some element of warfare. or it could be some element of great love. But someone could create some kind of drug that could have some kind of effect that could become incredibly popular, whether their motives are benign or malign. That could happen. Again, look at my terrible notes. I also think in England, okay, something else that I'm seeing in England, there's a lot of young people, they feel very disempowered. They feel very disheartened. They feel very, like they can't earn enough money to survive, like they can't take part in the economy, like they can't really put down roots. They can't own property. They can't secure their future.
In fact, in many ways, they're starting to experience what the punk sang about. The nihilism or no future is becoming very real to them. So what kind of effect could that have on a culture if people feel disposable? Could they create a culture about that? Or could they actually dispose of themselves? And this also combines, I think, with the velocity of the globalized culture, where people are being shuffled around. So if you kind of accept that and go with it, that could lead to all kinds of things. If you create a culture based on the fact that you accept the fact you're disposable. and I think we see that in the way people dress. You know, the clothes are increasingly tight and revealing
as if we know we have to sell ourselves. I don't know what it's like in Germany but in England the dress has vanished and girls just wear leggings. You know, female fashion is always about exposure but the exposure is becoming more and more extreme. So I think, you know, to be aware that you're both disposable and for sale and to go with that. Maybe not for everyone, because some people are better resourced and have more money, so they feel more secure. But those that don't may find some cultured expression where they either dispose of themselves or deal with their disposability. I mean, again, in terms of disposal and violence, it's possible a culture could emerge that's much more violent. Again, in England, many, I don't know if you read the papers, but a lot of young people die.
You know, they're involved in drug crime. Just a few days ago, a young guy was attacked by a mob of other teenagers with swords and died in some kind of low-level drug dispute. But many teenagers in England are involved in low-level drug disputes that lead to death. This is happening. Guns, knives, swords. So it's possible you could have a kind of youth culture movement that maybe isn't about buying or making records, but is about being involved in extreme forms of violence. You know, again, just when you least expect it, the unexpected always happens. You know, Acid House and Techno couldn't have been predicted. So perhaps a mass youth movement that was interested in enacting violence is the kind of unexpected strand that could emerge.
even though you could predict it looking at the present, and you could predict it looking at the way some people in London have taken the texts that are available in hip-hop and enacted them and made them real. You know, that's possible, perhaps. Again, my appalling notes. You have to wait, so muse on that while I try and read my handwriting. New drugs, new violence. Oh, yeah, just coming down a bit. With the demise of record companies, bands or groups form their own companies. So we may see more pop or rock bands being slightly more corporate. They'll be like a corporate entity with an office, with employees, with interns,
with all the things that go with running a business. We may see bands becoming more like small businesses, maybe forming alliances with people that support businesses like venture capital. maybe as they already are forming alliances with other brands or businesses, whether it's sport or fashion. So we'll see musicians and bands acting more like small or maybe even large corporations as they get more and more powerful. That's another possible strand. It's hardly a youth culture revolution, but youth. I would also suggest you could dispense with the word youth. You could say post-youth. Certainly, I think John Savage's last book did point out that the entirety of so-called youth cultures is really about the marketing of product to youth. They're
not really spontaneous expressions of youth energy. They're about, you know, carefully controlled situations to take money from youth. So it may not be that healthy to stand up and get excited about the concept of a youth culture. You know, and you can read history books about the creation of the teenager, the creation of the American high school, which was invented in part as a response to a moral panic when young American apprentices in the 1880s or 1890s with disposable income were spending that money on gambling, drinking and prostitution. So they changed the law to put them in school for longer. And that created the teenager in the American high school, which then created a different kind of youth market. So they'd be buying, you know, burgers
and milkshakes instead of gambling and whoring. You know, you can read books about this kind of thing. I have done for my sins. But post-youth also is important because, again, in England, we're in the midst of long-running paedophile scandals. So the cultural interest in youth could be something that's kind of embarrassing, something that you really, you know, you shouldn't really talk about. It's becoming a kind of taboo area to be obsessed with youth or what youth is doing because that's linked to people that have an unhealthy sexual interest in young people. So I would again say post-youth is a possibility in a kind of post-pedophile environment. I think there was something else I wanted to say about post-youth.
I mean again you could look historically about cultures and countries that have invested a lot of idea in the concept of youth. You know because not all countries are interested in youth. You know, and there's only been certain points in history where youth movements have been part of the cultural or political debate. You know, and I guess that's really obvious here, isn't it, in Germany, when the way that Wandervogel was co-opted into Hitler Youth. You know, youth was an important word or concept then. Youth has been an important word or concept in American teenage culture. And in these kind of, you know, fashion, techno, rave concepts, but it doesn't always have to be that way. You can dispense with youth. We may well be post-youth. Ah, something more less heavy, I've noticed. In 1981, when I was 15, I was listening to a lot of
punk and post-punk music, and there were some people at my school who used to listen to the Doors, and they used to dress in a funny way, the people that listened to the Doors. They wore these ridiculous clothes in purple and green and long flowing skirts and they had different hair and they were a youth group in 1981 hippies and they were an anachronism. You know us post-punk people you know we kind of thought who are these teenagers who are listening to music but it's 15 years old. What's the difference between 1966 and 1981? 15 years and those hippies were an anachronism. A few years ago I was in a trendy cafe in Shoreditch in London having coffee and they were playing music that was 15 years old by Kruder and Dorfmeister and it didn't sound
anachronistic. This has led me to conclude that the hipster time lag has shifted, that you could probably express this mathematically, that the time in which it takes for music or culture to either be acceptable or anachronistic is shifting. I mean if someone was good at maths you could probably do an equation for this and use it to predict the future but I would say that this may be of some interest. I would call it hipster time lag and I would say it's shifting or changing. It's shifting or changing obviously because of the electronic culture, because of the internet culture, because of YouTube, because of what we know as the access to everything all at once.
So in terms of the access to everything all at once, I wonder if the access to so much music also means that it's no longer necessary to make any music. Like, what is the point? You know, why bother? It's just simply not necessary because there's just such a surfeit that's available. What is the point in making more? Maybe there's some more profitable use for your energy or creativity, that it may simply be done. And finally, I guess in terms of rave culture, something that I don't know if anyone's been talking about here is how it was a body culture. I mean, maybe this is easy to forget, but if you were a raver or you were a dancer, and what I remember most about some of the best clubs that
I went to was that I didn't actually know where the music was coming from. I didn't know where the DJ was, never mind not knowing his name or her name or what she looked like, you didn't even know where they were in the building. You know, there was too many other exciting things going on. And the focus, so the focus for me as a participant wasn't on the person playing the music, it was on moving my body for 10 or 12 hours in space. And the focus, so the focus for me was both physical and internal. It wasn't external. I always thought this was very interesting. If you went to a gig, the focus was external, up on the stage. If you went to a rave or a dance party for a long time, the focus was different. It was somewhere else.
It was with the other people, or it may have been internal, moving in with the body and also working with the body. You know, the experience of being a rave consumer was of dancing for eight, nine, ten hours at a time. It was very physical. And there's also a possible link that is emerging between this kind of, and has emerged, between sort of gym culture and physical fitness culture and rave and dance culture. And this strand is probably, you know, it's ongoing. You know, it will continue for a long time. You know, has anyone ever seen a spinning class in a gym? You know, a dark room, very fast music, someone screeching on a mic. It's a lot like a, you know, a room at a party, right? And you go to another room at a gym and there's a different class and they're playing different music. I mean, gyms really remind me
of the kind of multi-room rave party type things. I may be done. Bear with me one second. So there's a few strands for you. It's a shame I may not have been able to read my writing, so the most important one may be lost. The only final thing I can think of was that in terms of punk or other forms like rave, some participants completely immersed themselves in the culture. Like, they no longer, they abandoned other paths. So if they were training to be a lawyer or a nurse, they abandoned that and they became a punk or they became a drug dealer or they just, you know, aligned their entire human identity in future with that culture. I don't know if people do that anymore. I don't know
if they will. But I would imagine that this is also interesting, this, the extent to which people are immersed or the extents to which people align themselves because I think at the present people don't align themselves they um they consume from a distance so I don't know if that's that's going to be a long-term strand that there'll be less and less immersion you know people will be employees or workers or nurses or lawyers and they will just consume the music from a distance so the musicians will live in the fairyland you know the magic land of music and drugs and sex and pleasure and travel and the consumer will live in the consumer land. But definitely, if you're looking at what characterised the Raven punk culture, some people crossed over.
Many people crossed over and aligned themselves with the culture and rolled the dice and that took them wherever it took them, you know, to different places. So yeah, some strands. Like I said, it's quite possible the most important one is illegible, which is quite nice. All right, thank you. So there's the choice. If you want to live in the golden age, you can either go and get a proper job or you can go to a spinning class. We have about 10, 15 minutes for questions. So anything would be fantastic. Yeah, again, one more point about a possible future is that there's no...
It may not be what you want. Assuming that you're all kind of left-leaning liberal types, you know, you may not get that. I mean, so a precedent here is the Bujubanta and is the alleged homophobia or real homophobia of that track. There's no reason to assume that some of the things that people will be singing about or presenting in their youth-oriented musics will be left-leaning or liberal. There's no reason to assume they won't be racist, genocidal. I mean, there's no reason to assume that all kinds of to left-leaning people are absolutely abhorrent. Energies may not present themselves. Like I said, fascist, genocidal, homophobic. You know, there's room for all of this stuff to emerge.
Or not. that's a bit dark but you know it's possible right but I guess if you know if people here are creative and stuff then also the future is what you make it you know you have the opportunity to do things so that's hopefully more positive you know thank you I'm always thinking has there ever been thought about music that much than right now that we maybe in the age of reflection that's what we do right now And I also think that art, I think art and music can also be shitty. Maybe we have the time of making bad music and I think it has the right to be bad. What do you say?
Scare quotes. Yes, exactly. I don't know. I think there's been quite a lot. There's a lot written about music. there's a lot written about music, a lot of academic work for a long time, yeah. I don't know if there's more now, you'd have to weigh it. You know, you could, you could, there's probably a research project there, but I don't know. Probably more now, yeah, because people are more aware of how powerful it is. You know, because it's not just product, you know, it's very resonant. Yeah, I'd say, isn't that the tension of the main theme of the Golden Age here? It's the thing that everybody seems to be, whether they're expressing it explicitly or not, there seems to be this frustration with a period of reflection and this kind of lust
for some way to break out of it. That's the only sense in which I can explain why we've got the dual themes of Transmediala and Club Transmediala this year, which are both very backwards looking, retro, retrospective. Thanks. So it seems like it's kind of an age of vanity at the moment, where people are kind of looking at themselves more than, they're looking for external kind of recognition. So do you think there will ever be a kind of mass movement of people brave enough to
kind of disconnect from the internet and be kind of, yeah, kind of, that will be the movement. They won't seek that recognition. So, welcome to the age of navel-gazing, yeah? Yeah, at the moment, yeah. There's, it was a phrase that Dan used in a radio interview with the BBC in Virtual Futures 1995. He said, there's a life cycle here and there's a built-in life cycle. And all the people who are moaning will be dead in a couple of years' time anyway, so who do we care? It came up on another panel session. The fact is there's a next generation that are coming up, this born digital generation.
this generation of kids who attract in the womb. So there's a project in San Francisco called KickBee. It's still patent pending, but it's an elastic band that pregnant women buy and wear. And it's got a little 3G or 4G SIM card in it. And every time the baby kicks, it sends a notification to Twitter. That's not the weird thing. The weird thing is that it sends the notification to the baby's Twitter account. And what's weirder than that is it sends it in the first person. So it goes, I just kicked mummy at 12.58pm. So you've got a whole generation who are ripped. Before they even ripped the womb, they're stuck straight into the social graph. Now, I fundamentally believe, and it's happening now on the basis of,
you know, there's a whole generation of kids who are using this new app called Snapchat. They're using Snapchat because they're doing sexting. They can send images and they last for three seconds. they're not on Facebook because everything lasts forever and because mommy and daddy are on Facebook you know why the fuck would you want to be on the social media site your parents were on you know so I think the next generation there's gonna be something else Facebook dead already it's dead in the water we're seeing that happen but they'll still be connected they won't they won't be brave enough to what do it depends who's who's kind of running the agendas you know it's It's a case of let's believe in this information metaphor and everything can get turned into information so that we can have smart cities and web-connected toasters
and this kind of odd, banal future that we're being promised by these companies who are trying to look for investor funding so they can connect your toaster to your fridge and you go, what do you fucking do? I think we're also talking... Are you talking about vanishing, about people that are withdrawing? I think you could look at this in art terms and the difference between Warhol and Duchamp, because Warhol is aggressively present, and Duchamp attempts to withdraw or vanish. And I think in terms of people trying to make... There'll be a very interesting way of becoming present by withdrawing. I imagine there'll be some artists and musicians who will try and make themselves more present by being less present.
I believe there's an artist called Simon Thompson. Maybe anyone know about his work? But someone told me that when some galleries have been asking him for a show, and I'm not sure about this, this is on hearsay, when they've been asking him for a show, he's saying, yeah, I'll give you a show. What I want you to do is the show that's on now, the show that's on before my show, keep it on for another four weeks. Don't issue a press release, nothing. But I mean, I heard that on hearsay. But that is a way of working, a way of being, you know, that's a kind of example of how someone may work to be present but also absent and I think you could probably look at the differences between Warhol and Duchamp as a way in so I imagine there'll be some more and more cultural value in somehow vanishing, you know vanishing becomes
but I think vanishing is always interesting because it intrigues people and again William Gibson wrote about that didn't he, about his ultra niche brands you know those secret denim and all this kind of thing that's happening now isn't it there are people who are almost not present and yet they make they're able to kind of generate incredible value for themselves as much value as someone who's present as britney if that's kind of what you meant i don't know that's what it suggested to me that idea you good on that one yeah i'd add that I think Vanishing was commodified a long time ago along with modernist exile. And Vanishing is merely a form of modernist exile if an internal exile.
I'd also note that one curious thing, how many people from that early 90s rave generation and the Warwick people, the philosophy department, the people whose ghosts have been hanging behind the death of rave panels all day, people like Nick Land and Sadie Plant, who, I mean, I know where they are, but I'm not going to tell you. They don't want you to find them. They fell off the grid a long time ago, having talked about the future of the Internet. They then ran as fast as possible in the opposite direction and never touched it again. Just to pick up on what you were saying about the, and resonating with what Luke was saying also about being born digital,
or I would also add to that being born into total surveillance. If I would pinpoint things that I see now that I think have the seeds of a future subculture, one thing that strikes me quite strongly is this fashion that has been developed by this guy in New York, which is invisible to infrared and security cameras. He's developed makeup that makes your face incapable of being detected by facial detection algorithms, and he's developed a hoodie which, if you're being viewed from a satellite, reduces your infrared footprint. And I think that could be a weak signal that there will be a lot of young people who choose to create a very underground, highly undetectable subculture that isn't online or that is encrypted.
So maybe a crypto subculture is already in the works that has its own music or its own aesthetics. The music was authorless, right? It was an authorless flow, that it was anonymous. And again, the idea that the participants vanished when they danced in the dark. Yeah, but getting away from like the Guy Fawkes sort of iconic image and towards some kind of authentic expression of crypto identity, that's not just in an aesthetic reactionary stance of like, you know, we are anonymous, but more a sense of we want to be cool, so that's why we're not going to post this party to Facebook. I think there's a very lively crypto party movement
here in Berlin, isn't there, led by Julian Oliver. But I think anybody who's been directly involved in that ultimately knows that it's just an endless arms race. I mean to say crypto and quotes. It's the claw and armor. One will improve and then the other will improve and it just goes on. There's no end to that. There is no escape possible. You have to find other ways of vanishing. I'm thinking something more lo-fi and analog. The way that lo-fi musicians fetishize the sound of their amps and their tube guitars and guitar amplifiers, something in that direction. Okay, I think we're going to come to an end now.
There's just one more question. I'm always slightly irritated by the Eurocentrism of the Geology and how it seems that looking back into the past, this kind of European unwillingness to look beyond its borders, to keep looking on itself instead of looking on to what is happening outside of his own agency. That's why I like the idea with the Chinese drug thing, which reminds me of an interview with Timothy Leary about what would happen if the Viet Cong dropped LSD into the American water supply. Well, but what I want to get at is if you have some ideas, some impulses for the future, or the future of music especially, which maybe are not based only on Europe and Britain and Germany and your personal experience, but if maybe you picked up on something which might seem pretty strange,
which is coming from outside Europe and the United States, of course, like some weird ideas you might have found or encountered that you could tell us about? Take a look at some of the stuff that's coming out of San Francisco. It's largely PR for the future, but stuff like transhumanism, it's an old term, but there's more kind of underground things things happening around the mind-enhancing drugs, but kind of nootropic drugs, drugs designed for smartness, which just enables you to type faster and make more code. But there might be something interesting in that space. Start looking at where, you know, larger companies start buying medical companies, embedded technologies, drug technologies, people who have been in software for years start
looking towards 3D printing pills and food supplements and something in that area, potentially. But that's a little bit like what William Boris used to do. It's like two drug centers. It's like we go down to South America and we look for some drug-related solution. But I was thinking about something more like a creative impulse, not fixed to a drug as such, but just some kind of tendency that is already there, which is not based on something... You know drugs is something Europeans like because they can just go somewhere, buy it, and then become non-European or whatever. I mean, is there some impulse which is not necessarily embedded in our consumer culture, which, I don't know, I'm not traveling that much, but maybe some one of you passed True Shiner and then heard some weird sound,
which is like a combination of, I don't know, maybe Chinese traditional music and electronic music, because that's where I would be looking for an impulse. closest thing I've heard and in fact we were talking about this before how was it on Wednesday somebody was talking about how his daughter has an iPod that has Matt Moss and then Frank Sinatra on it just kind of everything level, everything's listenable nowadays and I thought God how awful it must be to be a teenager nowadays or any time during the last 15 years because where are you going to get the music that's going to piss your parents off? There is nothing over the past 15 years
that would shock the years of 1995. And the only thing I have heard was when I was in Rio and it was Bailifanque, the music of the favelas. And there I heard something where, well, the Bailifanque parade in the center of Rio. I walked into the center of Rio and there were, I don't know, 80,000 favela kids and me, and my nostrils were actually vibrating because the bass was so intolerably loud. And the music is thoroughly offensive. I heard it, and I mean, I really like torturing my ears with anything that my ears think, oh, I can't quite handle that, but it took me a long time to get used to that.
perhaps that's because we've become so used to not challenging our ears particularly. But, you know, if you want to hear something that might actually offend everyone, including you, willingly, go for Bailifunk. There are Bailifunk parties in Germany already. Oh, absolutely. There's a big Brazilian expat and student community here. I know a small town where I used to study. there were no Brazilians there. It was just a student kind of thing to do. So Bally Funk, I know it's, maybe it's a little bit different, but yeah, I know what you're talking about. Okay, I think we're going to close up here. We've got a video installation by Orphan Drift, who Dan was involved with, but they were heavily involved
with the C crew in the mid-90s. It's about 13 minutes, and we're about to play it now, if you fancy sticking around for that. I highly recommend it. Thank you, and Virtual Futures will be in Birmingham in October 2013, from the 25th to the 27th. So if you're UK-based, come play with us. Cheers. Thank you.