This machine makes Mozart

Finally, Cope's program could divine what made Bach sound like Bach and create music in that style. It broke rules just as Bach had broken them, and made the result sound musical. It was as if the software had somehow captured Bach's spirit -- and it performed just as well in producing new Mozart compositions and Shakespeare sonnets. One afternoon, a few years after he'd begun work on Emmy, Cope clicked a button and went out for a sandwich, and she spit out 5,000 beautiful, artificial Bach chorales, work that would've taken him several lifetimes to produce by hand.

I'm going to try to get a hold of some of these computer-generated works and give you, dear readers, the official Bellman review. But in the meantime, I want to focus on what Jason Kottke said when he linked to the article about Cope:

Gosh it's going to get interesting when machines can do some real fundamental "human" things 10,000x faster and better than humans can.

Humanists, take note! This is not a threatening development.

First, let me posit that while Cope's work's works may not rise to the level of human genius, some algorithms will reach that benchmark during our lifetimes (except maybe your lifetime, Oldy McAbouttodie).

This assertion is not one most of my writer, artist, or musician friends agree with, but they (you?) are wrong, wrong wrong. It's inevitable.

Second, this is not a bad thing. Yes, there will be violent change to our idea of what makes a person or a particular work of art valuable or important. But this change will ultimately be for the better. How could being surrounded by the best art ever made, freshly baked each week, possibly be bad? Computers will find ways to reliably speak to our souls in ways that we rarely have.

And we will all be immensely--almost inconceivably--enriched. The future, she kicks ass.
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(img via Curved White)

This is the avant-garde

What’s more, certain independent games are entering a phase – familiar to historians of jazz, comics and indeed 20th-century literature – of vigorous experimentation with techniques of narrative. (An evening with the frightening and baffling The Path, rather like an Angela Carter story siphoned through The Sims, will show you what I mean.) And with book sales falling, it may not be long before prose writers jump ship for a medium that offers some of the most exciting possibilities of the new century.
...
Our experience of stories is, by and large, a lateral one, in which the writer commands every aspect of the world the reader inhabits as well as the process by which it reveals itself. Fine; it’s worked for centuries. But it’s hard to shake the feeling that gaming – which increasingly promises a narrative space for the player to make his own way, never having the same experience twice – is where at least some of the great writers of tomorrow will make their names. At which point, as with comics, everyone will get a terrible headache over trying to think of a new name for the medium. |Telegraph.UK - Tim Martin|

I can't quite decide what to think of Martin's essay. On the one hand, it resonates with my view that video games are one of the signal cultural artifacts of our era, an emerging medium with the same kind of potential that photography had in the nineteenth century and cinema in the twentieth. On the other hand, I think that the works of those who locate themselves on the avant-garde are more often than not self-indulgent crap, so I sure hope video game designers don't start believing their press clippings.

Traditional norwegian street art

KNUDZICH

I think this one would make a cool poster. Re: Blame it on the rain, it looks like a B-24 Liberator to me, and I choose to believe that the story is true.

Wyeth

Image from here, with every possible right reserved

|CNN| -- Andrew Wyeth, the well-known American painter famed for his painting of a young girl in a field called "Christina's World," has died, according to a Brandywine River Museum official.

Wyeth, 91, died in his sleep Thursday night, according to Lora Englehart, public relations coordinator for the Brandywine River Museum in Pennsylvania.

Mark

This post marks the beginning of the annual Ann Arbor Art Fair. Hold on, it only lasts 100 hours.

Addendum: To be fair, it's not all crap. For example, I particularly liked this artist's booth last year, and will make a point of stopping by again. If, unlike me, you've got $1200 lying around waiting to be spent on art, I recommend this piece.