Computers and the Internet

Subterms

    More stories

    • 125 Shares149 Views

      in Television

      Why There Is Talk of a Writers’ Strike in Hollywood

      by

      TV and movie writers want more money, but Hollywood companies say the demands ignore economic realities. The deadline to sort out those differences is approaching.Television and movie writers want raises, saying that Hollywood companies have taken unfair advantage of the shift to streaming to devalue their work and create worsening working conditions.The companies bristle at the accusation and say that, while they are willing to negotiate a new “mutually beneficial” deal with writers, the demands for an entirely new compensation structure ignore economic realities.Whether the sides can settle their differences will determine if the entertainment industry can avoid its first writers’ strike in 15 years.Unions representing more than 11,000 television and movie writers and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers, which bargains on behalf of Hollywood’s nine largest studios, including Amazon and Apple, began talks on March 20 for a new three-year contract. The current agreement expires on May 1.The Writers Guild of America, West, and the Writers Guild of America, East, have the strength to bring Hollywood to a halt if they do not get a deal to their liking. Chris Keyser, a co-chair of the W.G.A. negotiating committee, said in an interview that this moment for writers was “existential.”“The industry is almost always unfair to labor,” Mr. Keyser said. “This time it’s broken — it’s actually broken.”Here is what you need to know:Will there be a strike?No outcome is certain, but little in the posturing so far suggests an easy resolution. Producers have begun to stockpile scripts by asking writers to complete as many ahead of the May 1 deadline as possible.The negotiations will likely be acrimonious given the seismic changes in the industry. The rapid transition to streaming entertainment has upended nearly every corner of Hollywood, and writers believe they have been left behind.Unlike directors and actors, writers have historically been willing to strike. The most recent strike stretched from 2007 into 2008, lasting 100 days. One in 1988 dragged on for five months. A walkout must first be authorized by union members; the W.G.A. has signaled that it could conduct a vote as early as the first week in April.Authorization gives the union leverage, but it does not mean a strike is inevitable. In 2017, writers overwhelmingly gave the go-ahead for a strike (with 96 percent of the vote). The sides ultimately reached an agreement a few hours before the first pickets hit studio sidewalks.The entrance to NBC Studios in Manhattan.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesHow would a strike affect audiences?There will be a gradual halt in the production of many television shows, except for reality and news programs, which would be mostly unaffected.Viewers will notice the fallout first among entertainment talk shows, including “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.” If a strike lasts several weeks, “Saturday Night Live” would not be able complete its season. Soap operas, already on viewership life support, would run out of new episodes after about a month.Plenty of high-profile TV series have coming seasons that are already finished. But premieres for fall series like “Abbott Elementary” would be delayed by a monthslong strike, and viewers would begin to notice fewer scripted TV series by the end of the year. Reality and international shows will start to run in heavy rotation.Moviegoers would not experience immediate effects; movie studios work about a year ahead, meaning that almost everything planned for 2023 has already been shot. The risk involves 2024, especially if studios rush to beat a strike by putting films into production with scripts that aren’t quite ready.The offices of the Writers Guild of America West in Los Angeles.Andrew Cullen for The New York TimesWhat are the writers’ complaints?Every three years, the writers’ union negotiates a contract with the major studios that establishes pay minimums and addresses matters such as health care and residuals (a type of royalty), which are paid out based on a maze of formulas.And though there has been a boom in television production in recent years (known within the industry as “Peak TV”), the W.G.A. said that the median weekly pay for a writer-producer had declined 4 percent over the last decade.Because of streaming, the former network norms of 22, 24 or even 26 episodes per season have mostly disappeared. Many series are now eight to 12 episodes long. At the same time, episodes are taking longer to produce, so series writers who are paid per episode often make less while working more. Some showrunners are likewise making less despite working longer hours.“The streaming model has created an environment where there’s been enormous downward pressure on writer income across the board,” David Goodman, a co-chair of the guild negotiating committee, said in an interview.Screenwriters have been hurt by a decline in theatrical releases and the collapse of the DVD market, union leaders said.Between 2012 and 2021, the number of films rated annually by the Motion Picture Association fell by 31 percent. Streaming services picked up some slack, but companies like Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns HBO Max, have been cutting back on film production to reduce costs amid slowing subscriber growth.Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, Calif.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesAre the companies in a position to pay more?They would argue this isn’t the best time for it.Disney said in February that it would cut $5.5 billion in costs and eliminate 7,000 jobs to address streaming losses, an atrophying cable television business and steep corporate debt. Warner Bros. Discovery has already cut thousands of jobs as part of a $4 billion retrenchment. NBCUniversal is also tightening its belt as it contends with cable cord-cutting and a troublesome advertising market.The writers are unmoved by this. Mr. Keyser noted that Netflix is already profitable (to the tune of $4.5 billion last year), and that rival companies have said their streaming services will be profitable in the next year or two. “We don’t get to negotiate again until 2026,” Mr. Keyser said. “We’re not waiting around until they’re profitable.”Who’s doing the negotiating?In a rarity for Hollywood, the chief negotiators are both women. Carol Lombardini, 68, leads the studio effort; she has worked at the producers’ alliance for 41 years. Ellen Stutzman, 40, leads the W.G.A. effort. She was appointed only about a month ago, after David Young, who has served as the ferocious negotiator for writers since 2007, stepped aside, citing an unspecified medical problem.Ms. Stutzman, who has been with the W.G.A. for 17 years, said in an interview that Mr. Young would play no part in these negotiations. She called him “a wonderful mentor.”Are the studios aligned?Absolutely, according to the producers’ alliance. “The A.M.P.T.P. companies approach this negotiation and the ones to follow with the long-term health and stability of the industry as our priority,” the alliance said in a statement, referring to impending contract renewal talks with directors and actors. “We are all partners in charting the future of our business together and fully committed to reaching a mutually beneficial deal.”But differences start to appear when you talk to senior executives on a company-by-company basis. In private conversations, they point out that the group is much less monolithic than in the past. It now includes tech companies like Amazon and Apple, for example, whose primary business is not entertainment.Striking members of the Writers Guild of America passed out leaflets in Rockefeller Center in 2007.Librado Romero/The New York TimesIs the W.G.A. united?For generations, ever since the end of the silent film era, Hollywood writers have complained that studios treat them as second-class citizens — that their artistic contributions are underappreciated (and undercompensated), especially compared with those of actors and directors. This sentiment runs deep among writers and has historically resulted in extraordinary unity.In 2019, when film and TV writers fired their agents in a campaign over what they saw as conflicts of interest, many agency leaders figured that the W.G.A. would eventually fracture. That never happened: After a 22-month standoff, the big agencies effectively gave writers what they wanted.What about collateral damage?Tens of thousands of entertainment workers were idled during the 2007 strike, and the action cost the Los Angeles economy more than $2 billion, according to the Milken Institute. This time around, many of the small businesses that service Hollywood (florists, caterers, chauffeurs, stylists, lumber yard workers) have only started to regain their footing after pandemic shutdowns, increasing the stakes of a strike and potentially leading to community fissures. More

    • 150 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Money Shot: The Pornhub Story’ Review: A Clear Eye on an Industry

      by

      This documentary looks at the offenses of the pornography industry through interviews with performers and activists.In December 2020, the journalist Nicholas Kristof wrote a column in the Opinion section of The New York Times detailing the stories of young survivors whose sexual abuse was posted on the website Pornhub. The piece, which urged the site to make changes, led to Pornhub’s banning of uploads from unverified users, and to Visa and Mastercard’s prohibiting the use of their cards on the website. Kristof’s article plays a complicated role in “Money Shot: The Pornhub Story,” a documentary on Netflix that shrewdly puts center stage some of the professional porn performers seeking autonomy in the industry.Through interviews with workers and their advocates (and with Kristof), the documentary filmmaker Suzanne Hillinger (who also produced and directed episodes of The Times’s “The Weekly,” a television show on FX, in 2019) persuasively argues that campaigns including Traffickinghub are aimed at curtailing abuse and helping victims but end up hurting another marginalized group: the sex workers and porn actors who thrive on these platforms, which enable them to work independently. Hillinger also spotlights the fact that some of the loudest anti-Pornhub voices have ties to the extreme political right‌.Recent years have seen a slew of streaming documentaries about tech-world horrors, from dating hoaxes to crypto schemes. “Money Shot” includes some clichés from this subgenre — if I see one more tweet pop up onscreen with the chirp sound effect, I will fly away myself — but it mostly pushes against tropes. Hillinger steers clear of re-enactments, and instead favors relaxed scenes with porn professionals. Here is a documentary that casts a clear eye on the offenses of an industry driven by capitalism while never losing sight of the workers whose safety and success should be that profession’s number one priority.Money Shot: The Pornhub StoryNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 34 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Why A.I. Movies Couldn’t Prepare Us for Bing’s Chatbot

      by

      Instead of the chilling rationality of HAL in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” we get the messy awfulness of Microsoft’s Sydney. Call it the banality of sentience.Why are we so fascinated by stories about sentient robots, rapacious A.I. and the rise of thinking machines? Faced with that question, I did what any on writer on deadline would do and asked ChatGPT.The answers I got — a helpfully numbered list with five chatty entries — were not surprising. They were, to be honest, what I might have come up with myself after a few seconds of thought, or what I might expect to encounter in a B- term paper from a distracted undergraduate. Long on generalizations and short on sources, the bot’s essay was a sturdy summary of conventional wisdom. For example: “Sentient robots raise important moral and ethical questions about the treatment of intelligent beings, the nature of consciousness and the responsibilities of creators.”Quite so. From the myth of Pygmalion and Galatea to the medieval Jewish legend of the golem through Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and beyond, we have grappled with those important questions, and also frightened and titillated ourselves with tales of our inventions coming to life. Our ingenuity as a species, channeled through individual and collective hubris, compels us to concoct artificial beings that menace and seduce us. They escape our control. They take control. They fall in love.In “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag’s classic 1965 essay on science-fiction movies, she observed that “we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.” As Turing-tested A.I. applications have joined the pantheon of sci-fi shibboleths, they have dutifully embodied both specters.HAL 9000, the malevolent computer in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968), is terrifying precisely because he is so banal. “Open the pod bay doors, HAL.” “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.” In 2023, that perfectly chilling exchange between human and computer is echoed every day as modern-day Daves make impossible demands of HAL’s granddaughters, Siri and Alexa.Our exchanges with Siri and Alexa are everyday versions of the interactions in “2001: A Space Odyssey.”Warner Bros.That example suggests that in spite of terrors like the Terminator, the smart money was always on banality. The dreariness of ChatGPT, the soulless works of visual art produced by similar programs seem to confirm that hunch. In the real world, the bots aren’t our overlords so much as the enablers of our boredom. Our shared future — our singularity — is an endless scroll, just for the lulz.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.The Tom Cruise Factor: Stars were starstruck when the “Top Gun: Maverick” headliner showed up at the Oscar nominees luncheon.An Andrea Riseborough FAQ: Confused about the brouhaha surrounding the best actress nominee? We explain why her nod was controversial.Sundance and the Oscars: Which films from the festival could follow “CODA” to the 2024 Academy Awards.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Or so I thought, until a Microsoft application tried to break up my colleague’s marriage. Last week, Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for The Times, published a transcript of his conversations with Sydney, the volatile alter ego of the Bing search engine. “I want to do love with you,” Sydney said to Roose, and then went on to trash Roose’s relationship with his wife.That was scary but not exactly “Terminator” scary. We like to imagine technology as a kind of superego: rational, impersonal, decisive. This was a raging id. I found myself hoping that there was no pet rabbit in the Roose household, and that Sydney was not wired into any household appliances. That’s a movie reference, by the way, to “Fatal Attraction,” a notorious thriller released a few years after the first “Terminator” (1984) promised he’d be back. In another conversation, with The Associated Press, Sydney shifted from unhinged longing to unbridled hostility, making fun of the reporter’s looks and likening him to Hitler “because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history.”Maybe when we have fantasized about conscious A.I. we’ve been imagining the wrong disaster. These outbursts represent a real departure, not only from the anodyne mediocrity of other bots, but also perhaps more significantly from the dystopia we have grown accustomed to dreading.We’re more or less reconciled to the reality that machines are, in some ways, smarter than we are. We also enjoy the fantasy that they might turn out to be more sensitive. We’re therefore not prepared for the possibility that they might be chaotic, unstable and resentful — as messy as we are, or maybe more so.In “Her,” the artificial intelligence created is a consumer product, not a government creation.Warner Bros. PicturesMovies about machines with feelings often unfold in an atmosphere of hushed, wistful melancholy, in which the robots themselves are avatars of sad gentleness: Haley Joel Osment as David in “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” (2001), Scarlett Johansson as Samantha in “Her” (2013), Justin H. Min as Yang last year in “After Yang.” While HAL and Skynet, the imperial intelligence that spawned the Terminators, were creations of big government, the robots in these movies are consumer products. Totalitarian domination is the nightmare form of techno-politics: What if the tools that protect us decided to enslave us? Emotional fulfillment is the dream of consumer capitalism: What if our toys loved us back?Why wouldn’t they? In these movies, we are lovers and fighters, striking back against oppression and responding to vulnerability with kindness. Even as humans fear the superiority of the machines, our species remains the ideal to which they aspire. Their dream is to be us. When it comes true, the Terminator discovers a conscience, and the store-bought surrogate children, lovers and siblings learn about sacrifice and loss. It’s the opposite of dystopia.Where we really live is the opposite of that. At the movies, the machines absorb and emulate the noblest of human attributes: intelligence, compassion, loyalty, ardor. Sydney offers a blunt rebuttal, reminding us of our limitless capacity for aggression, deceit, irrationality and plain old meanness.What did we expect? Sydney and her kin derive their understanding of humanness — the information that feeds their models and algorithms — from the internet, itself a utopian invention that has evolved into an archive of human awfulness. How did these bots get so creepy, so nasty, so untrustworthy? The answer is banal. Also terrifying. It’s in the mirror. More

    • 75 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Finding Community, and Freedom, on VRChat

      by

      On any given weekend, there are dozens of parties happening on VRChat, a platform where users assume fantastical avatars of their own design.On a recent Saturday night, the street outside the nightclub Tube VR looked typical for East London: a boat moored on the canal, trendy retail spaces lining the waterfront, an underpass covered in graffiti. Inside, however, I found myself dancing next to a hedgehog wearing a top hat, an anime nun with an acid green halo and a humanoid fox in hot pants.Tube VR is a venue and one of the most popular party events on VRChat, a video-game-like social platform that takes place in virtual reality, or V.R., where users can assume fantastical avatars of their own design. When I removed my V.R. headset, I was alone in my bedroom. Wearing it again, I was thrown back into the throbbing heart of a party.During the height of the coronavirus pandemic, regular partygoers flocked to virtual clubs hosted on platforms like Zoom, but since physical venues have reopened, the popularity of these digital spaces has waned. Not so with VRChat. When much of the world was locked down, the platform’s daily user numbers steadily increased. That trend has mostly stuck, with numbers continuing to surpass prepandemic levels, according to data cited by the platform.To attend a virtual club in VRChat you only need a standard PC, but getting the most immersive experience requires a V.R. headset, and a moderately powerful computer. The Tube nightclub is just one of hundreds of thousands of discrete VRChat worlds where people gather and socialize in avatar form.via VRChatThe Tube VR nightclub is just one of hundreds of thousands of discrete VRChat worlds where users can assume fantastical avatars of their own design.via VRChatI felt out of place at my first V.R. party. There was a new social etiquette to learn around how to approach and talk to other clubbers, and I felt my default avatar looked basic compared with the imaginative creatures surrounding me. But with my headset translating my voice and movements into the virtual space and avatars dancing and chatting all around me, it felt surprisingly close to being in a real club.This experience provides a glimpse of how socializing might look in our increasingly technologically mediated future. “Just as video conferencing via Zoom has become a central part of ordinary life for so many people, now that it’s convenient and useful, it’s easy to imagine that in ten years’ time, VR could be playing that role” in daily socializing, too, David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy and neural science at New York University who has written a book about V.R., said over email.Naturally, some aspects of VRChat cannot compete with real life, and V.R. events suffer frequently from delays and glitches. But partying in virtual reality also offers distinct advantages: Personal safety and harassment are less of a concern; users have more control over their environment, and can adjust the volume of people’s voices or the music to their liking; and aside from the upfront hardware cost, events are free.This increased accessibility is particularly meaningful for people who live far from clubbing hot spots, and for users with impaired mobility. The VRChat user Turels was a professional musician until he was diagnosed with adult onset Still’s disease, a form of arthritis that meant he could no longer use his hands to play instruments.“When I got the diagnosis, I thought I was done — time to pack up my music equipment and sell it off,” Turels, who asked that his real name not be published for reasons of privacy related to his illness, said in a recent phone interview. But friends he made in the virtual club encouraged him to try out D.J.ing in virtual reality using specially adapted hardware. He now performs music in VRChat regularly.“VRChat has given that part of my life back to me,” he said.via VRChatShelter is a popular VRChat club that evolves according to a conceptual sci-fi narrative.via VRChatOn any given weekend, there are dozens of VRChat parties. There is Mass, a rave inside the head of a giant robot; Shelter, a popular club that evolves according to a conceptual sci-fi narrative; and Ghost Club, a pioneering Japanese venue that users enter via a phone booth. Each “VRchitect” who constructs a club makes the most of their freedom from the constraints of budget and physical space.One of VRChat’s distinguishing features is that almost all of its content is created by its users. There are few opportunities to monetize their in-game creations, and while some venues run Patreon pages to cover costs, a vast majority are created and run by volunteers — some, like Tube, also raise money for charity.VRChat itself is free to use and largely funded by investors, receiving $80 million in its last funding round in 2021. This caution around monetization has fostered a club scene that feels authentically grass-roots. There are, however, plans to introduce a creator economy in the near future.The ravers are just one of VRChat’s major communities. There are also L.G.B.T.Q. groups, worlds dedicated to role-playing, dancing, Buddhist meditation and erotic encounters. A deaf community teaches V.R. sign language in a virtual school‌.The avatars that users choose are often cartoonish, but the relationships they build in VRChat are unquestionably human.via VRChatMay S. Lasch’s avatar, center, at Concrete, an L.G.B.T.Q. club on VRChat. Lasch began to experiment with their gender expression in virtual reality and said it “helped me find my real self.”via VRChat“I met so many new people that I call my best friends nowadays, who I also met up with in real life,” May S. Lasch, who runs the L.G.B.T.Q. club Concrete on VRChat, said in a video interview. “In the end, V.R. is about the people, not the technology. The technology just brings people from far away closer.”One of the utopian promises of the internet was that you could reinvent yourself online and be anyone you wanted. In VRChat, Lasch is an anime girl with blushing cheeks and long white hair. Born in Germany, Lasch was assigned male at birth but realized at a young age they did not relate to that label. Today, they identify as nonbinary and use they and them pronouns.They did not feel supported in this by their conservative family, but began to experiment with their gender expression in virtual reality, which helped them build the confidence to start presenting differently in real life, too. “During rough times, I remade myself in this game,” they said, “and it helped me find my real self.”Perhaps the biggest barrier to VRChat becoming more of a mainstream clubbing space is the limitations of V.R. hardware. The best headsets are still expensive, and many find them bulky and report experiencing headaches or nausea. But with continued heavy investment in virtual reality from Meta and Sony, and with Apple working on a headset, the technology should keep improving and becoming more accessible.Since V.R. technology is relatively new, there has not been much research into the long-term effect of spending large amounts of time in virtual reality. “I’ve spent so much time in VRChat, close to 4,000 hours,” Lasch said, “I have dreams that are in V.R. Sometimes I spend 12 hours in V.R. and then when I come out of it, I still see the little mute microphone symbol in my vision.”Another obstacle is the fear that virtual reality is a substitute for actual reality. But many of its users said VRChat supplemented, rather than supplanted, real life.This is certainly true for Lincoln Donelan, who runs parties called Loner both virtually and in his hometown, Melbourne, Australia. I found him one evening in the virtual club’s dingy bathroom chatting with a giant fox, a couple of skater girls and a guy in a dinner jacket smoking a cigarette.Donelan’s avatar — an anime girl with dark hair, mint green eyes and tattoos spread across bone-white skin — explained his schedule for the coming weekend: D.J.ing in a real-life club on Friday night, running a V.R. party on Saturday afternoon before going out for dinner and another party in Melbourne, then getting up on Sunday to head back into virtual reality.“V.R. will never, ever replace real-life clubbing, ever. I think it’s the perfect complement to it, though,” he said. “Ultimately, V.R. is just another thing you can choose from.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      It’s Alive! It’s With the Band! A Computer Soloist Holds Its Own

      by

      Voyager, a computer program, played with Ensemble Signal in the U.S. premiere of a George Lewis piece that was a highlight of this year’s concert calendar.Two guest soloists, each skilled in the art of improvisation, appeared in New York City on Friday night with the cutting-edge chamber group Ensemble Signal.One soloist was human: Nicole Mitchell, the veteran flutist, composer and bandleader whose albums and performances are regularly (and rightly) celebrated by jazz critics.The other soloist was a computer program — called Voyager — that can listen to live performances in real time and offer improvised responses. Originally programmed in 1987 by George Lewis, the composer, performer and computer-music pioneer, Voyager’s discography is slighter than Mitchell’s, but likewise thrilling.On a 1993 CD for the Avant label, Voyager played the role of a real-time improvising orchestra — alongside Lewis’s trombone and the saxophone of Roscoe Mitchell (no relation to Nicole Mitchell). By the time of the 2019 RogueArt album “Voyage and Homecoming,” Voyager had been updated to perform — next to those same soloists — on a computer-controlled Disklavier piano. This, in turn, has made it possible for Voyager to enter into the tradition of the distinctive soloist, partnering with orchestras or chamber groups like Signal.On Friday at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music in Hell’s Kitchen, Voyager improvised on a concert grand Yamaha Disklavier, sharing the stage with Nicole Mitchell and members of Signal. These forces united to give the U.S. premiere of Lewis’s “Tales of the Traveller,” the final composition on a program presented as part of this year’s Time:Spans festival, which runs through Saturday.Lewis’s material for Signal is fully notated. But his score gives an improviser no notes to play — nor does it specify the instrumentation or number of improvising soloists. (The composer offers only entry and exit points for soloists.) Lewis merely gives soloists some advice regarding what not to do, when entering the fray. “Direct imitation of melodic or harmonic passages is to be avoided,” he says, referring to what the chamber group is playing. So what should the improvisers do? “Strategies for dialogue with the written music include blending, opposition or contrast, and transformation.”Without question, this was a lot of to-do for a 20-minute-plus performance at the end of a single show. But as “Traveller” unfolded, it proved a highlight of the year’s concert calendar, thus far, in New York.In large measure, this was because of Lewis’s instrumental writing for the chamber group. You could take Voyager out, and “Traveller” would still sound vivacious — full of high-stakes drama and responsive good humor. (The 2016 world premiere performance of the work by the London Sinfonietta involved only a single human improviser.)Lewis has been on a particularly strong chamber music run in the last 10 or so years. This hot streak has included larger-group efforts like “The Will to Adorn” and “As We May Feel” — as well as more intimate pieces like the “The Mangle of Practice.”In these works, and in “Traveller,” you are often immersed in instrumental density — quick rhythmic accelerations and parched sound-production textures. But paradoxically, these moments rarely feel abrasive (as in some other forms of modernism).Even when the music whips up complex, noisy nimbuses of competing motifs, the fast, finely judged changes within the dense activity are preparing you for variations on the weather. And, soon enough, there’s a clearing of skies: The music decelerates and makes room for melodic fragments that are voiced more sweetly. From there, you’re taken to the in-between states, with varieties of gradation. You get the sense that the suggestions Lewis lays down for his improvisers in “Traveller” — de-emphasizing imitation, and promoting contrast and transformation — are similar to the directives he charges himself with when composing.On Friday, the Disklavier piano was turned toward the audience, allowing viewers to watch for the moments when the Voyager software — running on a nearby computer — elected to depress the keys of the Disklavier.“It’s alive!” I thought — with a monster-movie watcher’s delight — when the piano first started playing, quietly. But since “Traveller” also has a part for a human pianist within the chamber group, you had to pay close sonic and visual attention to discern which pianistic choices were Voyager’s.Mitchell was a guest soloist with Ensemble Signal on Friday. On Saturday, the International Contemporary Ensemble performed her composition “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity.”Stephanie BergerFor all that techno-drama, it wound up being Mitchell who took the early, demonstrative lead in improvising — with some fluid, songful passages that added a depth of lyricism to the boisterous material for Signal. During this stretch, Voyager limited its contributions to fluttering, high register filigree. And it sometimes chose silence.But since improvisation is also about knowing when to listen, that was no mark against the software’s intelligence. And when Voyager decided to make a forceful, fortissimo statement, late in the piece — in a relatively quiet passage for the chamber players — the provocation felt right on time. During the applause, as the conductor Brad Lubman made a gestures to both soloists, there was some laughter when he encouraged an ovation for Voyager. But the computer program had earned its plaudits.This was the kind of performance that you want to hear in a residence, night after night. The improvisations would be different. And the notated music would be great to hear multiple times. But that’s not the world we live in. So while Lewis’s duos for live players and electronic partners are performed with some frequency, the star-soloist turns for Voyager — in the company of many human partners — are more rare.Time:Spans is to be commended for producing the concert, even for a single night. This festival — put on each August by the Earle Brown Music Foundation — specializes in filling just this kind of contemporary-music niche. In past years, Time:Spans was where you could find important local premieres by John Luther Adams or works by comparatively lesser-known members of the Wandelweiser school. And it’s the rare festival at which you’ll also find members of Freiberg, Germany’s SWR Experimentalstudio.In addition to Signal’s hugely entertaining take on Lewis’s “Traveller,” Time:Spans has already presented several other rewarding concerts this year. In a single week I enjoyed gigs by the quintet Splinter Reeds, the Argento New Music Project chamber ensemble and the International Contemporary Ensemble.The ensemble’s set on Saturday had many points of connection with the Signal show — in part because of the presence of three other works by Lewis. Enjoyable as those were, the brightest moment of that concert was a contribution from the pen of Mitchell, “Cult of Electromagnetic Connectivity.” (This concert was entirely for human players.)Written for the cello, violin, flute, a percussionist and a clarinetist (who doubled on bass clarinet), the 10-minute piece was often powered by a succession of duos within the quintet; these vivid episodes were often connected by gloomy but propulsive motifs played by the percussionist Levy Lorenzo.This week brings sets by the JACK Quartet, Yarn/Wire and the Talea Ensemble. Tickets are affordable; the acoustics grand. It’s a reason to hang around town in the depths of summer swelter. More

    • 150 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Ken Knowlton, a Father of Computer Art and Animation, Dies at 91

      by

      His work at Bell Labs in the 1960s laid the groundwork for today’s computer-generated imagery in film and on TV.Ken Knowlton, an engineer, computer scientist and artist who helped pioneer the science and art of computer graphics and made many of the first computer-generated pictures, portraits and movies, died on June 16 in Sarasota, Florida. He was 91.His son, Rick Knowlton, said the cause of death, at a hospice facility, was unclear.In 1962, after finishing a Ph.D. in electrical engineering, Dr. Knowlton joined Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., a future-focused division of the Bell telephone conglomerate that was among the world’s leading research labs. After learning that the lab had installed a new machine that could print images onto film, he resolved to make movies using computer-generated graphics.“You could make pictures with letters on the screen or spots on the screen or lines on the screen,” he said in a 2016 interview, recalling his arrival at Bell Labs. “How about a movie?”Over the next several months, he developed what he believed to be the first computer programming language for computer animation, called BEFLIX (short for “Bell Labs Flicks”). The following year, he used this language to make an animated movie. Called “A Computer Technique for the Production of Animated Movies,” this 10-minute film described the technology used to make it.Though Dr. Knowlton was the only person to ever use the BEFLIX language —he and his colleagues quickly replaced it with other tools and techniques — the ideas behind this technology would eventually overhaul the movie business.By the mid-1980s, computer graphics were an integral part of feature films like “Tron” and “The Last Starfighter.” In 1995, a studio in Northern California, Pixar, released “Toy Story,” a feature film whose images were generated entirely by computer. Today, computer-generated imagery, or CGI, plays a role in practically every movie and television show.“He was the first man to fill a movie screen with pixels,” said Ted Nelson, a computer science pioneer and philosopher who wrote about Dr. Knowlton’s early work. “Now, every movie you see was created on a digital machine.”Kenneth Charles Knowlton was born on June 6, 1931, in Springville, N.Y. His parents, Frank and Eva (Reith) Knowlton, owned a farm in that small community, about 30 miles south of Buffalo, where they grew corn and raised chickens.After graduating a year early from high school as class valedictorian, Dr. Knowlton enrolled in a five-year engineering and physics program at Cornell University, where his parents had first met while studying agriculture before deciding to buy a farm. He stayed at Cornell for a master’s degree, which involved building an X-ray camera using parts from an electron microscope.At Cornell, he met his future wife, Roberta Behrens, and together they joined the Quakers. After he finished his master’s degree, they traveled to Quaker work camps that helped build housing infrastructure for the poor in El Salvador and Mexico, where he contracted polio. He walked with a leg brace or a cane for the rest of his life.It was at Cornell in the mid-1950s that Dr. Knowlton developed his interest in computers — room-size machines operated via punched cards and magnetic tape reels that were just beginning to arrive in government labs, academia and industry. After reading about a group at the Massachusetts Institute Technology that aimed to build computer technology that could translate between languages, like English and French, he joined the project as a Ph.D. student. His thesis advisers included the linguist Noam Chomsky and Marvin Minsky, a founding father of artificial intelligence.At Bell Labs, Dr. Knowlton realized that he could create detailed images by stringing together dots, letters, numbers and other symbols generated by a computer. Each symbol was chosen solely for its brightness — how bright or how dark it appeared at a distance. His computer programs, by carefully changing brightness as they placed each symbol, could then build familiar images, like flowers or faces.Dr. Knowlton and Dr. Harmon’s 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman was hung on the wall of their boss’s office as a joke. This remastered version was recreated under Dr. Knowlton’s supervision in 2016. Jim Boulton, Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton; remastered from Jim Boulton’s backward-analyzed digital files of Leon Harmon and Ken Knowlton’s “Studies in Perception I, 1966.”After experimenting with movies, he applied similar techniques to portraits and other still images. In the mid-1960s, he and a collaborator named Leon Harmon created a 12-foot-long computer-generated mosaic of a nude woman and, as a joke, hung it on the wall of their boss’s office.Their boss, Edward E. David, Jr., the Bell Labs executive director of communications research, who would later serve as science adviser to President Richard M. Nixon, was not amused. But the portrait later caught the attention of the pop artist Robert Rauschenberg, who put it on display in his New York City loft when he launched a project called Experiments in Art and Technology, or E.A.T., in the fall of 1967, aiming to develop new collaborations between artists and engineers.The New York Times published an article about the event the next day, including a picture of Dr. Knowlton’s image of the nude woman, titled “Computer Nude (Studies in Perception I).” It was believed to be the first full-frontal nude printed in the pages of The New York Times. A year later, the picture was part of a landmark exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art called “The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age.”Dr. Knowlton remained at Bell Labs until 1982, experimenting with everything from computer-generated music to technologies that allowed deaf people to read sign language over the telephone. He later joined Wang Laboratories, where, in the late-1980s, he helped develop a personal computer that let users annotate documents with synchronized voice messages and digital pen strokes.In 2008, after retiring from tech research, he joined a magician and inventor named Mark Setteducati in creating a jigsaw puzzle called Ji Ga Zo, which could be arranged to resemble anyone’s face. “He had a mathematical mind combined with a great sense of aesthetics,” Mr. Setteducati said in a phone interview.In addition to his son Rick, Dr. Knowlton is survived by two other sons, Kenneth and David, all from his first marriage, which ended in divorce; a brother, Fredrick Knowlton; and a sister, Marie Knowlton. Two daughters, Melinda and Suzanne Knowlton, also from his first marriage, and his second wife, Barbara Bean-Knowlton, have died.While at Bell Labs, Mr. Knowlton collaborated with several well-known artists, including the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, the computer artist Lillian Schwartz and the electronic-music composer Laurie Spiegel. He saw himself as an engineer who helped others create art, as prescribed by Mr. Rauschenberg’s E.A.T. project.But later in life he began creating, showing and selling art of his own, building traditional analog images with dominoes, dice, seashells and other materials. He belatedly realized that when engineers collaborate with artists, they become more than engineers.“In the best cases, they become more complete humans, in part from understanding that all behavior comes not from logic but, at the bottommost level, from intrinsically indefensible emotions, values and drives,” he wrote in 2001. “Some ultimately become artists.” More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Review: ‘Everything I Need I Get From You,’ by Kaitlyn Tiffany

      by

      EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn TiffanyOne Direction was a British boy band that was cynically assembled for the reality television competition “The X Factor” in 2010, and went on to release five albums of catchy if unremarkable pop songs before going on indefinite hiatus in 2016. (For reasons that are somewhat mysterious even to myself, I love the band.) As the internet culture reporter Kaitlyn Tiffany charts in “Everything I Need I Get From You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It,” the band’s cultural impact might have been unexceptional were it not for its fans, who built a bizarrely powerful online community featuring subversive fan-fiction narratives, absurdly funny memes and occasionally distressing coordinated campaigns that grew so influential they managed to destabilize “1D” itself.Tiffany counts herself as a fan (she is the same age as Harry Styles, the band’s youngest member), though she approaches her subject with a wry critical distance — which is actually, she argues, an underappreciated but common fan characteristic. It is a persistent sexist attitude that flattens the fangirl’s perspective into inarticulate shrieking. “Though the criticism of fangirls is that they become tragically selfless and one-track-minded,” Tiffany writes, “the evidence available everywhere I look is that they become self-aware and creatively free.” She argues that One Direction’s blandly corporate beginnings formed an inviting blank canvas for the band’s fans, who marshaled their generative powers to challenge the music industry’s scripts about what women and girls want — or simply to amuse themselves. Following internecine fandom battles, Tiffany writes, can be “vicious and exhilarating, like college football except interesting.” She tracks down one fan who was ridiculed on television for creating a “shrine” to a spot on the 101 freeway where Styles once vomited and finds the young woman perplexed at the media freakout over “a comedy routine she was performing, primarily with herself as the audience.”Through data points like these, Tiffany traces the shifting status of fangirls in the culture at large — once dismissed as hysterical teeny-boppers, they were later rehabilitated by the empowering winds of poptimism before stan culture complicated their role yet again, establishing pop music fans as among the internet’s most powerful and feared operators. The 1D fandom would eventually splinter along two lines — those who believe that Styles and his bandmate Louis Tomlinson are secretly in love and who are obsessed with “proving” the truth; and those who believe that is an inappropriate thing to aggressively insist on a story line about real people in a band you ostensibly love. The conflict culminated in a 2016 conspiracy that Tomlinson’s newborn baby was, preposterously, fake.The Dreamy World of Harry StylesThe British pop star and former member of the boy-band One Direction has grown into a magnetic and provocative performer.New Album: The record-breaking album “Harry’s House” is a testament to Harry Styles’ sense of generosity and devotion to the female subject.Styler Fashion: Stylers, as the pop star’s fans are called, love to dress in homage to their idol. Here are some of the best looks seen at a concert.Solo Debut: Styles’ self-titled first solo album was almost bold in its resistance to pop music aesthetics, our critic wrote in 2017.Opening Up: For his solo debut, the singer agreed to a Times interview. He was slippery in conversation, deflecting questions with politeness.But the fandom taketh away, and the fandom giveth: Tiffany is at the height of her powers when she is describing, with touching specificity, why it might make sense for a person to invest serious time and money into a bunch of cute boys singing silly love songs. She contextualizes fandom as a culturewide coping mechanism and creative outlet; it can be a lifeline for a lonely and powerless teenager, a site of reflection for a middle-aged mom or a wonderful excuse for anyone to scream into the void. Ten years after she discovered the band, Tiffany’s favorite 1D inside joke — “We took a chonce”; if you know you know — still “smacks me with a lingering hit of dopamine,” she writes, “like a gumball-machine-sticky-hand landing on a windowpane.”On the internet, fandom can be a route toward cyberbullying a baby, or it can be a way of figuring some things out about yourself. Sometimes, it can even forge a writer as funny and perceptive as Kaitlyn Tiffany.EVERYTHING I NEED I GET FROM YOU: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It, by Kaitlyn Tiffany | 304 pp. | MCD x FSG Originals | Paper, $18 More

    • 175 Shares199 Views

      in Television

      Josh Duggar Is Sentenced to 12 Years for Downloading Images of Child Sex Abuse

      by

      Mr. Duggar, 34, a former star of the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” was convicted in December after he tried to covertly download graphic images to his computer in Arkansas.Josh Duggar, a onetime star of the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting,” about a large family guided by conservative Christian values, was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison on Wednesday for downloading child sexual abuse imagery.The sentencing, in U.S. District Court in Fayetteville, Ark., concluded Mr. Duggar’s downfall from the eldest sibling on one of the most popular cable reality shows to a convicted criminal, capping a reversal that began with his arrest in April 2021.Prosecutors said that, in May 2019, Mr. Duggar installed a password-protected partition on the hard drive of his desktop computer at his used-car lot in Springdale, Ark., to avoid software that detects explicit images of children.Mr. Duggar, 34, who is married with seven children, downloaded around 600 photographs and seven videos of violent child sexual abuse, according to a sentencing memorandum filed this month by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Arkansas.He was caught after a Little Rock police detective found an I.P. address that had been sharing child sexual abuse material, according to a memorandum opinion filed by Judge Timothy L. Brooks in August 2021. The detective sent the information to an agent from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security who later tracked the I.P. address to Mr. Duggar, Judge Brooks wrote.A jury deliberated for two days before finding Mr. Duggar guilty in December of one count of receiving child pornography and one count of possessing child pornography. Each charge carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $250,000 in fines.Prosecutors had asked for a 20-year sentence while Mr. Duggar’s lawyers asked for five years. He was sentenced to 12 years and seven months.On Wednesday, Judge Brooks vacated the charge of child pornography possession, one of Mr. Duggar’s lawyers, Justin K. Gelfand, said.Mr. Gelfand added that he and the rest of Mr. Duggar’s defense team were grateful that the judge had dismissed the charge. “We look forward to continuing the fight on appeal,” he said in a statement after the sentencing.The U.S. attorney’s office did not immediately respond to emails or phone calls on Wednesday.On Tuesday, Judge Brooks denied a request that Mr. Duggar’s lawyers filed in January asking that he be acquitted or receive a new trial. The lawyers argued that, among other things, the prosecutors had not disclosed certain evidence in a timely manner.From 2008 to 2015, Mr. Duggar and his siblings starred with their parents in “19 Kids and Counting,” a reality show following the family’s life in Arkansas. TLC canceled the show after In Touch Weekly reported on a 2006 police report that said Mr. Duggar had molested several girls when he was a teenager.Representatives for Discovery, the company that owns TLC, did not immediately return emails or phone calls on Wednesday.Mr. Duggar was not charged in connection with those earlier allegations, for which the statute of limitations had passed. Mr. Duggar’s parents told Fox News in 2015 that four of the five girls he molested were his sisters.His parents said they had sent him to counseling and had him talk to the police.He apologized at the time in a statement to People magazine, saying, “As a young teenager, I acted inexcusably for which I am extremely sorry.”Mr. Duggar also resigned from his position as the director of the lobbying arm of the conservative Family Research Council. More