A collection of links and threads that demand pursuit // cannot be pursued.
Eco Futurism
Eco Futurism Corporation just announced Life in Warp by A lake by the mõõn, check it out here.
Every sound you hear in the record was created from field recordings of living beings that are, or have been, endangered since the beginning of the Anthropocene.
Bruno Maçães
Bruno Maçães, writing for World Game:
As the pandemic raged, DeepMind announced that its AI system AlphaFold had been recognised as a solution to an old problem in biology: the protein folding problem. In his acceptance speech for the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Christian Anfinsen postulated that a protein’s amino acid sequence should fully determine its structure. This hypothesis sparked a five decade quest to be able to computationally predict a protein’s physical structure based solely on its amino acid sequence. DeepMind trained its system on publicly available data consisting of tens of thousands of protein structures from the protein data bank together with large databases containing protein sequences of unknown structure. By iterating this process, the system develops strong predictions of the underlying physical structure of the protein and is able to determine highly-accurate structures in a matter of days. Being able to know the structure of every protein the human body can produce should allow us to determine which molecules would be good candidate drugs. It will also allow us to map the structures of new virus proteins or to understand ageing at a cellular level.
The breakthrough was remarkable not just because of its predictable impact on biomedicine and health, but also because it shows, perhaps for the first time, what machine learning can truly achieve. As Eli Dourado noted, most applications of machine learning so far are essentially toys. Protein folding is the real deal, superhuman machine intelligence in the service of world-transforming technology. Expect a lot more of it.
Cutting Edge Canada
MUTEK and HELLERAU are delighted to offer you this first joint event and to give you access to new content that reflects the vitality and plurality of Quebec and Canadian creativity.
Pasha Petrosyan
Pasha Petrosyan was fatured on Honest Jams Podcast.
Erik Davis
Erik Davis, writing for Burning Shore:
Dance historians credit David Mancuso with laying down the template for the all-night urban dance club ritual around 1970. His “Love Saves the Day” (get it?) loft parties in lower Manhattan unleashed the DJ-as-soul doctor and the heavenly disco ball. Mancuso — who spent time at Millbrook with Leary and talked about using immersive sound equipment to achieve the feelings he got listening to birds or flowing water — was Italian, and his loft parties were mixed in terms of color, identity, and sexual preference. Many great DJs of color came up through these fetes, including the extraordinary innovators Larry Levan (Paradise Garage) and Frankie Knuckles (Chicago’s Warehouse), who pushed the form far beyond Mancuso, and hard into the future.