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Stefan Bohacek Interview: The Ethics and Humanity of Bots

Posted onAuthorBenjamin BrandallLeave a comment

Stefan Bohacek is the founder of BotWiki, a project that aims to catalog the useful, friendly and artistic bots of the world. He also has a number of side-projects on his site, fourtonfish.com. The projects include Detective, a chat-based game that randomly pairs you with a human or a bot and makes you decide which you’re chatting with.

We spoke about the philosophy and ethics of bots, as well as the ideas behind BotWiki, Detective, and his other exciting projects.

Listen to the interview below:

Or read the transcript for all the links we refer to:

BotWiki’s been a fascinating project for me lately.…   [continue reading]

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Secret Cave Office Chart [JUNE 2017]

Posted onAuthorLee TyrrellLeave a comment

Having been rather busy this month, on a variety of projects, June’s Office Chart is much more off-the-cuff. It found itself put together in short spots of downtime. Its choices were more impulsive; thrown on in the moment, as the whim took me. That said, I may have accidentally come out with the best end-product yet. Perhaps, in the past, my agonising over equal genre-mixes and ordering was a mistake. While I have spent some time making sure that there’s some coherence in the flow, a lot of the work did itself. The songs just seemed to make sense next to each other.…   [continue reading]

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Your Bot Art Belongs in a Museum

Posted onAuthorBenjamin BrandallLeave a comment

Recently I interviewed BotWiki founder Stefan Bohacek on the distinction between art made by a human and art made by a machine. “If you think art is these deep thoughts expressed by a human, then of course what bots make isn’t art”, he said. “If you think art is anything that looks good, then bots make art”.

Thinking more on the issue, I realized that a bot’s output is just the randomized result of human input. Even advanced bots with neural networks either learn from human input or learn from other bots that were programmed by humans. In the end, there’s no distinction between art created by bots and humans because humans are the ones that set boundaries for the bot and say what it can and can’t generate.…   [continue reading]

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Eggsy Interview: Trainers, The Unexplainers and Goldie Lookin Chain

Posted onAuthorLee TyrrellLeave a comment

John Rutledge is perhaps best known for his alter-ego of Eggsy, a principle and founding member of Goldie Lookin Chain. As one of their main voices, he’s made a name for himself as a consistently funny lyricist and, at least to my mind, incredibly underrated rapper. After years of prolific output, he and his crew show no signs of slowing down, with another new album due by the end of summer. Unique and colourful in the hip-hop scene, GLC always took a more sideways, yet realistic, look on the working-class streets of Britain.

Despite being a key part of GLC, Rutledge has managed to break out into incredibly intriguing things in his own right.…   [continue reading]

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CHOOSE YOUR CHARACTER: The Fallacy of Personality

Posted onAuthorLee TyrrellLeave a comment

It’s somewhat of a truism that we all put on masks for public consumption. The only question is, to what extent? While some people hide behind a thick barrier of curated character, others are closer to the knuckle in their personal portrayals. I believe, however, that everyone is guilty, by and large, of relying on fictionalised exaggerations. With the advent of social media, this loss of individualism is only encouraged. There’s a truth behind us all, of course, but to whom is it ever truly visible?

It often works in gradients. For example, your workplace small-talk colleague will probably meet a grander illusion than, say, your parent.…   [continue reading]

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WWE BackLash 2017 [LIVE TWEET STREAM/REPORT]

Posted onAuthorLee TyrrellLeave a comment

As SmackDown‘s first dedicated PPV post-WrestleMania, my expectations for BackLash were as low as they were for Payback. In fact, if anything, my expectations were a little lower. However you try to dance around it, SmackDown‘s a B-show. That doesn’t mean it can’t bring some compelling things to the table. It’s just that, by and large, you can always look to Raw for a bit of added spectacle. With a main event pitching Jinder Mahal against Randy Orton, my hopes were far from high. The only thing on the card of real intrigue, to me, was the inevitable debut of Shinsuke Nakamura on a WWE main roster.…   [continue reading]

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Is Netflix the New TV? Not Really

Posted onAuthorBenjamin BrandallLeave a comment

In 1997, Netflix wasn’t formed to disrupt our TV habits, it was formed to support them.

It launched with a library of 925 DVDs. The main thing that separated it from something like Blockbuster (and what eventually ended up allowing Netflix to trump them) is the monthly subscription. All-you-can-eat content, with a much wider selection than traditional TV or cinema.

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By 2000, Netflix had already declined an acquisition offer of $50 million from a terrified Blockbuster, and then went on to make DVD rentals obsolete with a revolutionary on-demand platform and a discovery algorithm within the space of 6 years.

Using similar tactics to YouTube, and emerging within the same year, Netflix represents the YouTube-ization of television.…   [continue reading]

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BONZIE Interview: Zone on Nine, Collaboration and Intimacy

Posted onAuthorLee TyrrellLeave a comment

I first discovered BONZIE, an American musician whose talent betrays her age, purely by accident one evening. Since, I haven’t been able to stop listening to her oddly cathartic music; strong in the belief that I haven’t heard songwriting this refreshing in years. Her first record, Rift Into the Secret of Things, is a gorgeous trek through melodious brevity. While short, the potency of the material within leapt from my speakers with an understated purity. To be more accurate, the music of BONZIE laps against your eardrum with all the playful provocation of relentless waves.

Like soft ocean ripples, her songwriting brings with it a depth that sounds like it’s swirled the entire planet to reach the quiet beach you find it on.…   [continue reading]

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A Change is Gonna Come

Posted onAuthorAndy TyrrellLeave a comment

In 1978, Neil Peart (lyricist and percussionist out of pompous Canadian stadium rockers, Rush) wrote “Plůs cà chăngë, plüs cé lä měmę chõsē” (that’s foreign writing that is, and I don’t expect you to understand it, but it means – “the more that things change, the more they stay the same”), for the song Circumstances on the band’s Hemispheres album. Having said that, in the context of the article I am about to write, that quote is a load of bollocks but, I have seen how many online “journalists” like to put a couple of cultural references in their articles, to make themselves look clever.…   [continue reading]

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David Kear Interview: Charlie Chuck, Musical Origins and Montreal Comedy Festival

Posted onAuthorLee TyrrellLeave a comment

David Kear is one of the most unique voices in British comedy. His principle character of Charlie Chuck is an unpredictable powder-keg of visceral joy. Often putting a dark twirl on commonplace Northern activities, his unhinged persona found laughs from discomfort years before better-known contemporaries. In the early 90’s, Kear began to accrue more mainstream fame through television. He first appeared to a wider audience, as Chuck, on Sky Star Search (in 1990), an odd little show fronted by James Whale.

Just three years later, Kear became one of the few recurring characters on The Smell of Reeves and Mortimer.…   [continue reading]