1.
Oracle Part 1 — a short story by Max Waller
From the Community
Below is an extract from the first story, of the first anthology by Digital Renegade. You can see the full post here.
Oracle couldn’t sing a note straight without going off-key. His nervous, pinched tenor never made the cut in the school choir, but he knew from an early age that he had music in him, this was just as much a fact to him as the blood coursing through his veins. He understood that music was energy and that it could be harnessed just like the force in Star Wars. A self-described Jedi Knight of hip-hop, he had become an instant icon based on his ability to assemble sounds and mix them into order, much like a sonic alchemist. He had cut beats for some of the biggest names in the music game, but he always remained the perpetual outsider and he wouldn’t have it any other way. He needed to be on the periphery of everything to make sense of both the zeitgeist and the eternal timelessness that existed outside of it. He neither wanted to belong to his generation or fail at being the voice of it simultaneously. He was a paradox and this would explain why he divided opinion in such a binary way. Some saw him as a dangerous egomaniac who demonstrated the very worst characteristics of the male celebrity artist, while others saw him as a visionary idiot savant, similar to that of Mozart and felt he should be made allowances for in order to serve his genius. In an age of progressive moral uniformity, he resembled something closer to Frankenstein’s monster, occasionally escaping from the music lab to wreak havoc on social media and the world at large, before returning to the place where he felt most safe. The studio. Since his breakout debut album “Foretold”, which he had produced and featured on as a rapper, Oracle had been showered with praise from all four corners of the globe. He had turned the hip-hop genre on its head and challenged the many generic assumptions of the form. The glass ceiling had been well and truly smashed and the fractured shards had fallen all about his peers. The escalation from being the shy introverted kid behind the mixing desk to performing at stadiums was swift. With every album, there was a recognisable evolution, an image change. Starting out as the outsider drop out, to braggadocios genius, and eventually to visionary loner, Oracle was demonstrating in real time that celebrity inevitably corrodes the innocence of the young artist. Textures were becoming heavier, thicker, more complex, utilising the entire soundboard of the music world, including samples, orchestras, choirs etc. His maximalist productions were expanding like his ego with each one under threat of being torpedoed by the sheer monstrous size of his own colossal ambition. And then his personal singularity collapsed and with it, any remaining semblance of reality he still had left to hold onto. And all because of a girl. Ghost girl.
2.
Archillect - an artificial intelligence for creative inspiration.
From the Internet
Learn more about Archillect on her website where you can also view an ever-changing archive of images she has found.
I find the best way to interact with her is through Instagram and Twitter.
3.
Euphoria — music video by Labrinth and Zendaya
From the Internet
It’s really good. Enjoy.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
How do you feel about AI in the context of creativity?
Let me know your thoughts by emailing on zine@co-create.space
I think most creatives underestimate the power of AI and most technology fans overestimate the power of AI. I think AI can be a great tool for creatives, so long as the creatives whose work the AI is given to learn from is adequately compensated.
For AI digital art, I think the music industry process for licensing samples is a good analog. When an AI uses a dataset that is an artist's work, it is essentially creating a new piece of art by sampling the work of the artist. A reasonable licensing fee lets artists get paid to make more art (and data sets for AI artists) and AI artists get to make new art.