#22: Underwater Dancehall

This week: Immersive sound on TV and on screen // Things to read, watch and do this week // A new city on the Blockchain. Plus: WAC Weekly and some early Dubstep

This week we’re looking at immersive sound in nature documentaries; we’ve got a bit of David Lynch, a machinima Hamlet, training black AIs, authoritarian blockchains and my love-letter to early dubstep.

The world of Creative R&D is never boring.

So, come on fellow voyagers, let’s dive in.

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We’re six months into Creative R&D - 22 editions. Not upgraded to a paid subscription yet? Now’s the perfect time.

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ART! // Listen to the world.

Over the last month, a new sub-genre of documentary film-making has emerged all at once.

Apple TV’s Earth Sounds and Sky’s Secret World of Sound, narrated by David Attenborough both focus on the heard and the unheard in nature.

Apple TV’s immersive audio focussed Earth Sounds

Nature documentary is a kind of storytelling that’s utterly dependant on technology change. From camera miniaturisation to night-vision, from robots to drones, we’ve got to see the natural world in new ways because of ever-less natural forms of technology.

But we’ve never really been asked to listen to the world before - the priority has always been to see it.

Which is what makes these shows interesting, because they show how important audio now is to “television”, and hint at new kinds of creativity to come.

The market for high-end audio for televisions exploded during Covid - and now we’re seeing programmes that really leverage its potential.

Soundbars, which bring cinematic immersive sound to the domestic TV, are an $8bn market already, and that’s projected to grow to $12bn over the next five years.

And Apple’s commitment to Dolby Atmos as the spatial audio medium for all its devices and software marks a commitment to immersive sound that goes beyond the rational. It’s an attempt to enforce a standardisation of high-quality digital sound the public’s not really asked for, and perhaps doesn’t really want.

But the deep market penetration of quality audio makes a programme like Secret World of Sound make sense.

Using an array of close mic-ing, and AI-enabled audio processing that makes sounds on the cusp of the audible range powerfully clear, it opens up another realm of natural wonder and really shows off your sound bar in all its glory.

But now we’ve got monkeys and peacocks in immersive audio, I want MORE.

The potential of exploring and amplifying the hidden noises of the world through sound has been rich, but very occasional, territory for the best film-makers over the decades.

Just a few years ago we had Memoria, Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s existential search for a strange deep rumble that Tilda Swinton knows means something, but can’t find what it means.

And back in his early films, David Lynch worked with sound artists Alan Splet to fill the corridors and elevators of Eraserhead and Blue Velvet with strange clangings and dark ambience.

Now we can pull out these microscopic sounds and anyone can hear them, it’s brilliant creative territory.

As much as I like the sturm und drang of Hans Zimmer’s orchestral bass drones in Dune or Interstellar, there’s a chance now to unlock subtler noise to help tell tomorrow’s stories.

Get making!

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IDEAS! // What to watch, read and see in Creative R&D

Looking for the best in digital creativity this week? Check out what’s going on below:

• Deustche Telekom demoed an “appless” AI-powered smartphone at this year’s Mobile World Congress. More proof that the AI revolution will be the frontier for a next-gen technology battle between incumbents like Apple protecting and extending their ecosystems, and both new and existent competitors trying to create an alternative.

• I LOVE this. Grand Theft Hamlet is a hilarious attempt to stage the Bard’s great drama in Grand Theft Auto, told in a machinima documentary. Two actors found an amphitheatre and try to stage the whole play … they don’t get very far as massed hordes descend, weapons raised. Brilliant.

• If you’re looking for critical exhibitions on digital art later this year, MUDAM in Luxembourg is the place to go. Opening in September, “Radical Software” tells the story of women in computer art. MUST SEE.

• AIs will only be riddled with biases (or riddled with hilarious wokeness, Googlers) as long as we allow them to be. So it’s great to see funding flowing to start-ups like Latimer, who are training AIs on black culture. More please.

• Not going to Luxembourg? Well head over to Warsaw where this super cool looking brain-computer interface driven installation is playing at Copernicus Science Center and reshaping the boundaries of immersive and religious experience.

• Apple have announced a multi-part TV series of William Gibson’s 1984 novel Neuromancer. It’s not possible to overstate the importance of the original book to digital culture. Eight parts seems a lot for what’s a pretty tight novel, but fingers crossed this is good.

• Not going to Luxembourg or Warsaw? WHY NOT? Well, get your ticket to MuseumNext in London in June instead. I’m speaking not once but twice. First with NIMI on NFTs and the future of museum philanthropy, and then a keynote on the rise of the Immersive Institution, six months on after my piece in The Art Newspaper.

NB, I have a lot less hair than this IRL. New photos are on the to-do-list.

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Your must-do in Web 3 // WAC Weekly

I’m totally delighted to have WAC Weekly as newsletter partners.

WAC Weekly is THE best place to keep up with what’s going on as Web 3 meets the Art ecosystem. A weekly call every Wednesday at 6 CET, it has an amazing revolving cast of speakers and projects.

It’s run by old friend and major maven, Diane Drubay. Register now - this season has a couple more months to run.

And look out for some exclusive content I’m making for Diane and WAC Labs over the coming weeks.

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TECHNOLOGY! // Cities on the Blockchain

There’s a lot of worry about what AI might do to democracy.

Whether it’s the impact of deepfakes or the way some kind of Artificial General Intelligence may turn upside down our socio-political structures.

But we need to look in other places as well to see how technology and society are coming together in new and disruptive ways.

Amidst the breakneck building of new worlds in the Saudi Arabian desert, another wildly ambitious new city is being built.

Mayasem is being built in Jeddah - a smallish town of about 5000 houses, with a skew towards media and culture. As reported by Arab News:

The district is intended to have a cultural value; streets will be named after prominent Saudi scholars, journalists and writers. Furthermore, it will act as a cultural hub for the city and a gathering place for media and intellectual leaders.

But one detail stands out. Mayasem is being built … On the blockchain.

Wait, what?

There’s not a lot of detail about what this means beyond some general Smart City-ish claims.

But the blockchain is more than the Internet of Things sending data about streetlights and traffic patterns.

It’s inherently, explicitly political.

Blockchain in its origins in the mythical Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper, is radically libertarian, and has led to a wildly volatile new kind of digital market.

So making it an organising principle of a city in a rapidly changing country integrating modernising hyper-capitalism with religious authoritarianism feels weirdly risky.

I have no idea where this goes, but in a year of pivotal elections and gruesome war, and whilst AI sucks up all the technology airspace, I have this weird itch that putting blockchain in the middle of a fast-changing society will have unintended consequences.

Keep watching.

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And finally … 18 years since Dubstep Warz

I’m writing this listening to a properly seminal moment in music culture - now just past 18 years old.

Back in 2006, Dubstep, a bass heavy, super moody take on dance music that had brewed in Croydon, hit a threshold and exploded, almost all at once.

This RIDICULOUSLY GOOD series of mixes by a Magnificent Seven of Dubstep DJs threw a whole genre into the spotlight - and over the next five years it eat the world.

Dubstep still to me sounds like the future.

Like the late 70s post-punk I reference a lot on this newsletter, early 2000s dubstep mashes styles together in an anxious, dark stew that feels so good largely because it feels so BAD, so queasy, so edgy.

Reader, I LOVE it.

But as good as dubstep is … and it really is … Dubstep Warz is also a reminder of a particular potency radio had in the earliest stages of social media. MP3 recordings of shows like this were a currency on MySpace, Forums, Blogspots and P2P sites, creating a mass virality that BBC Sounds, for all its excellence, can’t really replicate.

Get listening.

And once you’ve listened, watch this behind the scenes footage from DJ Kode 9, whose handheld graininess make 18 years feel like a millennia.

Last but not least, this week’s title is also a dubstep reference to the first album by Bristol act, Pinch.

See you next week.