I was watching Jaron Lanier play jazz piano with a small ensemble recently, and it occurred to me that in his freeform, shambling, yet artful way, he was radiating the same energy that suffuses his talks about technology: A kind of extreme casual intelligence, seemingly spur of the moment but actually the product of years of thought and contemplation.<\/p>\n
And suddenly I decided that when I give talks about the future, I need to be improvising on a piano keyboard. The words I speak about virtual reality, cyber-connections, neural implants, should be complemented by freeform improvised jazz.<\/p>\n
The hybrid format I’m contemplating probably breaks at least twenty different rules that keep CP Snow’s two cultures safely apart. Which means I will probably piss off quite a few people. On the other hand, I think Bob Dylan was totally on target in Newport in 1965 (you could look it up).<\/p>\n
So today I tweaked my Chalktalk program, the one I’ve been using for all my recent teaching and presentations. Normally, when I use Chalktalk, I sketch as I talk, and those sketches then turn into animated ideas and creatures, which act out whatever topic I’m talking about.<\/p>\n
But today I added a new feature: The animated creatures can appear in response to certain chords I play on my (midi) piano keyboard. Now, in addition to puppetry by drawing, puppetry by music.<\/p>\n
So I guess I’m already working on that talk Jaron inspired. And if I do it right, the visual ideas that show up and move about on screen will appear to flow naturally not just from the words, but also from the music.<\/p>\n
Which, in a way, is exactly right.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I was watching Jaron Lanier play jazz piano with a small ensemble recently, and it occurred to me that in his freeform, shambling, yet artful way, he was radiating the same energy that suffuses his talks about technology: A kind of extreme casual intelligence, seemingly spur of the moment but actually the product of years … Continue reading “Puppetry by music”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16630"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16631,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16630\/revisions\/16631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}