PopTech

Watch Young Guru borrow a beat from Al Green to show the fine line between art and piracy.

“When we study hip-hop we are actually studying the history of piracy. If we go back and study all piracy, we see that most things that were created in the world are a remix of something else.”

Revered as “The Sound of New York,” Young Guru has mixed 10 of Jay-Z’s albums and officially became Jay-Z’s tour D.J. in 2010.

climateadaptation:

Lovely, thought provoking talk on perpetual growth by Icelandic writer and thinker, Andri Magnason. His pyramid analogy is quite the highlight.

Typing on a standard qwerty keyboard can be boring. Typing on a ripe mango, however — now that’s infinitely more interesting. MaKey MaKey is a kit that can make such surrealist dreams come true by turning conductive objects into computer keys and buttons.

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MaKey MaKey: Who wants to use bananas as a computer keyboard? (Wired UK)

Jay Silver (PopTech 2012) is an inventor who created Makey Makey, a kit that allows users to turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the Internet, like creating a piano out of bananas or mangos. Watch his PopTech talk.

Glowing umbrellas and art without authorship

The modern performance company Pilobolus and MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory teamed up at PopTech 2012 along with several hundred volunteers for a collaborative art excercise. Guided by a camera fixed on a towering crane, the volunteers moved around holding umbrellas fixed with LED lights to spontaneously create dramatic colorful formations in a darkened outdoor amphitheater.

The modern performance company Pilobolus and MIT’s Distributed Robotics Laboratory teamed up at PopTech 2012 along with several hundred volunteers for a collaborative art excercise. Guided by a camera fixed on a towering crane, the volunteers moved around holding umbrellas fixed with LED lights to spontaneously create dramatic colorful formations in a darkened outdoor amphitheater. The results are stunning.

Neat! PopTech 2012 speakers Jay Silver of MaKey MaKey (whose talk we just posted) and Claressa Shields (featured in the documentary T-REX) are highlighted in Kickstarter’s Best of 2012.

Jay Silver is an inventor who created Makey Makey, a kit that allows users to turn everyday objects into touchpads and combine them with the Internet, like creating a piano out of bananas. He endorses art that is a “hodge-podge of different collections of contributions reflecting everyone’s own internal inspirations, kind of the way nature is, but for humans.”

“I come here today because I am excited about data, but also because I am terrified. I am terrified that we are having progress without culture in the world of data.”

Jer Thorp, who has launched The Office For Creative Research, explores the boundaries between science, data, art, and culture. His work has appeared in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

There are some areas where neuroscience will really allow for new contexts in society, and the legal system is one of them. Because we are able now to measure things we have never been able to measure before, this allows us potentially to customize sentencing and rehabilitation. The goal is to have the whole system be more just and have more utility. Currently, our national legal system [in the U.S.] does not allow that people are very different on the inside. Brains are not the same, neuroscience is proving, and they are sometimes very different from one another. Our system is built on the assumption that if you’re over 18 and over the IQ of 70, you’re a practical reasoner, free to choose how you act. But modern neuroscience suggests that those are not good assumptions. We treat incarceration as a one-size-fits-all solution. In America, we incarcerate more of the population than any other nation in the world — because in large part, there is no nuance to how we approach the system. My project is calling for greater nuance and refinement to create a tailored system. Just like how we have tailored education. I have to emphasize, though, that this is not about exculpation. I have to be very clear that this is really about customized sentencing and rehab that works.

— Q&A: David Eagleman, Director, Initiative on Neuroscience and the Law