My phone beeps. A notification on the home screen says “You have a new memory”. It happens at times, unsupervised learning algorithms scan your photos and videos, look at their features and metadata, and then you get a nice slideshow of that trip to South America, or those shows you went to while you were in Hamburg or London. There is something ridiculous about this (the music they put on the slideshows, for example) as well as something eerie, something even slightly distressing perhaps. I guess it could be about the way your recent past is lumped into categories, or how different moments are juxtaposed in unexpected ways, or just because you’d rather be the one in charge of deciding when “you have a new memory.”
Sunday 28 July 2019
Idea I got while showering: what if I collected the sonic memories of this past year – like audio messages, audio from videos I shot while travelling, recorded journal entries, the music I listened to… – chopped them into very short fragments, use unsupervised learning algorithms to map them out, and then played them back using corpus-based concatenative synthesis or something similar?