RADIO UPCOMING GUEST: JAMES BRIDLE

[graffiti in Hamra, Beirut DJ Rupture]

I’m pleased to announce that the special guest on tomorrow’s radio show is James Bridle, in town from London, full of provocative ideas & playful manifestations of our current digital-IRL moment, where the very definitions of memory, visibility, tangibility, etc are glitching out/fraying together in fascinating ways then physicalizing in fashion, advertising, interface design, architecture…. (When I saw the above piece of pixelated grief-graf in Beirut a few days ago, I instantly thought of James Bridle’s New Aesthetic.)

So. On Wednesday October 17th from 8-9pm EST we’ll be talking about the role of sound in all that with James sharing an ear-opening audio selection.

[from Paul Hagon’s Flickr]

In case you don’t know, James’ work made the internet explode last April when Bruce Sterling wrote a WIRED essay on The New Aesthetic as a kind of new art movement/weltanscshauung with James as “the master of the salon… the guru there.” Because of how the internet works, within days Sterling’s article had sparked roughly 1,000 other articles debating and reflecting on ‘The New Aesthetic’ — most of them written by people who didn’t really have an idea what was going on but felt excited to meme-dive and bend the discussion to whatever they were already thinking about. So, noise aside, Bridle is zeitgeisty in a good, contagious way, and this show is not to be missed.

BEIRUT / ISTANBUL DESIGN BIENNIAL / & etc

Tomorrow I’m off to Beirut for the Share Conference, “a weekend-long public, free and non-commercial hybrid event blending an Internet culture and technology related daytime conference with dynamic cutting-edge music festival by night.” I’ll be doing double duty: a daytime artist talk on Sunday October 7th, and a conference-closing DJ set that night. First time in Lebanon, looking fwd!

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From there I head to Istanbul for the opening of the Istanbul Design Biennial, where we’re taking over a room to install Sufi Plug Ins & John Francis Peters’ Morocco photographs. Beyond Digital by the Bosphorus! Last time I was in Turkey was a dozen years ago, touring with Wax Poetic & Norah Jones before she was (the) Norah Jones. Everyone says the city has changed more than any other in this time, turned ‘hip’, skyrocketed.

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Lest we forgetLast night’s radio now streaming:

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And in today’s news – at 2pm EST I’ll be talking music/tech/tools with Robin Sloan on the occassion of his 24-hour book party live stream.

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Spirit creature from last night’s radio show, drawn by Talacha live in studio:

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