Bicycle Built For Two Thousand

Aaron Koblin, Daniel Massey. The Berlin Transmediale was held from 2 to 7 February. This digital festival of art and culture digital featured work by many of the most important of contemporary digital artists. The theme of this year's festival was “FUTURITY NOW”, which plays with the much-worked idea of the future we have grow up on in the culture of the 20th (and 21st) centuries.

It is 2010, nine years after Kubrick's 2001 (and still no permanent moon base!) and nine years before the Los Angeles of Blade Runner (if we still aren't driving around in electric cars, just imagine what it will take to create flying vehicles).


 

Among the prizes awarded at the Festival was one for “Bicycle Built For Two Thousand”, a web piece by Aaron Koblin and Daniel Massey. The work involved compiling over two thousand voice recordings made using Amazon's Mechanical Turk service (which Koblin had already used for The Sheep Market, which can be seen on the home page of his website). The Mechanical Turk service is a portal for online employment: employers can offer simple easy-to-complete and generally repetitive work, which cannot be carried out by machines, but which anyone can perform. The “employers” pay small amounts of money for each task performed. In this case, the workers were asked to listen to a short sound clip and then record themselves repeating it. They were not told what the recordings were going to be used for. They were paid $0.06 for each recording.


The artists combined over 2000 recordings to reconstruct Daisy Bell. This song originally written by Harry Dacre in 1892, became the first song to be sung by a computer in 1962 (the IBM 704 mainframe, to be precise). It was this event that inspired Stanley Kubrick to create the famous scene in which David Bowman shuts down/murders HAL 9000 (another example of something from the twentieth-century view of the future that has failed to materialise - the thinking machine). The authors complete the circle by re-composing the song using fragments of human voices.


The title of the piece refers to a line from the chorus of the original, “a bicycle built for two”.


The result can be heard and seen at http://www.bicyclebuiltfortwothousand.com/

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