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/
