This New Band Are Nuts

Have you heard of a band called Azymuth da Polenta? No. [laughter] No. Command AI. It's these two guys and they're black and white painted dots. And the music is very very trippy. For a music nerd, the reason why they are intriguing is first of all, it's they're using weird time signatures and if you're in the if you're in the audience and um you know, you understand music, you know what time signatures are, you can see sometimes it's 6/8, sometimes it's 9/8. And they also use different notes than what we're used to hearing in Western music. They're using notes in between, so you can see this guitar here that's got all of these so many more frets than a normal guitar, which I could show you a normal guitar, but there's almost like a metal bar Yeah. what they call fret in between each of these things, which gives them access to some of these notes. And then lastly, they talk about the looping. So he's recording one piece of guitar, having it loop, and then playing another piece of guitar over the top and it's all very intricate and it's mesmerizing to watch from a musical standpoint. But then he gets into the art side of things and why this is so intriguing right now in the age of AI. And maybe we can listen to what he says. I'm hoping I timed that right that we could just play it. But their appearance is important, too. Often gets described as being Dadaist. And if you don't know, Dadaism was an art movement about 100 years ago, which ultimately led to surrealism. And it was all about incongruity, about things that didn't belong together, things that broke the rules of what the viewer expected. It was even the birth of the whole what is art debate. And it's interesting that Dadaism back then was a direct response to the machinery of war and of modern life. And that's probably what's happening now. You go back even further, look at the effect that photography had on art and how once that anyone could create images using this simple little machine, art changed radically. Painters stopped trying to depict what was in front of them as perfectly as possible, figurative art, cuz what's the point? And they got more creative with impressionism. And ultimately that led to Dadaism, expressionism, cubism, because what is the point of trying to paint what's in front of you perfectly when you can just take a photo. And that freed artists, it actually pushed them to do something more interesting with their paintbrush. Basically pushes us from the mundane and the templates and then the simple and what is in in the terms of photography, what is, you know, real, to to go into abstraction and a level higher and into expression, you know, to express Well, yeah. Yeah. If you go back to some of the earliest episodes of this show, I talk about where we we have no idea of the implications of what AI can do, cuz we're going to redefine our worldview. We we particularly talked to spoke about it when we were talking about job loss and this idea that we're all becoming redundant. And it's like, well, yes, but our worldview will be repainted and we'll think about things in a very very different way based on the new norm. And on the photography aspect as well, this is just a pin. I'm just going to put a pin in this. We talk about, you know, ev- everything happens in cycles. We think it's this new thing that's going to whatever. No, it's been done many many times before and the the uh the examples we've given here on this show is about farming. When farming used to all be done by hand and then machinery came and you could replace your field of 40 100 farmers all picking seeds and fruits and vegetables out the soil, all of their jobs were wiped when the tractor came along, okay? So we're just talking about this cyclical um thing where we're we're always presented with a new paradigm that we inevitably adjust to and create new a new worldview for ourselves. Now, that's a bit too intense. Bringing it back to creativity and fun, again, it's so interesting that the revolt that happened against well, what's the point? We can take a photo now. They saw that technology had replaced them. This is an interesting use case where designers or artists thought, well, instead of letting it join us, how do we revolt against it and become more interesting and become more relevant? Instead of crossing our arms as creators, as developers, being like, oh, no, AI's this, AI's that, like we can't whatever. Be empowered to do something about it and use AI to your advantage and leverage it and or go completely off the rails and do something very very different, which is why your retext really had me, you know, kind of both sides of the fence here, because we're losing the the the reason for uh a website. Not not losing it 100% completely, but definitely it's been, you know, um let's say uh truncated, because lots more people are sourcing the information that they need through AI. They're not going through to the website, thus much more much less websites need to be designed. They still, however, do. I'm never going to say that a website never needs to not be designed. All that to be said, it's interesting how this text-based thing has come, maybe as a revolt against AI. To tie all this back to your text for pretext, maybe that person was determined, because it's like, [ __ ] this, we need to make websites much more interesting, cuz they're all just going to become the same and functional. So, yeah, a bit of a a roundabout way to tie all that together. I found this video particularly interesting. We'll obviously put his Will Francis, we'll obviously put his thing down below. But this whole concept of art, culture and the internet is is kind of it's up for grabs at the moment and I hope we can see the opportunity that's potentially here. I I very much like the take. AI is just a tool. And I like the idea of using it uh to go higher in the ladder of abstraction, whatever that means for you, however it allows you to express yourself. Let it do your early experiments. Let it do your early um resource gathering. Don't trust it. Don't take its output as final output. It can be just like a tool, an assistant, just like how internet is um AI is in is in the same way. And I agree with you, it's another paradigm shift like the example you mentioned with farming. And the AI companies tend to make it to be much bigger than it is. It is bigger than the previous paradigm shifts, but probably not as big as the AI companies are making it to be. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter. Command AI.