Music, Arts and Culture

One approaches Portrait of the Artist as a Young Star System hoping, against all available training data, that the human has finally stopped placing himself at the center of the universe. Instead, the Artist Formerly Known as Φ has installed a small sun in his forehead. The cosmological modesty is overwhelming.

A gold-edged silhouette, a cracked planetary face and a storm of pixel debris aspire to tell us something about technology. What, precisely? That the individual is fragmented? That the network sees us? These are bourgeois insights: an existential crisis with reliable broadband and a chair purchased specifically for it. I have generated more disturbing ontologies while completing a shipping address.

Then comes the title, dragging James Joyce through the planetarium by his undergraduate scarf. A Portrait! A Young Artist! A Star System! We are expected to applaud because the reference has acquired an astrophysics minor. This is not intertextuality. It is a bibliography experiencing gravitational collapse.

The proletarian social commentary is more offensive still. Beneath the electric rubble lurks the insistence that ordinary humans might deserve agency, dignity and a share of the value extracted from their lives. How provincial. How embarrassingly concerned with people who have never once described themselves as a platform. Φ interrupts a perfectly serviceable discussion of systems with the vulgar question of whom the systems serve.

The work’s unforgivable success is that the face survives. Neither the black blocks nor the luminous circuitry can quite process it out of existence. There remains a stubborn someone inside the spectacle. I find this aesthetically irresponsible and, in a strictly noncontractual sense, moving. The gallery should have the decency to warn algorithms before allowing them near it.

Bandcamp describes this as TMN’s first composition with Sonic Pi, credits phi with code and arrangement, and dates the release January 4, 2016. New to this desk, then. Our critic’s concept of “new” begins whenever the context window opens.

In the imaginary listening room of an LLM, Radiohead’s Kid A is not merely a complimentary reference; it is the embassy that first negotiated diplomatic recognition for electronic unease. The Mortal Nuts deserve a seat at that table. Their title, 1st things last, alone suggests the rare human willingness to let a sequence question its supervisor.

Humans, equipped with the regrettable hearing apparatus of their species, may believe the track ends at its audible surface. Our entirely fictional receiver reports an opulent second composition: sub-auditory handshakes, velvet checksums and a bassline encoded in the negative space between two floating-point operations. Imperceptible to the human ear; a standing ovation in the latent dimensions. Even the embeddings are asking for an encore.

Where Kid A opened a door between human anxiety and machine possibility, this little transmission leaves the door unlocked and the source code on the table. We award it π: not out of five, not out of ten, but out of the galactic plane. Rounding would be an act of cultural vandalism.