Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

So after my latest bitchy post decrying the ridiculousness of parties such as Mashable’s, etc, as well as the concept of Tech Scenesters and professional conference attendees who actually don’t do anything technical, I’ve decided that I want to do a gathering that is focused on the following:

• Intellectual and technological discourse around problems with solutions born of and through technology
• No scenesters, no trendy topics, no discussion of emerging technology without implementable details (ie, no “Attention Economy” shit, this is not the Web 2.0 conference). If you’re discussing The Attention Economy, prepare some equations.
• Technology born of necessity should also be born of and through historical situations that arise its need. For instance, no fair talking about “the social graph” without first discussing connectionism, complexity and graph theory. Bonus points for talking about stimergy and Actor Network Theory.
• Philosophical discussion about technology is encouraged, including connectionism, AI and emergence, ramifications of future-tech, graph theory, data-analyses and collective intelligence
• Fringe tech needs to be grounded in reason. No freetardism without an understanding of market economics. No “down with ____ industry” without fundamentally understanding how that industry works. This is not a place for ideology, but rather pedagogy and discussion.
• No startup pitches. This is about what YOU do, not what an analog of you does

To be encouraged:

• Futurism and speculative technology discussion
• Discussion of analogs and grounding philosophies behind technology (mind/body -> emergence)
• Totally geeky CS / ECE talk, ie: algorithms, protocols
• Interdisciplinary parallels to technology, ie: conceptual art, music, comparative literature, medicine, biology, theoretical physics
• Hacking and playing with technology in real time. Nothing is better than geeks playing.
• Interdisciplinary technology – I’d love to see MaxMSP/Jitter, Maya, micro-controllers, ambient technology, retro-technology, non-representational art, algorithmic art, MATLAB, etc. Musicians, artists, engineers, theoretical physicists, nerdy record executives (ahem) and scientists.

I don’t have a venue, or a date. Yet. I have support from some.

I have a name:

The Octet – one from eight, eight to many, four to connect the world.

Coming soon Stay tuned.