Haunted Science: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the lost futures of hauntological music

Scene ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-120 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Christodoulou
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Economic Transformation ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Electronic Dance Music ◽  
State Planning ◽  
Cultural Experience ◽  
The Future ◽  
Post War

This article will explore the particular sense of nostalgia evoked by the sound and music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for a utopian future that has been irrevocably lost; a future contextualized in Britain by the post-war consensus and its attendant narratives of public service broadcasting, state planning and benevolent social engineering. I examine the relationship between the workshop’s output and the contemporary cultural experience Mark Fisher defined as ‘hauntology’, before investigating the workshop’s influence on the hauntological music of contemporary artists who use radiophonic sounds to recover a sense of the future lost as a result of the political and economic transformation of Britain which followed the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, and which would eventually lead to the decommissioning of the workshop itself in March 1998. In addition, this article considers the workshop’s idiosyncratic output in relation to electronic dance music which, until recently, had been considered at the vanguard of musical futurism. However, in contrast to electronic dance music, ‘sonic hauntology’ looks to the past for its engagement with the ideas about the future; in particular, the technological optimism associated with the post-war modernization of Britain, such as the belief in a paternalistic, yet benevolent state and in the progressive application of technology. In these ways, hauntological musicians place considerable significance on the sounds, music and other cultural signifiers encountered through the workshop’s productions, such as the use of analogue media, public information films, and science fiction and horror programmes, from the period in which BBC broadcasting dominated the British media landscape.

scholarly journals The effect of ISO/IEC 27001 standard over open-source intelligence

2022 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. e810
Author(s):  
Abdallah Qusef ◽  
Hamzeh Alkilani
Keyword(s):  
Open Source ◽  
Public Information ◽  
Social Engineering ◽  
Source Information ◽  
Strategic Intelligence ◽  
Open Source Intelligence ◽  
Combining Data ◽  
The Future ◽  
Internet Information ◽  
Iec 27001

The Internet’s emergence as a global communication medium has dramatically expanded the volume of content that is freely accessible. Through using this information, open-source intelligence (OSINT) seeks to meet basic intelligence requirements. Although open-source information has historically been synonymous with strategic intelligence, today’s consumers range from governments to corporations to everyday people. This paper aimed to describe open-source intelligence and to show how to use a few OSINT resources. In this article, OSINT (a combination of public information, social engineering, open-source information, and internet information) was examined to define the present situation further, and suggestions were made as to what could happen in the future. OSINT is gaining prominence, and its application is spreading into different areas. The primary difficulty with OSINT is separating relevant bits from large volumes of details. Thus, this paper proposed and illustrated three OSINT alternatives, demonstrating their existence and distinguishing characteristics. The solution analysis took the form of a presentation evaluation, during which the usage and effects of selected OSINT solutions were reported and observed. The paper’s results demonstrate the breadth and dispersion of OSINT solutions. The mechanism by which OSINT data searches are returned varies greatly between solutions. Combining data from numerous OSINT solutions to produce a detailed summary and interpretation involves work and the use of multiple disjointed solutions, both of which are manual. Visualization of results is anticipated to be a potential theme in the production of OSINT solutions. Individuals’ data search and analysis abilities are another trend worth following, whether to optimize the productivity of currently accessible OSINT solutions or to create more advanced OSINT solutions in the future.

The Future of the World

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Intellectual History ◽  
Nuclear Physics ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Cold War

The book is devoted to the intriguing post-war activity called—with different terms—futurism, futurology, future research, or futures studies. It seeks to understand how futurists and futurologists imagined the Cold War and post-Cold War world and how they used the tools and methods of future research to influence and change that world. Forms of future research emerged after 1945 and engaged with the future both as an object of science and as an object of the human imagination. The book carefully explains these different engagements with the future, and inscribes them in the intellectual history of the post-war period. Futurists were a motley crew of Cold War warriors, nuclear scientists, journalists, and peace activists. Futurism also drew on an eclectic range of repertoires, some of which were deduced from positivist social science, mathematics, and nuclear physics, and some of which came from new strands of critical theory in the margins of the social sciences or sprung from alternative forms of knowledge in science fiction, journalism, or religion. Different forms of prediction lay very different claims to how, and with what accuracy, futures could be known, and what kind of control could be exerted over coming and not yet existing developments. Not surprisingly, such different claims to predictability coincided with radically different notions of human agency, of morality and responsibility, indeed of politics.

Exploring the Drugs-Crime Connection within the Electronic Dance Music and Hip-Hop Nightclub Scenes

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tammy L. Anderson ◽  
Philip R. Kavanaugh ◽  
Ronet Bachman ◽  
Lana D. Harrison
Keyword(s):  
Hip Hop ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Electronic Dance Music

Short Films from a Small Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Public Information ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art And Architecture

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.

The Dance Chorus in Recent Top-40 Music

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alyssa Barna
Keyword(s):  
Popular Music ◽  
Dance Music ◽  
Electronic Dance Music ◽  
Production Techniques ◽  
Top 40

Contemporary trends in popular music incorporate timbres, formal structures, and production techniques borrowed from Electronic Dance Music (EDM). The musical surface demonstrates this clearly to the listener; less obvious are the modifications made to formal prototypes used in rock and popular music. This article explains a new formal section common to collaborative Pop/EDM songs called the Dance Chorus. Following the verse and chorus, a Dance Chorus is an intensified version of the chorus that retains the same harmony and contains the hook of the song, which increases memorability for the audience. As the name implies, the Dance Chorus also incorporates and acknowledges the embodiment performed in this section.

Rock in Broader Context

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Temperley
Keyword(s):  
Dance Music ◽  
Historical Survey ◽  
Electronic Dance Music ◽  
Tin Pan Alley

This chapter zooms out to examine the broader historical and stylistic context of rock. The roots of rock—especially in common-practice music, the blues, and Tin Pan Alley / jazz—have been widely discussed, but this chapter attempts to identify more systematically the features that rock shares with these previous styles, as well as its unique features. A historical survey of rock itself and its various subgenres finds that it underwent major changes in the early 1960s but remained rather stable over the next three decades, and in some respects rather homogenous. The chapter then considers some other genres with which rock has interacted and sometimes fused: folk, Latin pop, jazz, electronic dance music, rap, and country. Finally, it considers the development of rock since 2000, finding some changes in the style but also many continuities.

Epilogue

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Willeke Sandler
Keyword(s):  
The Future ◽  
Specific Association ◽  
Nature Preservation ◽  
Post War

This short epilogue takes the story of the leading colonialists into the post-1945 period and assesses the historiographical narrative of post-war colonial amnesia. This amnesia did not begin in 1945, however, but in the 1930s and 1940s through the work of colonialists. In their efforts to situate overseas colonialism within the needs of the present and of value for the future, colonialists had created an overly positive narrative that emphasized an inherent German aptitude for administering Africa. After the war, these ideals could find expression through development or nature preservation, even though (or perhaps because) they no longer bore a specific association with Germany’s past of formal colonialism.

Dystopian Science Fiction and the Return of the Gothic

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sherryl Vint
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
Victorian Culture ◽  
Gothic Fiction ◽  
Post War ◽  
British Culture

This chapter explores the connections between dystopian science fiction and gothic fiction. It links science fiction to a tradition of European utopian and surrealist writing, situating the genre equally within discourses of science and the gothic. This perspective, the chapter argues, was perhaps more possible from the vantage point of 1973 than it would have been for earlier critics: the scientific romance tradition was rooted in a Victorian culture that believed in empire, technology, and progress, even if it was not always convinced by their contemporary instantiations. The dramatic shifts in British culture during the Blitz and in the immediate post-war period looked back on such optimism with a rather jaundiced eye: British global hegemony was distinctly at an end. It is little wonder, then, that the speculative fictions of this period turned toward darker tones of dystopia and the gothic.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

Living machines in our cultural imagination

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Szollosy
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Cultural Imagination ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Future ◽  
Public Imagination ◽  
The Human Condition

Public perceptions of robots and artificial intelligence (AI)—both positive and negative—are hopelessly misinformed, based far too much on science fiction rather than science fact. However, these fictions can be instructive, and reveal to us important anxieties that exist in the public imagination, both towards robots and AI and about the human condition more generally. These anxieties are based on little-understood processes (such as anthropomorphization and projection), but cannot be dismissed merely as inaccuracies in need of correction. Our demonization of robots and AI illustrate two-hundred-year-old fears about the consequences of the Enlightenment and industrialization. Idealistic hopes projected onto robots and AI, in contrast, reveal other anxieties, about our mortality—and the transhumanist desire to transcend the limitations of our physical bodies—and about the future of our species. This chapter reviews these issues and considers some of their broader implications for our future lives with living machines.

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