When I lived on a farm in wales, we would occasionally discover in our fields something called bog oak. This was trunks of oak placed in the ground by ancient farmers to drain a field. Over the centuries this had become semi-fossilized and in the process had become very strong. From high quality bog oak, it is possible to make wooden rings as strong as metal. Our bog oak was not so good (I tried) but certainly good enough for super strong dowels and suchlike.
I saw and enjoyed bag piece at the recent Tate retrospective- pretty much as she describes it the contrast between the experience of the people inside the bag (giggling, wriggling) and the people standing round watching int the gallery was interesting & memorable. And as for cut piece - obviously related to the later Rhythm 0 by Marina Abramovic - unless you think there’s no possible value in performance art, this seems to me like pretty remarkable work.
Such a wild take after looking at, for example, a propaganda poster captioned “Work together to develop pig breeding and new varieties of rice” where the artist has decided to make the pigs in question bright purple with yin-yang signs on their backs.
I worked at The Times in London when we did this - we lost ~98.7% of our free audience, retained a smaller ad business, turned a £20mn / year loss into a £20mn / year profit over a few years.
From Wikipedia: In 1961, an IBM 7094 at Bell Labs was programmed to sing "Daisy Bell" in the earliest demonstration of computer speech synthesis... Science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke witnessed the IBM 704 demonstration during a trip to Bell Labs in 1962 and referred to it in the 1968 novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, in which the HAL 9000 computer sings "Daisy Bell" during its gradual deactivation.[13]
The earliest demonstration of electronic speech synthesis was actually at the 1939 world’s fair. I think it was keyboard operated, though, and not driven by a computer.
