Process: Public from Nothing

Public from Nothing started off as a joint exploration with my thesis classmate Kyle Miron. Facing the new realities of remote classes due to the pandemic, and missing out on what we were hoping would be a year of getting to know a bunch of talented peers and work together in person, Kyle and I were trying to figure out a way to support one another more intentionally in the work we were doing. We decided to start looking at Spotify and the music it automatically recommends to its users. I wasn't as familiar with it since it had barely used Spotify since its previous iteration, which welcomed you to upload your own music to listen through their app.



Since my Discover Weekly playlist was a fossil from a few years ago, with 30 tracks of mostly video game music, I had to intentionally start listening to music on the platform for a while to get it to start generating recommendations again. We weren't sure exactly what we’d do with what we got. Kyle thought maybe a photograph made of album covers that slowly grew in resolution and became a picture of us as each week's songs accumulated. I'm not sure what I thought at first, but I was fascinated by how Spotify just presented you, the user, with music, without giving any sense of how they were coming to their conclusions about your taste. I used to use a platform called last.fm a lot to develop my music taste. It was fascinating how they could take what you listened to and show you how it connected to all these different artists just through tools like listener comparison and genre tags. On last.fm, you could see a pretty solid through line between what you listened to and what they recommended to you; it felt like an extension of the cultural collection of music I’d experienced in high school, sharing CDs among friends.



On Spotify, the process seems intentionally obfuscated. I'm sure it must be a similar engine to last.fm, but their complete lack of context seems very intentional. The whole platform serves up music without bothering you with the details, but the delivery method and ease makes it seem false, more robotic, emptier somehow. It was especially strange to see how the songs they gave me eventually began to feel like they were veering off course. Around weeks 5-6, I liked about a third of the tracks. It really seemed like the algorithm was honing in on my taste. By week 11, I wanted to skip half the songs. How could it veer so far from my taste? Its black box nature inspired suspicion, made it feel like more was going on behind the scenes. How could I know the algorithm was working in my interest? How could I know it wasn’t just trying to steer my music taste towards something that profits Spotify more?



The hidden nature of how it all happens, and the ebb and flow of great and terrible playlists began to meld together into the work. I wanted it to be esoteric, like the algorithm. I started collecting the album covers to make something. The album covers seemed like the ultimate weird part of this kind of music delivery. For every album that is released, artwork is intentionally chosen by an artist to inform the listening experience. Then, in this format, a myriad of all these individually cared-for pieces of art are flattened onto the same plane, delivered without context, to extend my music exploration for another week. I imagined the albums shifting in a great void, a space representative of how the algorithm functioned, like the virtual space where the playlist’s generation happened. Columns of each week shift and re-align new albums in a flat, machine-like fashion.



It wasn't until I was discussing the work with Kyle again later that I understood how to frame how the piece fit in with the rest of the work. I had put all the columns in virtual space after creating all the animations (more on how below) and had set the audio of each first track in the space with a spatialization I'd rigged up so it sounded like they were all coming from different directions. The final result sounded like a simulation of a mall, with music piped in from above, crowds of people having conversations, and the sounds of general activity and movement. I said the whole thing seemed like a strange attempt to create a public-from-nothing, a computer trying to mimic physical space through its algorithmic development.



Giving people music, devoid of context, creates a kind of fake public space. This is also one of the more terrifying things about virtual space: so many platforms, from social media to streaming sites, are generating a kind of community simulacrum. This exploration of music given from a black box was the perfect introduction to why virtual space can be so unnerving and uncanny, a weird space linked with grief when you consider how much context and culture is stripped from a process so vital to our individual and cultural development as sharing music.