Recap: November Salon on Music with Alyce Currier, Lushen Wu, Owen Williams, and R*Q~L.
This recap is brought to you by DS community member Kathryn Wright
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Welcome (or welcome back) to the Drink Salon blog! November marked the 8th Drink Salon on Technology and Ethics. If you missed this music-themed evening or want to relive it, look no further than these (digital) pages!
This post marks the launch of a new effort to document Drink Salon events. In conjunction with blog content, the Drink Salon team is also on Twitter (@EMWDrinkSalon, #EMWDrinkSalon). If you have ideas for discussion topics or speakers, if you want to tweet a quote from an event, or just want to chat, please get at us!
Since this monthâs focus is music, in addition to highlights from the event, links are included to a few tunes connected to content from each speaker. Hopefully, it is new music to your ears.
Recap of the EMW Drink Salon on Tech and Ethics: Music
The co-directors of Drink Salon, Stine An and Theresa Kim opened up the evening by calling on the audience to re-focus on the connection between ethics and technology. Within modern society, our culture is increasingly captivated by the market opportunities technology enables while pushing the social implications of these tools to the background. In recent years, the tech sectorâs major talking points have been digital transformation, enabling hyper-productivity, and disruption, but EMW Drink Salon hopes to encourage its audiences to question for what purpose and for whom do these efforts translate into progress, and how to make technology more accessible for everyone.
Alyce Currier (a.k.a. DJ Lychee), the eveningâs curator, compared her experiences working in the tech sector and within techno music scene. In both cases, despite years of experience, she found the spaces exclusive, particularly for women. Through her observation, both communities have developed insular cultures, which are not designed to help women or other underrepresented groups thrive. As Alyce continued to work in music and tech from high school through the present, she found there were limited women role models to reference. Line-ups for techno festivals were absent of female DJs and a Google Search for the most successful tech entrepreneurs still looks like a line-up from the old boys club.
However, this is changing. Femme-centric DJ groups, such as Discwoman out of New York, have pioneered events that are more inclusive spaces for women, and in turn, foster a culture of inclusivity that can promote positive change for techno as a whole. Learn more about their work in this NPR article featuring the group last week.
Building on her experience observing the increased accessibility of techno, Alyce curated the evening to focus on technologies which work to make music more accessible to diverse groups.
Musical sidebar: When she's not curating salons, Alyce is DJ Lychee. Check out her latest track! https://www.mixcloud.com/notalyce/ultramodern-8ghm/








