bootleg reality

For over 40 years, Clubbo Records has featured a broad range of music styles from a number of bands. Well, they’re all fake, but the sampler is real. But observe this bit of fictional joy, regarding The Lazarus Project:

Computer whiz Mark Lissitsky doesn’t mourn the loss of such musical icons as Hendrix, Joplin or Tiny Tim. His favorite artists may be long gone, but he spends little time replaying their old hits.
Instead, he listens to their new material.
Lissitsky has created the unthinkable: a computer program that resurrects the creative minds of the past with eerily convincing results. We don’t fully understand how his program works, but according to Lissitsky, it involves analyzing sufficient amounts of past data in order to predict the next logical step in an artist’s creative output.

The page goes on to provide a link to a song that sounds much like a warped modern variant of Karen Carpenter.

What is the point? Why do this? Because it can be done. Because the web allows anyone with the inclination to not only be an artist, but to find an audience with which it may resonate. Because people will talk about it. The reasons are many and varied, as described in some detail in this Slate article about Alternate Reality Games. I was happy to see that wikipedia is also on the case with not only an article on the concept of ARG's, but an worthwhile summary of Halo 2's Haunted Apiary