San Francisco art and music collective The Residents have paid tribute to Apple founder Steve Jobs, whose death was announced last night. Writing on The Residents website, spokesman Hardy Fox of The Cryptic Corporation said that Jobs had "helped change and create" the group. He praised the roles Jobs and Apple played in making accessible the technology that The Residents used to create their music and art: "Apple computers had a perspective that regular people should be able to do remarkable things that they would not normally be able to do if assisted by computers. Technicians should not be the exclusive controllers of that world," he writes. "The Residents have always been masters of using technology on a human scale." This, says Fox, impacted both on The Residents’ music and artwork.
"The Residents ran MIDI live on an old Apple II at the Snakey Wake in 1988. The following year they toured CUBE E carrying their entire studio which centered around a Mac II, the most powerful personal computer that existed at the time."
Fox says this was actually a two-way relationship, with The Residents influencing Apple technology: "When Apple invented Quicktime, the wiz kids that actually did it were Residents fans. The original logo which was a big "Q" had a top hat to reference The Residents and the videos used to demo the software were the One-Minute Movies from The Commercial Album. I was one of the people who appeared in the Apple "Think Different" campaign."
Our spokesman concludes: "There is no way I can cover all the ways Apple and Steve Jobs impacted The Residents. I do think it fitting to conclude with the fact that Chuck on the Talking Light tour was controlling a Mac Air computer with an iPad that was running wirelessly on a local network utilizing an Airport, all Apple products, to make the statement that The Residents appreciation of the technology of Steve Jobs’ company has never faltered."
