Occasional updates

A really cool website full of old Casio wrist camera photos taken more than 20 years ago:

“It’s an amazing thing that looks just like a normal watch, but has a nifty little built-in digital camera that lets you take lots of photos on the quiet – and then beam them to your computer! Expect occasional updates documenting my travels and drunken nights…“

Sensing, more than reading

Hallucinating sense in the era of infinity-content: great new article by Caroline Busta.

“But what if, for better or worse, this non-reading mode is a form of adaptation: an evolutionary step in which we’ve learned to scan, like machines, for keywords and other attributes that allow for data-chunking, quickly aligning a piece of content with this or that larger theme or political persuasion? What if, in a time of infinity-content, a meta reading of the shape and feel of content has become a survival skill? The ability to intuit a viable meaning via surface-level qualities—ones that are neither text nor image but a secret third thing—is now essential for negotiating our sprawling information space. Perhaps we’re tapping into a more primal human intelligence.”

The Grannies

The Grannies is a documentary short film created with/in Red Dead Redemption 2. A group of players — Marigold Bartlett, Andrew Brophy, Ian MacLarty, Kalonica Quigley & friends aka The Grannies — venture beyond the boundaries of the video game. Peeking behind the curtain of the game’s virtual world they discover a captivating and ethereal space that reveals the humanity and materiality of digital creations. Directed by Marie Foulston and edited by Luke Neher, the film was produced by Marie Foulston and Nick Murray.

[related reading: Ursula K. Le Guin, The Space Crone, 1976]

One Million Checkboxes

A webpage with one million checkboxes. Checking a box checks it for everyone, in real time.

[update via Garbage Day: “Teens hacked One Million Checkboxes into their personal r/Place. Nolen Royalty, who made the website, coded a few features to limit spamming, but he didn’t anticipate a group of teen coders building a program that was only visible when converting the checkboxes into pixels or binary code, which they used to link to their Discord and post shirtless GIFs of Jake Gyllenhaal. Turning the site into a real-time rickroll just before it shut down”.]

 

Cyclops

Cyclops, by Trevor Paglen, is a networked performance, collaborative narrative, and alternate-reality-game designed to be played by groups of people working together across the word.

“Paglen’s interactive speculative reality artwork, titled CYCLOPS, takes the audience on a journey through the world of 1960s-era CIA mind control experiments, psychological operations, and unexplained historical anomalies. For this new work, the artist drew inspiration from Ed Ruscha’s Rocky II sculpture hidden in the Mojave Desert; collisions of facts and fictions in Benjamín Labatut’s book When We Cease to Understand the World; and Internet-era enigmas such as the “Cicada 3301” project.

Featuring documents, videos, and other archival materials produced between the 1950s and early 1970s, CYCLOPS requires active engagement and participation. Users are tasked with reconstructing events, deciphering codes, conducting open-source intelligence investigations, and analyzing music, literature, and poetry to move through a work that is part treasure-hunt, part historical unfiction, and part cybersecurity challenge. In this way, CYCLOPS teaches many of the skills behind Paglen’s own investigative practice, exploring how a clandestine history of research into psychological operations, mind control, and paranormal phenomena has shaped media and politics of the present moment. This networked, collaborative experience spanning the digital and physical worlds can be accessed online at cyclops.sh.”

Oh, Ballard

One of the dozens incredible predictions by J.G. Ballard. This comes from the 1977 essay “Future of the Future”, published on Vogue.

[via]

Found in Translation

Eric Drass, aka Shardcore, made this very interesting experiment with generative AI applications: “I arranged a form of Chinese-Whispers between AI systems. I first extracted the keyframes from a scene from American Psycho and asked a multimodal LLM (LLaVA) to describe what it saw. I then took these descriptions and used them as prompts for a Stable Diffusion image generator. Finally I passed these images on to Stable-Video-Diffusion to turn the stills into motion.”