W. David Marx and Roni Xu used DALL-e to generate imagery of the absurd cuisine from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s 1932 tome The Futurist Cookbook. The results are fascinating.
The Lore Zone
The Lore Zone. A very interesting online research on “Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies”
Wonka Wonka’s Snowpiercer
My new favourite fan theory is the one that says that Snowpiercer is a sequel to Willy Wonka.
American TikTok Psycho
American Psycho, But With The TikTok Girl Voice.
[via]
The Art of the Gag
A very interesting and entertaining video on his Majesty mr. Buster Keaton.
Fractal nightmares
China’s Borges
“For over a decade, a Chinese woman known as “Zhemao” created a massive, fantastical, and largely fictional alternate history of late Medieval Russia on Chinese Wikipedia, writing millions of words about entirely made-up political figures, massive (and fake) silver mines, and pivotal battles that never actually happened. She even went so far as to concoct details about things like currency and eating utensils.”
[more here]
September 5th, 2006
“Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman traces the significance of Facebook’s Newsfeed launch, from the initial rage it engendered to its precipitation of the algorithm-dominated status quo of current-day digital media. Prior to Newsfeed, early internet users had static profiles and had to consciously click and search for things on the site. Upon its launch, the blueprint for media inexorably changed: we were no longer explorers, searchers, discoverers—our very experience of time collapsed into an ever-shifting present; we became passive consumers of a digital feed algorithmically curated to our every trivial fancy. “
[streaming on DIS]
Comparing AI images generators
In this video Philip Dyer compares three AI image generators: Dall.E Mini, Midjourney and Dall.E 2.
The Subject Changes
“The Subject Changes is a poetic live simulation of a capricious character, endlessly shape-shifting while negotiating his/her ambiguous world. The character sets out on an indefinite dérive – a frantic exploration – where fragile relationships with the world-cum-stage and its occupants are established or broken down. His/her state is ornately reflected in a constantly mutating attire, a fluctuating embodied masquerade — the virtual body as an encoded aesthetic artefact.”
Created by Vienna based Depart (Leonhard Lass and Gregor Ladenhauf).
Essai d’ouverture
Essai d’ouverture is a 1988 short French film by Luc Moullet. It’s about a man and his many bizarre approaches to opening a Coca-Cola bottle.
[via]
Heaven banning
Heaven banning is not real, nor are the articles that people are sharing about it. But it is a fascinating concept nonetheless, that can be read as an extension of the Dead Internet Theory. According to some sources, it is just a resurrected joke post from HackerNews.
The future of image-making
When a harm ends, how can we make Amends?
In his latest work “Amends”, artist Kyle McDonald is auctioning three sculptures – from which the proceeds will pay to mitigate the historical emissions of three major art NFT marketplaces. The sculptures are both digital renders and physical handcrafted glass blocks, each filled with a material used for carbon removal and prevention. But they will only go on sale when Ethereum (finally? actually?) transitions away from proof-of-work. And the sculptures will be shipped to the owners of the NFTs—if they burn their NFT.
McDonald says: “The science shows that even if we end all emissions today, we still need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of historical greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and ocean. In tech the motto is ‘move fast and break things’, but those broken pieces are haunting us. Changing things going forward isn’t enough. This work represents a major opportunity to take responsibility for a small portion of our impact on the environment.”
AI and literature
I recently got an invitation to test the MidJourney beta, which is an amazing new AI app that generates images from text inputs. I’ve been playing with it for a while but I also spent hours just watching other people using it in a dedicated Discord server. It was a very funny and interesting experience and I got some amazing visual results, especially when I came up with the idea of feeding the algorithm a literary input instead of a merely descriptive sentence. Here are some images the app produced me based on some famous books incipits.
imagine/ The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel. – William Gibson, Neuromancer, 1984
imagine/ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. — George Orwell, 1984, 1949
imagine/ “Psychics can see the color of time it’s blue. – Ronald Sukenick, Blown Away, 1986
imagine/ Once upon a time , there was a woman who discovered she had turned into the wrong person. – Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups, 2001
VRChat, the Metaverse People Actually Like
I really enjoyed watching this video published on People Make Games YouTube channel. It gives an amazing perspective on the topic of virtual worlds beyond hype and corporate bullshit.
Dracula Daily
“Dracula Daily is an email newsletter by Matt Kirkland that sends you a chapter of the Bram Stoker novel Dracula, written as a series of dated diary entries, news clippings, letters, etc., in realtime on the actual date of each entry between May 3rd and November 10th, the dates between which the novel takes place. The newsletter launched in May 2021 and became increasingly popular during its 2022 run, particularly on Tumblr, where it caused memes and posts about Dracula to trend.” – more info here
[via]
Hide and Seek
Hide & Seek is a painting by Pavel Fyodorovich Tchelitchew, a Russian surrealist artist, that has gained a cult following of people who love to stare at it while taking Peyote.
Infinite Images
Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst experimented with the new OpenAI DALL·E 2 software and they wrote a very interesting report about it. Check it here.
NFTs do not go bad
Michael Moynihan: “Can you explain to people who might be confused as why a very smart, sensible man like yourself, would spend 500,000 dollars on a jpeg?”
Metakovan (aka the most famous cryptoart collector): “I can have it forever because it’s on the blockchain, I DON’T LOSE IT and IT DOES NOT GO BAD”.