Something called the internet

“Kate Bellingham reports that an exciting new interconnected world – a world where every word ever written, every picture ever painted and ever film ever shot will be at our fingertips – is tantalisingly close. The information superhighway will be a high-capacity digital communication network, which in time could revolutionise the way we shop, socialise and work”.

Originally broadcast 29 April, 1994 on BBC

AI for detecting cluster munitions

VFRAME is an organization that researches and develops state-of-the-art computer vision technologies for human rights research and conflict zone monitoring. It is developed and maintained by Adam Harvey in Berlin with contributions from Jules LaPlace, Josh Evans, and a growing list of collaborators.

During the winter/spring of 2022 VFRAME and T4T partnered to develop a 3D model of the 9N235 submunition that has frequently appeared in the war in Ukraine. This model is being used to create synthetic training data for object detection algorithms and high-accuracy 3D printed replicas for benchmarking purposes.

Everyone lives out a fairytale as a template script

Artist Ian Cheng looks at the way that the work of psychiatrist Eric Berne changed the way that he thought about human personality when it came to creating the AI simulations that people his work. On Elephant:

“Obviously we take different paths, but Berne believed that everyone lives out a fairytale as a template script that they’ve cast themselves into with the help of their parents. Most people aren’t satisfied with the script that they’re unconsciously barreling down. It might be a mismatch: maybe your parents had old fashioned values; maybe the culture you grew up in radically shifted in your teens, which alters the relevance of your life script.”

 

The Happiness Box theory

“The Happiness Box theory posits that sufficiently advanced civilizations don’t swarm out into the universe, they implode into virtual worlds of their own making. If you could gain the ability to upload consciousness into simulated realities that are functionally indistinguishable from physical reality, why would you bother to climb into a physical spaceship to outwardly explore?”

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VR and psychedelics

According to this research, in David Glowacki‘s VR experience, Isness-D “participants can partake in an experience called energetic coalescence: they gather in the same spot in the virtual-reality landscape to overlap their diffuse bodies, making it impossible to tell where each person begins and ends. The resulting sense of deep connectedness and ego attenuation mirrors feelings commonly brought about by a psychedelic experience.”
The study, involving 75 subjects, showed that Isness-D offers an experience near indistinguishable from 20 milligrams of psilocybin or 200 micrograms of LSD.

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The Lore Zone

“The way we remember the events that happen on the internet is different than reading a book. Information circulates and gets stored in a way that incorporates personal narratives as documentation, combining textuality with elements of oral storytelling. Bits of text and image serve as artifacts that help piece together complex narratives. The Lore Zone seeks to help us all understand new interesting ways of reading, writing, and remembering the internet.”

The Lore Zone. A very interesting online research on “Memes → Memories → Micro-Mythologies”

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]

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).

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

 

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

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