“An AI generated, never-ending discussion between Werner Herzog and Slavoj Žižek. Everything you hear is fully generated by a machine. The opinions and beliefs expressed do not represent anyone. They are the hallucinations of a slab of silicon.”
Cornerfolk
A single-episode analog horror video, Cornerfolk concerns a man who believes strange entities to be using his home as a sort of nexus when passing through dimensions. Fascinating.
A neural network mimicking a video game
Ollin Boer Bohan made an interesting experiment involving videogames and AI:
“I made a playable Pokémon overworld. It looks (mostly) like a normal video game, and you can try it in your web browser here. Although this looks like a video game, I did not write any game code. This program is actually a neural network mimicking a video game.”
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”.
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.”
Spawning
“Spawning is building tools for artists ownership of their training data, allowing them to opt into or opt out of the training of large AI models, set permissions on how their style and likeness is used, and offer their own models to the public”.
The Follower
Dries Depoorter‘s “The Follower” project combines AI, open access cameras, and influencers to show behind the scenes of viral shots—without them knowing.
[via]
Passage a l’acte
I don’t know how it’s possible that I didn’t come across this masterpiece before. Passage a l’acte, by Martin Arnold (1993) “makes a simple breakfast scene from To Kill a Mockingbird look like a surrealist nightmare“.
Life On The Internet
“A 13-part television series covering aspects of the Internet in 1996 to introduce to a general audience. Called “Life on the Internet”, the series was hosted by Scott Simon, sponsored by Sun Microsystems, and covers the state of online life at the time”.
The Cursed Computer Iceberg Meme
“this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.”
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?”
[via]
Drunk Mel Gibson Arrest Diorama
Amazing sculpture, amazing performance, great video.
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.
[via]
Fiberglass Mold Graveyard
“The Fiberglass Mold Graveyard of Sparta, Wisconsin is a zoo full of discarded animal-creature-and people-shaped molds. This field of plastic carcasses lies behind the FAST building, aka the Fiberglass Animals, Shapes, and Trademarks workshop. Both spooky and wondrous looking, this field of gigantic molds, left behind from various projects, has become an art installation in itself.”
[via]
DALL.E meets Marinetti
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 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”
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).