Posts Tagged → art

The Toaster Project

I just found out about this incredible work called The Toaster Project. In 2009 Thomas Thwaites decided to recreate a mass-produced toaster from scratch. The TED Talk about the project is also great.

“It takes an entire civilization to build a toaster. Designer Thomas Thwaites found out the hard way, by attempting to build one from scratch: mining ore for steel, deriving plastic from oil … it’s frankly amazing he got as far as he got. A parable of our interconnected society, for designers and consumers alike“.

 

Telematic Dreaming

Telematic Dreaming was originally produced by Paul Sermon in June 1992 for the annual summer exhibition entitled ‘Koti’ at the Kajaani Art Gallery in Finland, linked via videoconference to the Tele Gallery in Helsinki. This full-length 40 minute documentary was produced shortly after the premiere of Telematic Dreaming and includes interviews and rare line-out recordings from the opening ceremony.

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.”

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.”

Voice In My Head

Kyle McDonald & Lauren Lee McCarthy developed an AI system that can replace your internal monologue:

“With the proliferation of generated content, AI now seeps constantly into our consciousness. What happens when it begins to intervene directly into your thoughts? Where the people you interact with, the things you do, are guided by an AI enhanced voice that speaks to you the way you’d like to be spoken to.”

Life: a user’s manual

I was just reminded by a student of this powerful performance by Michelle Teran:

Moving through the city streets with a video scanner reveals a hidden layer of personal fragments and stories which are broadcast by the private owners of surveillance cameras. The accumulation of these autonomous yet synchronous acts contributes to an invisible ad-hoc network of media permeating the socially codified spaces of our urban environments: the café, the apartment building, the store, the parking lot, and the street. Life: a user’s manual is a shared experience in visualizing the invisible. Together with the participants, Michelle Teran walks through the streets with a wireless surveillance camera scanner and broadcasts the images on a TV monitor.

[via + via]

In the Name of the Place

In the 1990s, a group of radical artists called the GALA Committee smuggled political messages into Melrose Place. This story is WILD.

“Watch enough episodes of Melrose Place and you’ll notice other very odd props and set design all over the show. A pool float in the shape of a sperm about to fertilize an egg. A golf trophy that appears to have testicles. Furniture designed to look like an endangered spotted owl.”

[via]