Posts Tagged → art

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]

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]

Sunday Nobody

I don’t know why I haven’t come across this artist before. Sunday Nobody calls himself a “meme artist”, but what he does is actually a surprising mixture of conceptual art, performance art, viral video and extremely high level craftsmanship. You can watch his videos on TikTok and Instagram.

Literally No Place

Hello baby dolls, it’s the final boss of vocal fry here. Daniel Felstead’s glossy Julia Fox avatar is back. Last time she took on Zuckerberg’s Metaverse. Now she takes us on a journey into the AI utopian versus AI doomer cyberwarfare bedlam, exploring the stakes, fears, and hopes of all sides. Will AI bring about the post-scarcity society that Marx envisioned, allowing us all to live in labor-less luxury, or will it quite literally extinguish the human race?

Literally No Place, brand new video(art) essay by Daniel Felstead & Jenn Leung

The Future Ahead Will Be Weird AF

“Welcome to the post-post-post-truth AI world. You know it’s not real. But you have to eat some bread in order to survive. But there is more out there. Synthetic Personalities awaits you at the door. The Future will be weird AF.”

The Ultimate AI CoreCore Experience, provided by Silvia Dal Dosso