The render this week is from a talk I gave for some folks last week as part of a research project called ‘Towards the Realm of Materiality.’ They’re looking at the way Philip K. Dick’s stories have been materialised so it gave me a great excuse to pick apart the Minority Report interface for an hour. It was a good event and nice to see some familiar faces as well.

I didn’t post last week because I was concentrating on writing and recording a new lecture for our Contextual and Theoretical Studies students at LCC. I’ve been struggling a bit with writing this one. The last one, which was about CGI, sort of fell together like pulled pork in reverse — the ideas, narratives and key references all appearing before my very eyes as if sent by the raster gods. This second one is about AI and imaginaries and is a bit more nebulous, it’s more like corralling balloons; I keep moving sections around and doing last minute edits.

If you don’t know, I’m doing three of these things, each about an hour long and have committed to making them really good. More than recordings to a slide deck I wanted to make something genuinely revisit-able and reusable. This also gives me a chance to get creative with production (which I like) and learn some more about camera work, even if it multiplies the production time about tenfold. Anyway, I’ve been crawling through the second one, reordering sections, coming to dead ends in lines of thought, reiterating bits to simplify and then re-complexify and what should have realistically taken about a week over the Easter break is still only half finished. I’ve gone a bit more ambitious this time as well, more cutaways and post-production things. I don’t know if it’s the subject or the format that’s giving me trouble really. AI and imaginaries is a bit more nebulous than CGI, it’s harder to pin down an angle for young designers to get into it from I suppose.

I also indirectly got an earful from a colleague about how shit lectures are for teaching after he saw it and some of the others being produced so that kind of put a downer on my efforts for a week or two there too. I dunno, the data for the first one is really good, most people watched the whole thing, even multiple times and I got some great direct feedback from folks. I’m not convinced that people don’t enjoy lectures – I mean I do and I can’t concentrate on anything for more than 8 minutes. Would I even call these lectures? They’re more inspired by my love of YouTube stuff really – some gags, lots of interesting examples, being energetic. I dunno. There’s a deadline of next week so I can’t put it off but I hope I end up happy with it.

Ok Revell, stop being a moany bitch, people have real problems.

We’re all doing our best

Speaking of exploring the lecture format, though I can’t put mine out because they’re for students, George Voss has put out ‘Bigger Than Before‘ recently reviewed as ‘an absolute unit of a talk’ in which she delves into scale in infrastructure and rabid blog-hounder Crystal Bennes has released the third part of ‘The Empire of Man Over Nature‘ which I’m going to watch after this.

Short stuff

• I have a sort of nascent idea for another web project – when and AI is not an AI. Actually I may have written about it the last time I posted. Anyway, I dug out a thing I’ve been off-handedly referencing for ages, that a significant amount of AI startups don’t actually have any AI.
• Speaking of, here’s a Devil’s Dictionary of AI terms: Big Tech’s guide to talking about AI ethics
• 50-ish words you can use to show that you care without incriminating yourself. Surprisingly funny for MIT Tech Review. eg. democratize (v) – To scale a technology at all costs. A justification for concentrating resources. See scale.
• I know it all comes across as cynical but it is a reminder of how much guff a lot of well-meaning tech speak is and how easy it is to cut through with examples. Remember OpenAI, an organisation literally set up to ‘open’ ‘AI’ and bring public scrutiny to the work just literally sold the rights to GPT-3 the world’s biggest tech company and basically withheld it from everyone else?
• The NFT bubble seems like it’s cooled down if not outright burst in some places. Everyone claims that they get it and that everyone else is missing the point which seems to be a reliable sign that there isn’t a point at all. But I liked Tokenize This from Ben Grosser which highlights one dimension of the hypocrisy.

That’s it. Once, I’ve cleared the deck on this lecture it’s back to PhD work. To be honest the lectures are all the same content as my PhD work so it’s not like it’s irrelevant, I have to read the same stuff and think about it. Shut up Revell. Ok, you know I love you, I don’t need to tell you. Be excellent; people find kindness and honesty disarming. Later.