Box075: Planetary strike out

27.07.22

DS075-e059: It could be described as rain if you thought about the water cycle. Everything started as sand and returned to it. The sand they were walking on was just temporarily formed into concrete. In a few thousand years it might be sand again, then a thousand years after back to concrete as a new path or corridor or structure is formed. The sand is the only constant.

London was, as I’m sure everyone knows, seized by heatwaves Monday and Tuesday. I was lucky enough to be working in an air conditioned office, leaving to collect a bubble tea felt like being in Singapore or similar; that wall of heat that suddenly hits you. But unlike a country built around that temperature, London can’t cope; the shops were closed, people on the street were tired, frustrated, angry and aggressive. It’s hard to feel hopeful: ESG’s are a mess where Tesla (whatever you think of them) are kicked off but Exxon Mobil, Phillips 66 and other fossil fuel companies profit from it. Joe Manchin singlehandedly set back progress on climate policy for decades. The EU has decided natural gas is ‘green.‘ Oil and gas companies earn $2.3 billion a day with which they can ‘…buy every politician, every system with all this money…’ and government funding priorities are clearly 98.8% elsewhere while celebrities take 17 minute flights that dump 1 ton of carbon into the atmosphere. As Umair Haque has written ‘We’re not going to make it to 2050:’

Take a hard look at right now. Do you really think our civilization’s going to survive another three decades of this? Skyrocketing inflation, growing shortages, runaway temperatures, killing heat, failing harvests, shattered systems, continents on fire, masses turning to lunacy and theocracy and fascism as a result?

And while the environmental left has been adopting a strategy of small, incremental change, convcined that system change was impossible or would automatically shut out the right, the right went ahead and did it anyway as George Monbiot writes:

Some of us know what we want: private sufficiency, public luxury, doughnut economics, participatory democracy and an ecological civilisation. None of these are bigger asks than those the billionaire press has made and largely achieved: the neoliberal revolution that has swept away effective governance, effective taxation of the rich, effective restraints on the power of business and oligarchs and, increasingly, effective democracy.

So yeah it does feel very much like the end. The last week or two has been a litany of human intransigence, failure and incompetence in the face of planetary change.

So what does this information do? To be honest, I don’t think most people are willing or able to entertain the idea that this may be the end of life as we know it. That it is the end of life as we know it. I sort of stomached it a few years ago but being honest, in a kind of nihilistic way. People will literally look away from you when you suggest that a very high and increasingly likely outcome is civilisational collapse within out lifetimes and that’s worth bearing in mind.

It’s a ‘selling tickets to the Titanic’ problem (as I once heard put on a podcast) – you can’t convince people to buy into a terrible time. But do the positive visions have the same visceral impact? I’m working on once right now, trying to tease out the nuance of it, but it feels so much like a dream in comparison to the reality laid out every day.

I have often said ‘you can only do what’s reasonably possible’ – you can’t expect the impossible of yourself or others or for them to do things that unreasonably painful or destructive to themselves or others. But, again ‘reasonably possible’ may not be enough.

Reading

I read some good fiction recently. The Employees from Olga Ravn and Making of Incarnation from Tom McCarthy. The former is a series of short interviews from a space ship going through some calamity. It centres on what being human is as various different types of being struggle to define themselves but it’s all wrapped in the poetry of bureaucracy, workplace hearings, meetings and agenda items. The sentence ‘I would like some materials on which thoughts require forgiveness’ is now stuck in my head forever and there’s a lot of other great poetic turns in there.

Incarnation is also made in it’s own way. Justin recommended it a while ago. It’s a sort of conspiracy thriller set at the intersection of time and motion studies, motion capture, aerodynamics, kinematics and Hollywood cinema. It’s mostly deep long technical paragraphs melding computer graphics and simulation with character enlightenment which I found absolutely wonderful but I’m not sure is everyone’s bag. Characters working through forward kinematic simulations as they come to realise that all movement in the universe is connected I found thrilling is all.

I’m currently reading The Image of the Future from Polak after Johannes has written about it for a bit and it’s making my PhD fingers tingle.

Upcoming and Recents

John Wilshire very kindly invited me to drop in on his Innovation and Futures Thinking course at IED Barcelona last week. I talked about some Arup work and some of our methods and tools. I feel more confident in these things than I would have done even a few weeks ago.

Next week I’m in the Lake District at a getaway with a bunch of clever design folks in a country house. Yes I’m taking the bike obviously.

DS075

The procedural texture for the wall of sand.

This week was once again playing around with procedural textures. I’m convinced that it must be possible to generate almost anything but it does get slow. For the wall of sand I put a wave texture moving up with a gradient texture to stretch it out, then mapped it onto some noise and musgrave to make it more uneven. Finally, the ‘pipes’ are a dynamic paint texture that’s then put on top. So where it’s white, there’s sand, where it’s black, transparent. Not bad. A long way to go though. Also I’ve found that they start to get slow really quickly as Blender struggles to compile all the nodes.

Short Stuff

I’ve done a lot of gardening on my Are.na. The way I use it is I just seem to chuck stuff in, sometimes throwing up new boards then look back and go ‘well there’s something here I’m saving a lot’ or ‘one block! delete’ and do a tidy up.

Minecraft’s developers Mojang have rejected the idea of having NFTs on its platform. The creep of the bad vibes into PR offices is a good signal of the crypto winter to come. Sony have also announced ‘Stars’ which is, according to a Sony spokesperson: ‘…definitely not NFTs. Definitely not. You can’t trade them or sell them. It is not leveraging any blockchain technologies and definitely not NFTs.’
Matt Jones has written up his slides from CIID – Keeping up with the Kardashevians. The story of his journey so far.
An Archaeology of the Future in Space. A conversation with Fabien Girardin, Simone Rebaudengo and Fred Scharmen. Some great, really meaty design process discussion which I really like from designers. ‘How did we come up with this thing?’
Jarrett has been putting up some old episodes of Scratching the Surface that he has found powerful, including this one with Cameron Tonkinwise. I might think poorly of the way he treats people on Twitter and the almost acrimonious way that he writes but it’s an incredibly good interview, he makes a powerful case for design, a discipline that he clearly loves and wants to elevate and give power to as a route to the environmental politics he comes from. Well worth a listen. Also put a bunch of Gregory Ulmer on my reading list.
Benjamin Bratton and Blaise Agüeras Y Arcas have a piece in Noema – The Model is the Message – about the limitations of language in describing what AI is and does and the risk of jumping to ‘premature ontologicization.’ They call for us to be more open to bend our definitions to the interactions that emerge between AI, humans and other sentiences rather than try and classify things on existing definitions. There’s also a nice summary with potential and emerging problems in AI.

I’ll leave you with some on-bike footage from this year’s men’s Tour, which finished on Sunday and was actually really good and competitive unlike last year and featured one of the most beautiful moments in sport. The love and respect rivals show each other is one of the many reasons I love to watch the sport and, as I said to a colleague recently; we don’t have cycling hooligans. Anyway, depending on who you are this on-bike footage is either incredibly exciting or anxiety inducing but should strike some awe.

Ok, I love you, I’m sorry it’s been so long.

Box074: Pictures out of pictures

13.07.22

DS074-e404: Having followed the flow of the sand to the thing in the distance, we came close enough to see the wind (if it was wind) rippling through the fabric of everything. Across the surface of this obelisk, the wind carved patterns and mandalas, waves of mathematics rippling across the apparently impassive body of the thing became a moving sculpture to the calculations of the wind.

Of course those images of from the James Webb were amazing, what were we expecting? This blog has become really irregular. This simple fact is that I have a young baby, an active training programme and am doing a bunch of online courses because I now work in a proper business and need to bolster that side of my skill set.

I find myself reading things just to have read them rather than taking time to reflect which is the point I guess. I think once these courses are done I am going to dedicate the time to PhD work. People have been asking recently: I’ve been on a year’s break for the baby and covid and in September I’ve decided to pick it up again but time is not on my side there. It’s been start-stop for years and it hasn’t found a rhythm. So when I start again I’m going to be committing to real deadlines and timeframes to get it done and get it out in the next 24 months. A part time PhD in basically two years.

Pictures of pictures of pictures.

This is an example of a post I’m seeing increasingly regularly on LinkedIn particularly but also on Twitter dot com. I’m not a fan of calling people out but this is an alarmingly uncritical epidemic. The spread of image generation ML like Dall-E and Midjourney have resulted in this proliferation of prompt imagery with an accompanying drum roll of amazement, shock and optimism about the future of this technology.

They are increasingly used by futurists and people in the futures space to visualise things that they do not otherwise have the craft or technical skill to visualise. But there’s little critical consideration of the fact that they are simply replicating the existing aesthetic, visual and imaginary tendencies that the system has been trained on. These images aren’t new, or novel or different, they are automated remixes of the cultural hegemony and the data they’ve been trained on. Of course there’s a critical pathway in remixing as we know well from music but those are consciously presented that way. For example, a lot of the more interesting things coming out of ML artwork is in juxtaposing things that are logically impossible or contradictory to see how the machine responds to these fallacies. This is a conscious and critical use of remixing to expose the system.

There’s also a particular colonial fantasy to the images produced in this particular thread. Further down, someone else uses the same system to generate a ‘future’ African city. Afrofuturism and similar movements sure offer an exciting alternative to the dominant aesthetic of the future but it feels grotesque to exploit it through a GAN; both removing and erasing the artistry of afrofuturist artists and the effort they’ve undertaken to challenge our imagination as well as appropriating the aesthetics for your own LinkedIn likes.

These images are probably better than the CGI images developed by big brands based off the Hollywood visuals that dominate the ‘future cities’ space and I absolutely agree that there’s something useful in helping people quickly visualise concepts and scenarios. However, I’m not convinced it’s possible to expand the imaginary potential of visual culture through ML solely. It can be used as a prompt or partner and a tool for creative thinking but is not a useful way of producing genuinely critical and imaginatively emancipatory images.

Short Stuff

Is there a difference between a cult and a brand? So asks Jarrett Fuller in his lates piece for AIGA. Obviously there isn’t, we sort of knew that but he usefully walks us through a bunch of examples and references. He also appears to have an encyclopaedic knowledge of documentaries on cults.
Theories of global collapse: closing down or opening up the futures? Good evidence that doomy scenarios actually encourage action. Where and how is particularly interesting, more local, individual pro activity seems to results from a comprehension of ‘collapsology.’
‘Imaginable reads as a guide for how to eat the future, how to capture and entrain it, brought forth by a series of consultancy exercises that are partly responsible for how we got where we are right now.’ Interesting critique of Jane McGonigal’s new book and the sort of futurism that tangentially nods at the climate crisis or even suggests it’s a great way to grow. I’ve spent some time around that recently. And I’m doing McGonigal’s Coursera.
Shannon Mattern on Multispecies Wordlbuilding podcast talking about trees as charismatic megaflora, their use in computing metaphors and deployment as a distraction to hard problems. Also her prolific writing, disciplines, grafting etc. etc. Crikey she’s so worldly.

I wrote this one over two weeks but it doesn’t look like it. Ok, love you, bye.

Box073: Pictures about Computers.

24.06.2228.06.22

DS073-e401: Out here (of course it wasn’t really ‘out’ of anywhere – such a definition of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ made no sense in this context) but out here it was louder; deafening even. Our head swam with the sound of the wind ricocheting off the walls and the low growl of the marching sand.Below us, huge dunes slouched across the plain and into the mist of their own dust. The wall opposite, which we furtively scanned for anything that might tell us why, stood impassive.

Last week was a couple of the private views around London, at London College of Communication – my old place – and Central Saint Martins. Today is Goldsmiths and Creative Computing Institute I particularly enjoyed Material Futures exhibition and was somewhat buoyed to see a little less mycelium than usual. Being on the other side of shows are interesting, it really makes a difference when someone approaches you to talk about their work.

Pictures about Computers

A couple of threads have been intersecting lately and as I sat down to just say ‘oh this is interesting’ I ended up pulling them together a bit more. Remember this is a blog not an academic journal.

From Source: Applications of AI: “Artificial Intelligence can be omnipresent as it is seen in almost every aspect of our daily lives. It is a technology that surrounds us and can be applied invisibly and beneficially to fields as diverse as medicine, transport, urban planning, climate change and energy. This broad application requires an abstract visual response, demonstrated through the concept of ‘volumes’; fog-like 3D ‘atmospheres’ which envelop and embrace their environment. It shows how AI can encompass various themes.” Artist: Tim West

DeepMind has commissioned some 3D artists and graphic designers to produce artworks. Interestingly, these have been released on Unsplash which hosts permission-less images for use, the implication being that DeepMind would prefer if you used these images when writing articles about their work. It’s an interesting choice. On the one hand the images, though beautiful are uncritical and flat. The descriptions of the images are similar to early undergraduate illustration students, one shows a grassy hill-scape and is about the world after nuclear fusion, a project DeepMind are quite rightfully involved in (again, lots of great applications for AI, vanishingly few for crypto.) But they also clearly tap into a younger cultural zeitgeist, aimed less at VCs and funders and more at people who get their news from Instagram and satisfying 3D renders. Perhaps this is aimed at attracting future DeepMinders, perhaps it’s simply about challenging the dominant aesthetics. Either way it shows an awareness on DeepMind’s part that the way AI is culturally assimilated is as important as what it is.

Which is why it’s surprising that none of the images in the series are actually produced using DeepMind technology.

DeepMind first bounded into the public domain with Deep Dream in 2015. The famed ‘puppy slug‘ images from one of the early GANs are a long way removed from the incredible power and versatility of the technology today but brought with them a marked aesthetic which seized popular imagination about AI. There was a few years where puppy slugs peppered every article, conference slide deck (including my own) and blog (yes) mentioning AI. It was a product ‘of’ the machine and before we really had the language to either understand what was going on, let alone describe it to ourselves it provided a stand-in for what, up until then was the stock imagery of androids brushing their hands against curtains of 1’s and 0’s. It felt like a peering under the hood.

For DeepMind there hasn’t been a slate of images or a technology released with as much public and cultural impact since. These images on Unsplash, may well be seeking earnestly to explore and shape a new visual language (I don’t think that’s going to happen with pretty metaphors that could really be about anything if you removed the caption) but then why not use the technology itself to do it? These images are all nice, glossy Cinema 4D or Maya pieces that slot seamlessly into the world of shareable CGI images but they don’t jump out and make a mark like Deep Dream did.

However, on the other side, Open AI, perhaps in the shadow of their founder, are giddily saturating the world with Dall-E and Dall-E 2 memes.

The feeds have been filling up with Dall-E images, so much so that it’s starting to become it’s own meme, people inputting ludicrous scenarios and enjoying the return. It reminds m a little of the Deep Dream glory days. Now, Dall-E 2 is open for previews, supposed to be even more advanced and is loudly being heralded as the ‘future of design’ because you can actually call anything the future of design.

This really isn’t a post about the inherent creative and critical problem of equating design with putting prompts into Discord. But if Dall-E isn’t going under the hood it’s certainly letting you into the mechanic’s garage to look around, for all my cynicism of Open AI, they do tend to publish quite lengthy analysis of releases their own page highlights the inherent biases in the software, something that any designer should really be reading before giddily proclaiming it to be the future.

Now, the aspirations of DeepMind as a whole and Dall-E as a small part of Open AI (again, not actually open) are different. There is a sense in which DeepMind, for all of its problems, is quietly and diligently getting to the business of developing solutions to technical (and sometimes, regrettably, social) problems using its technology while Open AI like to buoy interest and funding by releasing snippets of culturally shocking pieces like GPT3 (exclusively licensed by Microsoft, again not Open) and Dall-E for meme creators to play with.

An incognito image search I did this morning still reveals a dominant standard for artificial intelligence.

All this to say, that in the process of normalising AI there seem to be three distinct approaches. The first is the churning of stock imagery of robots and blue 1’s and 0’s as above. These tap into twenty, maybe thirty years of cinema, video games and TV to build suspension of disbelief. We still see this being deployed in those same arenas today.

The second is DeepMind’s more cautious, representative approach; tapping into an aesthetic zeitgeist but making it ‘about’ AI. This is more akin to how the Economist or New Scientist might illustrate – interpretive human made images. But these are forgettable, they could be about anything, they don’t have a critical impact on our understanding of image production.

And thirdly is the memetification of AI aesthetics, releasing it to the crowd and letting the memes make themselves, whether through GPT3 or Dall-E. I wouldn’t be surprised to start seeing this in Cinema, TV and Video Games as they gain a popular foothold.

Really the place you want to go for this is Encoding Futures, Maya Ganesh, some of the BBC R&D stuff and the resulting platform Better Images of AI. I’ve done a couple of arts about it. Natalie and I have also been chipping away at it for sometime at Haunted Machines. Really if I was better I would have finished my PhD about this by now which is all about this feedback loop between CGI and the imaginary of AI but I’m busy and like riding bikes when I have an hour off.

The way to think this forward is through advertising because that’s where the cultural zeitgeist is built and responded to. And advertising relies on convincing people of how something feels – driving, drinking, having comprehensive life insurance. How do you advertised an AI? We’ve seen it in Google Home and Amazon Alexa, the convenient monolith, part of the family, gleefully responding to commands and a ukulele soundtrack. These are easier to sell, they’re domestic products which are basically operating system doorways to an ecosystem. A more general or advanced AI is a more difficult thing to hero image.

Reading

You guys write too much and I’ve only just hit the 95% of gamified me-time needed to actually sit down and read things. I managed to finish Andrew Dana Hudson’s Our Shared Storm pretty whip-smart. Grim, positive reading. Will it convince people to change their ways and confront the climate crisis? Probably not, you’re either there or you’re not going there. Does it offer a really nuanced and interesting critique and celebration of the massive giga-project that is COP? Yup. Also check out the NFL podcast he did where he talks a little more about Post-Normal Science.

I decided to create an Are.na board for books I’ve read. Why not? You might find it useful and it will convince me to read more when I fall into bed at 21:07 and would usually drift off to a Warhammer painting video in 6 minutes. And it comports with my fully gamified lifestyle: Targets! Data! Badges! ‘Chievos!

Playing

Why not have a section on playing? I started Norco but it was a bit much on a Saturday morning so saving that. I’m now the proud owner of a Switch so I was browsing for something and got Citizen Sleeper from Gareth Damien Martin of In Other Water fame. It’s a Sci-Fi text-based RPG with some real nice gameplay mechanics where you basically have a limited number of things you can do each ‘cycle’ and each ‘cycle’ progresses storylines so you have to make choices about what to focus on. It’s definitely a min/maxing game and I have not done that of course.

Short Stuff

How did i miss NeRF? Basically machine learning yourself 3D meshes from 2D images. It’s like really good photogrammetry. Not enormously different to Deep Stereo of yesteryear either but, really good.
Real Life, as usual being bang on in last week’s newsletter critiqued Kevin Roose’s ‘millennial lifestyle subsidy‘ notion pretty much brilliantly:

The word lifestyle, which implies having a choice, is especially galling, given that the business model of the companies in question was to undercut alternatives for the service they offered so that people would have no choice but to use them. … To equate the services these companies offer, which prompt isolation and stratification and dislocation from neighborhood life, with “urban lifestyles” is to entirely misunderstand them
Real Life newsletter

Alright love you see you later.