BOX048: It’s Impossible

01.09.21

DS048: Second part of a project where I was asked to think about how we work now. I really want to focus on the material qualities and get a good, reliable workflow for ‘realistic’ looking stuff. The noise filter in cycles is a bit unpredictable at these high levels of realism which is why the animation is so noisy but I’m not unhappy overall.

I went out to try and get some photo scans the other day using a variety of apps and found all the results a bit poor and glitchy. The new iPhone 12 has LIDAR on it which a lot of the good results I’m seeing online seem to be relying on. AR Kit is ok for macro scale stuff but for capturing scenery, it’s just bumpy and ineffective.

Reading

There has to be a word for that feeling of seeing the work you’re really into done better than you ever could. It’s a sort of deflation met with excitement. I’m about halfway through Image Objects by Jacob Gaboury and very much in that head space. Gaboury tells us a sweeping history of computer graphics based around the work done at the university of Utah that drove the field forward. In doing so he untangles the particularly logic of computer graphics as computational objects first and images second and the paradoxes of visual representation. The first chapter for instance goes through the work done on the Hidden Surface Problem. To a computer:

…graphical objects exist in their totality – as a collection of coordinates, points, image files and object databases – prior to their manifestation as a visible image. Graphical objects are in this sense non-phenomenological, known in their entirety prior to out perception of them.
Page 32

The Hidden Surface Problem lies in programming a computer to hide things which would not normally be perceptible to a human because they are behind other things. You have to programme perspective and perception into a machine that was never designed to be visual. Gaboury then examines perspective – not as a linear path through art history but something that has emerged in different contexts at different times.

So far he seems to be heading in the same direction as, for instance Deborah Levitt, that computer graphics are distinct from photography and cinema rather than a technological continuation of them. That the underlying logics and experience of working with computer graphics are more akin to painting or sculpture and the potential of them lies in moving beyond logics of cinema and into new aesthetic sensibilities. (I’m paraphrasing Levitt’s words, don’t @ me).

Anyway, it’s a remarkable book and I’m bummed and excited by it. Gaboury is doing a much more rigorous and rich job of what I attempted with Computers Making Pictures (he actually even uses a similar phrase). This is probably be cause he’s been working on it for a decade with a a bunch of different research projects while I scribbled some notes for a week and a half. That’s a useful delineation of my work ethic against that of actual scholars.

Doing

Natalie and I are heading all the way over to Peckham Digital Festival on the 12th September to roll out our AI schitck. This looks like a really fun and interesting event for folks from the local area to get into and share work in creative technology. I’m sure we’ll see lots of people we know. It’ll also be my first in-person event for two years. It’s free so you should go.

Short Stuff

A sort of cheery story from the intersection of automation, open source and ‘democratisation’ in design: The Rise of Semi-automated Illustration. Several interviewees make a point about the homogenisation effect of automation but stress that the memetic nature of visual culture is hardly new, it just happens faster.
Why is it So Hard to Be Rational? via Shannon. Mattern. A sort of review of rationalism including the ‘rationalism community’ and all the pitfalls, including the need for meta-cognition. I like that things Spock deemed ‘logically impossible’ happened 80% of the time, largely because he assumed everyone else was as logical as him.
Deb Chachra on Care at Scale. Brilliantly demonstrating the political and infrastructural imbalance (‘Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to go everywhere. People are not.’) and calling for an ultrastructure. I also never saw such a comprehendible version of Rawl’s Veil of Ignorance – I finally get it.

Ok, super brief I know, I’m about to head off for a few days. Love you.

BOX045: Really, really this time.

04.08.21

DS045: No simulations or silliness. Keeping it straightforward.

The Metaverse is a broad, undefinable milieu in which you take your disease-ridden social network, add some home-brew virtual reality and more forms of data surveillance, call it an experience and trap people in it. It’s similar to ‘ecosystem’ but attempting to become more encompassing.

It’s starting to encroach into the narrative space of technology, a useful shibboleth for a range of things that no one really knows what they’re for. For example, I recently heard the idea being bandied about by some vacuous shill Shoreditch gallery owner trying to convince students to mint their work as NFTs and let his gallery take a cut or, as he put it, to ‘join the metaverse.’ The fact that none of those components even add up let alone make any moral sense demonstrates how useful a cover something like ‘metaverse’ is for naked profiteering. Now the ‘Metaverse’ is apparently coming according to those most interested in promoting it and has started to appear in keynotes and TV bits as the next apparently inevitable wave of ‘paradigmatic’ technology.

As the article there points out, nebulous prognosticating is a common tactic of boosterism and hype. I spend a lot of time looking at it in regards to so-called artificial intelligence but we also saw it in the Internet of Things for example, and most of us still don’t have smart fridges and smart locks; the case is too difficult to make. Despite that, the snake oil, Bitcoin bros are already moving in, buying and selling land that doesn’t exist, for example, but calling it ‘the metaverse.’

When you predicate your entire model on endless growth, but you’re hitting a ceiling like Facebook is, you sort of have two option: First, you could fundamentally reform, addressing and acknowledging the dependence people have on you to become a more wholesome piece of public infrastructure that enacts its claims of connecting people, information and debate by ejecting organisations that capitalise on your existing structure to profit, create hate and division for political ends or outright scam people and reform around a more open and accountable framework. Or second, you could say that a thing called the ‘metaverse’ is coming and put loads of articles out for your shareholders to read about how you’re going to make trillions of dollars.

The metaverse is season 5 of Lost. The writers are rudderless and throwing in hook after twist, time travel after reincarnation, just trying to hold on to the viewing figures while refusing to admit they actually have no idea of the actual plot.

I was thinking about this yesterday with Strava. I use Strava a lot for cycling stuff, and Strava keeps adding features to try and make it a social network – things like group challenges, meetups and so on. Strava is huge, it probably has most people who are somewhat serious about running, cycling and a load of other sports as regular users but all these people already have social networks. They’re already plugged in to whatever platforms they can confidently exercise self-loathing on so they don’t need another one. Strava has a lot of bugs and problems in the way the things I actually want – fitness data – are interacted with. Last year, they introduced a paid model and lots of people declined to sign up, largely because what you’d be paying for (lots of fitness data crunching) is done better by various free plugins. Rather than fix the broken bits and innovate on the things Strava users want, they tried to pivot to a social network.

So here’s my thought, I can’t tell if it’s just because I’m older and slightly less dumb or maybe it is a genuine shift of the status quo. I really don’t think people have much more patience for feature-loading; adding gimmicks and hype to services to stimulate growth and higher profit. We’ve just seen a massive international effort to turn the tables on a virus, where science and innovation actually saved lives, tangibly and really. Watching multi-billionaires gloat about the metaverse they’re building from their spaceships suddenly undermines their own self-importance. I’m sort of cautiously optimistic (increasingly also by the ad-war of personal security going on between Facebook and Apple) that these charlatans are going to have to take their problems and the problems they’ve created and profit from seriously. Really, really, this time. I just don’t think the consumer patience is there for more bullshit while whole nations burn and genocides are humoured.

Short Stuff

Some heteromation here from The Boring Company. Techcrunch got hold of the manual for people working on Musk’s Loop including readily prepared answers to questions about the system. Behind every bombastic charlatan is a well-oiled PR machine.
An alternative to the metaverse – miniverses in Moving Castles from Trust. Also particularly interesting for the idea of kitbashing CGI objects.

Ok, love you, speak next week.

BOX041: Running Downhill

23.06.21

DS039: Tried to a cloth simulation on a cloth simulation on a cloth simulation but you would never guess that it kept crashing. So I just froze it and pretended that was what I wanted all along. Still, got to figure out the difference between hash and blend for transparency in Eevee. Always learning.

Everything is happening at once. Sometimes people ask – as if it’s remarkable in any way – ‘how do you do it?’ and the truth is it may look very well held together but I’m only ten minutes away from a catastrophic collapse; of everything going out of balance; of dropping the ball on something that slips my mind which has a cascade effect on everything else. I spend time between things pacing back and forth in the living room trying to think of what could go wrong. And these weeks have been particularly frenetic, with a dozen things all running in parallel, all – by their own account – full-time commitments and all gleefully ignorant of each other.

I once described it as like running down hill with plastic bags full of stuff. You’re driven entirely by momentum and if you stop or think, you’ll trip and fall. And, to the plastic bag’s inertial frame, everything seems normal. It’s all teetering on the verge of chaos just awaiting a single misstep.

So yes, I know, it’s been three weeks since I wrote to you and that’s been the longest time for many years. And this is another stupidly quick one. I wrote a whole introspective bit which I deleted because I suspect you don’t read this for the introspection. I’m still coming out of the tunnel at the moment so I haven’t had time to sit down and think about any one thing in particular for a while, besides which I have two or three writing engagements I should be putting writing time into. However, as you might expect, three weeks has spawned a dragon’s trove of notes, tabs and half-considered thoughts so we shall just jump straight into the short stuff. However, I am keeping some in reserve as part of my Content Strategy™️.

Short stuff:

Alan Warburton’s RGBFAQ is on the Internet now for free. You can just stop reading now and go watch it, it’s amazing. I think I’ve expressed my admiration for it pretty well on all the websites.
Natalie Kane tells me this blog is broken and the layout is messed up but since she’s the only person who ever tells me that I’m hardly going to engage in a development project on the feedback of a user group of one person so can you tell me if it’s also broken for you?
Andrew Sempre has a great blog/newsletter that I just discovered out of his Feral Research outfit which this week includes the great line: ‘Social media as a cursed shittiness-amplifier: playing back to us.’ It’s like how I want this to be, and how blogs should be; a range of unconnected stuff that’s interesting.
Here’s a somewhat disappointing and technical interview with Blitter who I talked about a few weeks back.
Fred Scharmen found a cool rocket picture. I don’t know what else to say, that guy knows his space stuff. He’s doing this on Saturday and I’m going to be going, if you go you’ll see how much space onions he knows.
My colleague JP Hartnett wrote this great top-level summary of ontological design taking in the work of Arturo Escobar, Sasha Constanza-Chock and Tony Fry. It’s a really good introduction to contextualising the ‘totality of design as a kind of meta-discipline, better able to encompass the relational complexity of how it operates.’
Le Tour starts on Saturday. Look forward to that on the socials.

I have a podcast interview coming out soon and I expect I leant to much on the candid side of the brand rather than the pseudo-intellectual but also I’m not particularly interesting so at least I can be disarming in honesty. Anyway, it’s keeping me guessing about the reception, if there is any. I’m led to believe some people hate-read this blog so perhaps there’s some joy to be found in my idiocy for you good folks there. You know what actually there’s quite a few things out there I’ve done recently and coming up (including two, count them two, books) so I will update you on those next week.

Ok, I love you and I’m sorry I haven’t told you recently. Byeee.