BOX051: Sweet, sweet Snorlax, baby.

06.10.21

DS051: This is a recreation of a sketch I did four or fie years ago. I’m really trying to spend time with Eevee and figure out hacks for things. For example, Eevee, can’t do shadows for volumes so I made two discs with translucent cloud patterns on that spin around the ceiling and floor to fake shadows – unfortunately glitchy.

I know I always write these apologetics about not having enough for you but the truth is I just have a lot of things to do. I’m trying to knock out two or three projects a week alongside my actual job. This week I need to finish a bunch of client stuff, a foreword for a book, an essay, a paper abstract, record a lecture and start planning some events. Besides this I haven’t had the time to ruminate on things. I miss ruminating and I imagine you’re quite tired of a litany of excuses and apologies from me. Time slips away from you doesn’t it? Even though I’m great at multi-tasking and quite organised and disciplined there is always the feeling of catching up. Of running downhill with bags full of stuff.

Art School Fantasies

Like a couple of folks I read this hysterically nostalgic piece from classicist Daisy Dunn lamenting the ‘death’ of the British Art School in which the author blames a variety of phantoms for what she paints as a bleak, wintery landscape of creative education. An aside, and not meant to be read as anything other than it is but I dug around to find the author is almost exactly my age so it got me a little twisted when I read it with all the gushing praise of the Young British Artists and I expected someone ten, twenty years older living in the Cotswolds. Anyway, she goes on a tirade, lamenting that everything is done on computers nowadays instead of stained glass, that it’s all about ideas now and not doing things and that students have to think about what they’re doing and occasionally even write it down. The Art School is dead, she says, and it’s all its own fault. Most of the piece is poorly researched and misleading; three quarters of an undergraduate degree is practice-based with theory that emerges from that practice exactly as she demands and regrettably we can’t simply pretend computers don’t exist. In fact, we’re really, really good at computers and art in this country. But the rest of it is just based in some abject fantasy of the Art School largely drawn from a handful of exhibitions in the early 2000s and a Pulp song.

Rather than (as you might expect a classicist with a rounded understanding of history to do) looking at societal shifts and the way politics has moved in and around higher education in the UK to create a competitive funding environment which in some ways, frankly, has uplifted the quality of education (yes, I know it’s contentious but standards are really important) but also tries to tie it to research and industrial strategy she just says that art educators have lost their vision. Rather than talking about how the Conservative government (she also writes for the Telegraph) has a sustained war on ‘wokeness’ that extends to publicly criticising ‘left’ subjects in the arts and humanities and putting them under sustained financial pressure (she even mentions the Fatima advert but fails to connect it) she says that educators have lost imagination.

What’s paradoxical is how much she identifies many of the symptoms but then blames art schools for them: The government redefining foundation degrees as Higher Education so they can no longer be free as well as the proposed 50% cut in subsidies for ‘soft subjects’ are all apparently the Art School’s fault.

Anyway, other than a YBA revival show, it’s not exactly clear what she wants. Since there’s been a significant amount of better art since the YBAs it’s just maybe that she hasn’t seen any art since then? I think I was like 15 when that show was at the Saatchi? I don’t actually think the whole piece is worth reading into that much (I know, that’s what I’ve done) since it’s clearly an outrage piece but I suppose it connected with a conversation I had with a student a few weeks back which is why it stuck with me:

They were asking about my time at the Royal College of Art; what it was like, how was it with so and so, what happened in the studio etc. etc. I sort of tried to describe it without edging in to nostalgia but it also struck me that their fantasy of this apparently elite education was somewhat misplaced: It wasn’t actually that good. Ok, it was certainly elite and highly privileged and put you in a network which gives a wealth of opportunities but it was also confusing and disjointed and not in a good way. I have to caveat this by saying I wasn’t a great student; I’ve never been a very good student in any setting, but I never really had a sense of learning outcomes, or the journey, or how it connected together. I never felt in control of it; just being blown around by the interests of the tutors and course. And also, compared to the MA students at LCC I probably got a tenth of the contact time and mostly unstructured at that. And even that contact time was often terrifying; formulated around architecture-style crits which were more about making sure the tutors were happy and didn’t shout at you than actually figuring out what you’d learned or why you were struggling to learn.

That whole art school is awash in fantasy. I’m not convinced it ever existed. As I’m the same age as the author, I can certainly say it never existed in my time. And though I have happy memories of my time at the RCA, I can name many more thing I learnt fifteen years ago on my scrappy undergrad course in a recently reformed university than at the vaunted halls of the RCA.

Gaining university status was one of the worst things that could have happened to art schools.
https://engelsbergideas.com/notebook/the-strange-death-of-the-art-school/

What Dunn insists is that the creation of the art university and the ‘death’ of the Art School have irreversibly wrecked her small-minded view of creative practice. Look, universities are hard. They’re big unwieldily beasts that often behave in counter-intuitive ways and have to be reluctantly coaxed over years into doing what you want them to do. (I sometimes lovingly think of mine as like the Snorlax in Pokemon Red/Blue.) However, an uncomfortable truth for Dunn and other fantasists, is that professionalisation of arts education has not only made it significantly better but also given it a unique weapon: legitimacy. It’s no longer the playground of the kids of rock stars and Tory donors, art school halls aren’t thronging with kids who’ll do alright whatever because their parents will bail them out so they can go and start bands and hang out with Kate Moss. It’s people who want to start businesses, get into strategy, develop new tools and techniques, hell, become great artists. Many of them are first generation university students and they chose art or design because a legitimate degree gives it weight and currency that the anecdotes and fantasies of the dreamy British Art School simply don’t to people who start with little.

That legitimisation is meaningful and empowering and opened creative education up to many, many more people. It’s not so simple obviously, tied up as it is in the vexation sagas of fee increases, but it made it possible for people to see a future for themselves in design, art, fashion, whatever where before that would require a significant financial safety net. It also brought the subject as a whole onto the international stage (again not so simple) bringing art and design research into government, executive boardrooms and intergovernmental politics.

Anyway, enough griping. Here’s a piece from James Purnell continuing the argument with FT readers. Here’s Talking Politics trying to unpick the Brexit politics of why you would knowingly harm your country’s second and third most well-known exports for political points (higher education and arts and humanities) and here’s me making this argument at greater length.

Short Stuff

Matt Ward is back on blogging. Some of the most insightful and sporadic stuff on design education. Hope it’s a habit he returns to.
Crystal Bennes is releasing a book, Klara and the Bomb, which you will now go and pre-order a copy of here.

Ok, love you very much, sorry it’s been so long.

BOX037: Who am I even talking to?

28.04.2128.04.21

DS035: Get a sphere. Add some arrays in x, y and z so you have loads of spheres. Apply those arrays so they’re all objects, make sure to set the origin points to their geometry or it’ll get weird later. Make em all rigid bodies. Put a box around them and make that an animated rigid body that’s a child of your camera. Set your camera to rotate around x, y and z slowly. The box should follow it and stay locked on. Put some lights in but leave them still. Set the rigid body world speed to like 0.1 so that everything is in slow motion and doesn’t mess with your eyes. Hit bake and then animate.

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.

Still from the title of the first lecture, about Computer Graphics.

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.

Box 012: Compatible Rigging

23.09.20

DS007: Progress on indirect lighting, largely because I didn’t spend hours on procedural textures. There must be an easier way to do cables than curve modifiers but I have yet to find it.

What would the Arctic be like if the Earth’s spin was perpendicular to its orbit? Instead of a half-year day and a half-year night it would just be perpetual dusk and dawn. Even the creep of a day stretched out over a year indicates time, imagine if it was perpetually out of time, between day and night?

I said I’d make time to read three things a day, but time’s already run out by the time I get to last week’s tabs. I wanted to bring the better behaviours of lockdown and the summer back to work but responsibility gnaws at the edges of the day, like a needy puppy. I’ve also caught myself being angry this week at nothing in particular, just frustration at professional inconveniences. That’s often a sign of losing perspective, a useful way to check myself and appreciate how good things are.

I’m happy with the digital sketch this week. Those screens were meant to have articulated arms like the wall sections in the Portal games but I forgot how to rig them up and then have them repeat along the mesh without doing it manually. So I cheated and made a pneumatic pump instead.

My PhD work is increasingly circling around realism and expectation. This is somewhat disappointing but feels good to have a better sense of it: ‘Realistic Expectations’ The aesthetics of realism in visualising the future. Maybe? I don’t know. It’s slow going, every paragraph keeps being rewritten and mostly I just look at a blinking cursor and feel incredibly stupid. In a way it’s a simple task: What’s required is quite straightforward but the way this is meant to be achieved seems to be completely incongruous depending on who you ask; everything can be picked apart, you patch a hole only to create another hole. And so a small subsection that I had cut back to 800 words two weeks ago is ballooning to 3000 just trying to plug all the damn holes and in the end, it’s not that important and needs to be cut again resulting in more holes. It’s a Sisyphean task that appears to have no intellectual or creative value and serves appease pedantry. Don’t do a PhD, the sole reward is smug self-satisfaction and self-hatred. Maybe I should have just written a book on realism instead, like a readable one.

You know me well enough to know that I don’t get into divisive rhetoric or demonising people or things. People have different motives and I generally try to empathise or at least understand them, even if I don’t agree with them. I’ve found this to be a more effective way of pinpointing and critiquing these motives in order to inculcate change. Folks are most often responding to the world around them and celebrated social and political values like self-preservation, wealth accumulation and individual success rather than malicious intent: The ultra-rich seek primarily to preserve their fortune, not deny others of their own – this is just a side-effect. It doesn’t make the side-effects any less that hurtful and traumatic but I think it’s a mistake to assume maliciousness in other’s actions because they hurt (not to say there aren’t also malicious actions.) Usually hurtful actions are the result of an iniquitous economy and institutions that reward and celebrate individuality, ego and self-worth above community, care or even classical notions of progress. This is why so much of the necessary changes we need to make are put on the individual including social and ecological change, because that’s what are our institutions (including the creative and academic ones) are centred on; individual change and personal growth. All this is to get to the point that I fucking hate Peter Thiel.

The government has decided to put Palantir in charge of our borders because apparently G4S weren’t toxic enough and it just flung that memory dust in my eyes. Some people are beyond redemption.

Short Stuff

Using machine learning to artificially increase frame rates of stop-motion from 15 to 60fps. Hardly a surprise but makes you wonder what the state of Deep Stereo is five years on.
As usual, some maths geekery as usual; Quanta magazine’s interactive visualisation of the different mathematical fields, mapping out the relationships between them.
I idly watched this episode of VFX Artists React where they talk about how the cartoon matte was achieved in Mary Poppins in 1964, long before green screen. It used a process called sodium vapour. Sodium vapour lights emit yellow at a specific, very limited wavelength that falls exactly between the red and green film strips that were used separately (along with blue) in the Technicolor process meaning it was super easy to isolate and matte anything at that particular wavelength while still having yellow generally as a result of the red and green overlay. Problem is, there was only one camera ever made that could do this which Disney jealously guarded for forty years and now it’s lost so the history of special effects went a different way with the slightly more janky, less detailed mattes developed on blue screen years later for Star Wars. Innovation is stupid.
Lemino is a cool YouTube channel. (I’ve removed the channel recommendations section of this blog because it gave me too much of an excuse to watch YouTube.) He goes over interesting mysteries in quite a good amount of detail, maintaining an air of mystery while offering cynicism to hysterical and conspiratorial interpretations of historical mysteries and events. It’s almost forensic; good 1am stuff.
Here’s friend and colleague David White offering a provocation for this year’s Digitally Engaged Learning conference; the desituated studio. He nods to the conversation we had on teenage drama simulation website twitter dot com about it and some of the work Eva Verhoeven and I have done in this area.
Thanks to Joana Pestana for showing me this; the Institute of the Cosmos for the second Riga biennale. Not much to say, very cool.
It’s weird how protocols sometimes appear in innocuous interactions. Like BBC stuff will not play over SONOS. Neither BBC, Spotify or SONOS will tell you that, you just figure it out after spending ages updating, scrolling, turning things on and off and then Googling it.

I’ve used all the short stuff I had so I will need a new Content Strategy for next week. Blogging is hard, but thank you to the roughly 140 people who check in here on the reg. I love you particularly. I’ll write you again next week.