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.

BOX052: THE UNDETECTION OF THE NEW

27.10.2127.10.21

I had an idea for something much more complex but once I’d set up the ‘background’ I was really happy with it and so just left it. It is animated but only super gently. I’m getting better with Eevee lighting too.

The regular schedule has fallen apart. Can I keep opening with excuses?

I’ve been starting to use Are.na more proactively over the last few weeks. Took me a while to get my head around but I really like it as a sort of ‘what if Pinterest but good’ sort of thing. Please follow me if you’re on it. I’ll do the same. It’s mostly pictures I put on there, keeping text to Zotero.

There’s still writing deadlines left, right and centre at the moment and I’m trying to clear the deck before Christmas. I had a review and update of the website recently and I’ve fallen into the trap of agreeing to do writing and then just being asked to do more writing all the time. Some of it is really great though and super interesting so there’s some reward. Look, I’m going that thing where I’m being elusive but eluding to things coming up. Give me a YouTube channel.

Had a nice time yesterday doing a webinar with Arup as part of their infectious diseases foresight project with the WHO. I did a workshop on the project a few weeks before which was really interesting as well. The video from it is up and out there right here so you can catch up with me rattling on about AI and solutionism to some enormously well qualified and experienced experts in public health there.

I updated the website more generally with recent projects as well. Still some things I need to document and edit to get on there but I’ll get round to it eventually.

I literally just finished reading this amazing paper from Vladan Joler and Matteo Pasquinelli The Nooscope Manifested. They position AI as as the ‘nooscope’ – a tool for knowledge extraction and break down the critical issues into 11 categories. It’s a brilliant sumamtion of some of the technical and social dimensions of AI with a million tasty quotes and a super neat summary for technical and social players alike. Another thing I’ve read which really shoots your own attempts at doing the same in the face and throws them out the train.

They dispel a lot of assumption (including my own). For instance, they point out that non-comprehension of new technology is not unique to AI – that there’s nothing about the conceptual construciton of machine learning that makes it different from otehr advanced technologies at their time. Eg, they suggest that early in the invention of the steam engine there was a mystery about how it functioned even after being tested. There’s no reference for this, which is annoying so if you know of one, let me know cos that seems like a super interesting rabbit hole to dive down. There’s so many tasty bits in there ‘the undetection of the new’ will stick with me.

…machine learning learns nothing in the proper sense of the word, as a human does; machine learning simply maps a statistical distribution of numerical values and draws a mathematical function that hopefully approximates human comprehension.

Short Stuff

As you know I have two real loves in life: computer graphics and the power of bureaucracy. Never before have I seen them perform together but in a rendering engine built inside of Excel. Fuller video explanation here. (via David Benque)
The New York Times R&D folks have made ‘An End-to-End Guide to Photogrammetry with Mobile Devices‘ which should help my stalled efforts. (via Andrew Sempere)
Interesting writeup of a project looking at AI and colour with some great references.
Perfect Sleep from Tega Brain and Sam Lavigne connects sleep, with capitalism, with the climate crisis and ‘allows users to adjust their sleep schedule, slowly increasing their sleep time over the course of three years until they achieve a state of ‘total sleep’.’
The nuances of prompt engineering for GPT3.
Against Longtermism. A long piece for Aeon describing a constellation of institutes and ideas that I had little idea were sort of part of one bigger project. It seems obvious that undervaluing life in the present for an imagined imperial future sucks but hey, maybe someone needed to write it down.
Why the Boston Dynamics video isn’t CGI.
Superflux have a new film; The Intersection which you’ve already seen unless you’ve been living under a rock. But they have produced and educational guide for it that you might have missed from your rock.

Ok, see you next week (hopefully). Love you.

BOX039: Just get rid of the treehouses

19.05.2119.05.21

DS037: Keyframed animations are so much easier to do than anything involving a simulation. There was no particular challenge here other than having to model a load of stuff and then keyframe it. Can you tell what inspired it?

Fuck, the world has been grotesque this week. Look, donate here for Medical Aid for Palestine, by doing it through the website they can claim VAT as gift-aid.

I was going to put this in Short Stuff at the bottom, but the rest of this post turned out to be quite deflating and critical and I wanted to put something buoyant up at the top. I’ve been crunching through a series of videos about Messier objects. The Messier catalogue is a collection of 110 astronomical objects which are not comets compiled in the 1770s. Astronomers saw all these smudges of weird, annoying things through their telescopes in their search for comets or stars. They were largely disinterested in them and considered them nebulous to the hunt for comets – hence, nebulae.

Anyway, turns out a lot of them were deeply interesting because once telescopes got good enough they discovered they were things like other galaxies and, yes, nubulae. There was an episode where it was pointed out that our galaxy, and space more generally, is full of star-exhaust (imagine me saying this with a sort of ‘can you believe it’ aghast face). Literally! Like a sooty dust that clogs up the Milky Way and makes it hard to see. Without it, the night sky would be much, much brighter and we’d be able to see much further. Anyway, we can’t see it but we can hear it turns out. Sound 1, sight 0. Damn it.

You wouldn’t let us into your treehouse…

I really don’t want this blog to become a stream of NFT-bashing but it really is such a perverse and seemingly ass-backwards, burn-it-all-down sort of petty vengeful mode of change that I can’t help but stare at the grotesquery of it. I’m also just very, very sad about seeing interesting critical practitioners I’ve admired for years turn their feeds into a stream of hashtags, ‘drops’ and hype-baiting to make money. I want to understand why, I want to see what they see. So, I continue to seek out things that make the case for why it is genuinely a better way of working but they all tend to land on the same bitter recriminations of ‘mainstream’ or ‘bricks and mortar’ art or some way-off, vague cult-like hype about how the future will be this or that. Neither lines of reasoning tend to have much substance to them and seem to be pretty transparent bubble-inflation.

I read this because it was posted with a caption of something like ‘at last someone lays to bed the anti-NFT sentiment’ on a reputable site. Good! I thought, at last, help me get it. I want to get it! But hope turned to despair as it immediately fell into some of the classic paradoxical tropes of the arguments.

By the way, where was the outcry during the heyday of incessant art fair air travel, ie every year pre-pandemic since Art Cologne launched it all in 1967; and the destruction caused by single-use wooden shipping crates?

This is the bloodsucking monster argument again: Yes, the art world is a blood sucking monster, the solution is not to replace it with a different maybe less-bad blood-sucking monster that promises to be nicer in the future. By raising this argument you’re tacitly admitting that the criticisms are true. I was listening to a podcast (can’t remember which) where this was also positioned as; it’s like pleading in court that you should be let off an assault charge because manslaughter is worse and you didn’t do that. Remember the ‘if you hate capitalism so much, why do you have an iPhone’ retorts that came up around Occupy?

Also, lacing texts with your letter-to-the-editor gripes is never a good way to win people round. I could go through this argument by argument but I just don’t have the time for it all: ‘The art world isn’t keen on willfully adapting to change, especially when the upheaval entails a shift in the landscape of access and gatekeepers that control it.’ Isn’t this just new gatekeepers? All still based on social currency? This is another common paradox; that it’s about changing the financialisation and hyper-capitalism of the art world. But it always just seems to be about replicating the art world digitally with digitally-native collectors, galleries and speculation. It’s not any different, just a more unstable currency. It’s all more ‘You wouldn’t let us in your treehouse, so we built our own, rival treehouse‘ when what I want to read about NFT’s is ‘ you wouldn’t let us in your treehouse so we’re going to roam freely over the surrounding fields and valleys while you hide in there‘ which you know feels like the metaphorical appeal of working digitally. If you hate the art world so much (which is understandable) just ignore the art world. Many, many people continue to successfully ignore the art world all the time and still do interesting things. You can’t hunger for the fame and wealth you feel you’re owed at the same time as decrying a system which creates and replicates fame and wealth.

(Also, also, inviting Tracey Emin to exhibit somewhat undermines the credibility of a line of argument about challenging the art world.)

Ok, near the bottom there’s some interesting stuff. Yes, the possibility for new forms of access, audience and engagement are the same things that excite me about open source and creative commons work. Yes, the longevity of art as medium of cultural discourse could be changed if it’s not locked in galleries or collector’s beach houses at night. And, NFT’s themselves could become a metric of social sentiment that directly empowers political change. But just make those arguments. Even better; materialise those arguments in a way that people like me who are stupid and don’t have time to know enough about crypto can see and touch and imagine, don’t lead with the treehouses/blood-sucking monster. It’s music to the crypto bros and just inflames stupid markets.

Short Stuff

Anyway, here’s a better examination of some of these paradoxes by Geraldine Juárez: The Ghostchain. She goes into some more of the ideas of assetization and the acceleration of capital through this new market.
Wait are NFTs just loot boxes?
Jay has done some interesting analysis here about what’s driving the argument, looking at some of the sales data previously looked at on this blog (She uses Kim Parker’s work showing 1.8% of sales are achieving asking price which often just about covers the cost of upload.) The conclusion seems to be that it is still predominantly creator-driven.
You saw this. I know you did, I’ve had it advertised everywhere. It’s crazy. Amazing crazy.
Contactless, rare-earth-element-less electric motor design. Don’t know if it’s up there with star exhaust for this week’s coolest thing but it’s pretty interesting.
Justin sent me the results of this Ipsos poll which shows that for the first time since 1999, more people in the UK are cautious and austere than not. I’m not sure calling people who don’t intend to save money or think of the future ‘hedonistic’ is entirely accurate – the government seems to believe or fantasise that once we’re through Covid we’ll have some sort of explosion of consumerism and culture but it seems very unlikely.
At the same time, Deutsche suggest an ‘Age of Disorder‘ marked by growing inequality, worsening international relations and shifting demographics. (I like that they use a two-thousand year time scale for their analysis. Gives it some depth.)

Ugh. What a time to be alive. Truly, an age of disorder. I wish I had some good news. Star exhaust is all I have. I love you, I miss you. I don’t really feel great about going inside pubs and will probably hold off for a while. Oh, wait! I got an amazing shirt yesterday. So cool. Can’t really wear it until it’s warmer ‘cos it’s short sleeved but I’m excited to take it on a test-run at some point. Ok, reiterating that I love you, this all sucks very, very much but you’re doing amazingly. Speak soon.