specture readings 02

AI / ML readings, trees and sounds of the city ::: 20230408 - 20230409

reading and watching

::: Eryk Salvaggio's "Critical Topics: AI Images" undergraduate class. It introduces data ethics, a history of art, media studies alongside AI-image making approaches. Eryk notes it's a work in progress, with videos of lectures & loose reading list ::: via Eryk Salvaggio

::: AI Images, Eryk Salvaggio's Class 1 - Love in the Time of Cholera https://www.cyberneticforests.com/ai-images ::: AI/ML images as data visualisations or infographics

::: How to Read an AI Image - The Datafication of a Kiss

::: AI Images, Eryk Salvaggio's Class 19: Artist Talk video with Merzmensch via Merzmensch

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::: Style Over Substance by Lindsay Caplan ::: via Outland ::: whilst the author points out a few gaps, would love to see the “Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952­-1982” exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

::: Outland and Linda Dounia video chat discussion on Linda's work including GANs. Around 15mins in, there's a point about volume of images since 2010s changing consumer of images/content -> producer of images/content, which led to the rise of blogs and "content is king" ethos of the era. This made me think about David Holz's interview mentioning MidJourney being trained on search results of previous version, not a new set of existing images - it's evolving this way. Botto is similiar - it creates images based on explicit choices from its users/benefactors. We'll be seeing what the machines want us to see, based on our previous likes - let's see if the ideas on beauty and preferences change over time — they should, as they have in the past, but what will they look like next?

::: Kelly Richardson on her visuals for Metallica's *72 Seasons* music video ::: "Richardson describes the piece as "a debris field made up of crystals or diamonds, and they're floating in space." The diamonds, she said, represent extinct species." ::: via Kelly Richardson

::: Friday Long Read: What To Do About AI by Mark Maunder ::: via fluxresearch ::: basically, start learning more about it

::: Geeks, MOPs, and sociopaths in subculture evolution by David Chapman ::: via Matt Kane ::: this was posted in the context of creators vs bad actors / scammers in NFT land, but much of this rings true (for earlier subcultures too)

::: Task-driven Autonomous Agent Utilizing GPT-4, Pinecone, and LangChain for Diverse Applications ::: via yoheinakajima

::: GPT-4 Technical Report

::: Astah ::: great for system, process, UML etc diagrams ::: via DrMiaow

::: Another World is Possible: On the Universal Language of Trees - Katie Holten Calls for the Rewilding of Vocabularies - by Katie Holten on her new book "The Language of Trees" ::: via Sasha Stiles ::: Holten created an alphabet based on drawings of trees and converted it to a new font/typeface: Trees. Her book contains stories on trees throughout the ages and the entanglement of trees and people

::: Women now dominate the book business. Why there and not other creative industries? by Greg Rosalsky ::: via Michael Jongen

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::: ‘An engine for the imagination’: the rise of AI image generators - An interview with Midjourney founder David Holz by James Vincent, Aug 2022 ::: via matsysdesign (see also Outland item above)
"how do we expand the imaginative powers of the human species? And what does that mean? What does it mean when computers are better at visual imagination than 99 percent of humans?"
...
"All the games are dreams, and everything is malleable, and we’re going to have AR headsets” — what the hell does that mean? So the humanistic element of that is kind of unfathomable."
...
"So everyone’s ripping off each other, and there’s all these new aesthetics. It’s almost like aesthetic accelerationism. And they’re all bubbling up and swirling round, and they’re not AI aesthetics. They’re new, interesting, human aesthetics that I think will spill out into the world"
...
“our most recent update made everything look much, much better, and you might think we did that by throwing in a lot of paintings (into the training data). But we didn’t; we just used the user data based off what people liked making (with the model). There was no human art put into it. But scientifically speaking, we’re very, very early. The entire space has maybe only trained two dozen models like this. So it’s experimental science”

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::: Midjourney --> train as you use it // "RLHF" // evolution ::: via DrJimFan and matsysdesign

news

::: DIYFRAME, Made by @AndreFvchs is now live on Tezos https://diyframe.xyz - DIYFRAME is a web app that lets you display fxhash, versum, objkt and teia NFTs on any screen for free ::: via AndreFvchs

::: PureSpider has released an updated set of fxhash-pfp template / boilerplate for generative PFP works - see https://github.com/PureSpider/fxhash-pfp ::: via
PureSpider

listening

::: The Magician's Hat Vol.3 Film by Scanner ::: via Scanner ::: beautiful ambient sounds

::: Welltuned City by Gail Priest (2015) ::: "there are no birds in this singing city ... the birds can hear, and cannot bear." see also Sounding the Future

::: Jess Cook - 107 Projects - ep 10 of Matt Levinson's "I might have a story for you - Interviews with brilliant people who make great things happen" podcast ::: ::: via Matt Levinson

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::: also published on my substack and medium accounts