Showing posts for Art
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Some art I like
The internet introduced me to a couple of new artists last week, whose snapshots of regular life resonate with me.
Hasui Kawase (via Jason Kottke) was a woodblock engraver who produced hundreds of prints through the Taisho and Showa eras depicting landscapes in vivid colour and detail. Apparently he was a big influence on Miyazaki, which I guess endears him automatically to me as a white guy approaching middle age.
Elin Danielson-Gambogi was a Finnish artist of about the same period, actually, who produced realist portraits of life and work in Finland and Italy. Her paintings are expressive without being dramatic, which is exactly how I like my art.
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Rebuilding Ise Shrine
Here's a video (in Japanese) about rebuilding the Ise Grand Shrine (in Japan). The shrine is rebuilt every 20 years as part of a longstanding ritual to preserve the cleanliness of the building for Amaterasu, the Shinto sun deity that purportedly lives there. The building process itself—chopping down Japanese cypress, cutting and forming the wood, crafting the adornments, and assembling the whole thing—takes 8 years. The current buildings were opened in 2013; the next ones will be finished in 2033, which will be the 63rd time that they've done this.
via Scope of Work
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GPT-3 greentexts
Just when I thought that we were out of the GPT-3 game, the game pulls me right back in again.
>be me
>bottomless pit supervisor
>in charge of making sure the bottomless pit is, in fact, bottomless
>occasionally have to go down there and check if the bottomless pit is still bottomless
>one day i go down there and the bottomless pit is no longer bottomless
>the bottom of the bottomless pit is now just a regular pit
>distress.jpg
>ask my boss what to do
>he says "just make it bottomless again"
>i say "how"
>he says "i don't know, you're the supervisor"
>rage.jpg
>quit my job
>become a regular pit supervisor
>first day on the job, go to the new hole
>its bottomless -
jdan's hashart
I like generative art in principle. I think it's a good jumping-off point for discussions of e.g. like what is the interface between humans and art or in other terms what does art's API look like? but I'm not going to go there because I don't feel like agonising for an hour and a half over an idea with a shelf life of like 2 weeks.
Jordan Scales has created a collection of generative art based on SHA-256 hashes. It's all JavaScript and draws its output to a canvas. I'm not sure that any of them are striking per se, but all of them have a sort of technical edge augmented by reading the code. I'm not trying to get all 1970s sci-fi on you here; I just like looking at them. I like the idea of turning cryptography into art (even if I'm not particularly good at either of them)—especially when it doesn't involve grimacing monkeys. It makes me want to try and create my own.
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Looking Glass AI
It feels like, for a few years in the early/mid 2010s, the aesthetic of vaporwave was: what if artificial intelligence tried to assemble a pastiche of capitalistic trends from the 1980s and 1990s, back when things were no less sinister but somehow less dangerous? The album artwork that stands out to me is Vektroid's Sapporo Contemporary from 2012, but there are plenty of others.
For the most part, vaporwave has moved on from this sort of thing, but real artificial intelligence has caught up—to building wonky pastiches, at least. There are all sorts of AI image remixing algorithms out there, but Looking Glass (which produced the Weezer Blue Album image at right) is the first one that's produced more than trippy nightmare-scapes.
The result is not remotely vaporwave. Instead, it seems like AI is developing its own aesthetic, based around heavy copy-pasting (and inserting eyes everywhere for some reason). It's hard not to laugh at it, at this point—because some of these remixes are legitimately funny—but I'm really interested in where this is going from a, like, Legitimate Art kind of perspective.
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9A cohesive unified theory on the purpose of art rendered incoherent by being like really tired of a lot of things.
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