pict, png and svg (10. 986)

Although a bit surprised that the fabled auction house is yet trying to make NFTs a collectible, no matter has the public now gets to enjoy a never-before seen series of digital painting from the artist Keith Haring. From Boing Boing, Haring was gifted an Amiga computer in 1986 from his friend Timothy Leary in hopes that the artist would contribute to his project to promote a planned cinematic adaptation of the cyberpunk novel Neuromancer after witnessing Haring engaging with a Macintosh Steve Jobs brought to the birthday party of John Lennon’s son Sean (see also)—mostly to entertain the kids but other guests, including Andy Warhol were rather taken with the medium. Neither above venture quite came to fruition though, Haring was happy to experiment—and proceeds from the sale go to a good cause.

proteus effect (10. 963)

Via Web Curios (a lot more to explore in the weekly bulletin), we are directed towards an AI assisted photo editing platform—yes, these are probably a dime-a-dozen and we subject ourselves to a feedback loop of recursive learning and the quandary of creation with such digital personae, indulging a kind of perfection in imperfection and uncanniness, the fidelity degrading over the iterations—but this Human Generator is kind of fun. Like playing with paper dolls, Sims, Miis or Yahoo! Avatars, the application which maps to one’s face if you choose, can be dressed up and altered in a variety of ways with textual and preset inputs to experiment with. Give it a try and share what you come up with—especially if you don’t mind looking a bit thirty and swole, accounting for bias.

 synchronoptica

one year ago: colour television in West Germany plus assorted links to revisit

two years ago: Rashomon (1950), St Genès, the feud between Salieri and Mozart, more links plus how to cut every cheese

three years ago: Voyager I leaves the Solar System (2012), more links to enjoy, more traditional units of measure plus a Number 10 stand-in

four years ago: premier of The Wizard of Oz (1939) 

five years ago: weekly word watches from the OED,  Letters from Iceland (1937) losing one’s marbles, an early attempt at weather control plus a local kite fest

hype cycle (10. 776)

Though never claiming to have the pulse on any trends, we’ve regularly pinned to formerly Twitter and now on Mastodon what we’ve posted one year, two and more years ago for comparison on what’s the latest obsession and really appreciated this thoroughgoing analysis—via the Verge—from the Columbia Journalism Review on how the breathless cheerleading of media coverage for ChatGPT and spin-offs has strong resonance with the valuation and enthusiasm and uncritical reporting that was accorded to the gig and sharing economy, cryptocurrencies and NFTs not so long ago. The coverage follows a particular pattern—promising redundancy and utopia, catastrophe and revolution, playing on the FOMO and belated adpotion principle—before rather than taking a more circumspect turn on the deliverables of said technology but go through a period of sober and rapid withdrawal, pushing instead a narrative of counterfactual bias (wokeism is not baked into to algorithmic suggestions and quite the opposite is the case) over unexamined efficacy.

pompon (10. 767)

Whilst only expected to fetch about five thousand dollars at auction, a portrait of one of favourite canine companions by Jacques Barthélémy Delamarre (the eighteenth century painter whose portfolio limited to pictures of this dog with shaved hindquarters and few other studies of cats and rabbits and not to be confused with Joseph Ducreux—though equally meme-worthy) commanded over a quarter of a million. Not much is known about either the artist or the subject, that is believed to be a Cavalier King Charles—other than the French queen kept a menagerie of pets and this one is as elaborately coiffed as their human, though unclear if they shared the same political views, see also.

7x7 (10. 531)

business vulnerable: dress codes for your wedding to confound invited guests 

boom and bust: in stark contrast to last year’s showcase dubbed Crypto Bowl, no cryptocurrency ads have been purchased for Super Bowl Sunday  

fanilect: more eggcorns and mondegreens in misheard lyrics to Taylor Swift songs  

gaming like it’s 1927: annual public domain table-top project playing and remixing expired IPs—via Things Magazine  

overworld theme: beatboxer recreates the songscape of Super Mario Bros. 2

only the shadow knows: a noir short by Fabrice Mathieu  

family dining: Facebook to open Metaverse to children to try to rehabilitate flagging interest 

assistant to the regional manager: the Great Resignation and unethical reclassification practises helped create inflated job titles

beta-testing (10.496)

In an attempt to pre-empt some of the legal and ethical concerns in a field fraught with promise, disappointment and unchecked acceleration that our present concessions to copyright and IP are not fit for, stock picture clearing house Shutterstock has partnered with a suit of text-to-art artificial intelligences to offer clients with existing licensing packages access to a limited dataset used to train the generative AI, promising to compensate artists, photographers, models (contributors) whose work was skimmed, studied. Shutterstock also includes the unenforceable catch-all caveat that generated images must not be used to infringe or misappropriate intellectual property or otherwise generate false, deceptive or misleading imagery—which we can’t whether or not divides the onus and responsibility between publisher and patron.

regal zonophone (10. 489)

Composite artist and computer collaborator—I think these partnerships are called centaurs or reverse centaurs depending on one’s perspective on who is doing the driving—Wen Wormhole sits down for an interview with Messy Nessy Chic to talk about the alternate reality of a “Glam Rock Sci-Fi Universe,” with a touch of wrestle-mania energy added to the prompt, that he’s has helped craft with the power of artificial intelligence—see previously.  Learn more about the creative process, techniques and compounding inspiration at the links above, which Wormhole compares to being an art director of a project. What fusions of reality and alternate universe would you create with the help of AI?

can’t do hands (10. 483)

Via Web Curios, we are directed towards a rather nightmarish gallery of the myriad ways that early and contemporary, cutting-edge image generators alike make malformed human hands. It took me a long time to see this mural in Wiesbaden as the interlocking fingers for rebuilding but it did eventually register. There’s uncanny valley to describe the off-puttingness of a simulation that’s just too close to reality but there’s no agreed-upon term for its corollary. What would you call it? Such mangled hammer-toes only are relatable in a society in an era beyond such imitations and manual simulacra. How would you like to be vetted?

7x7 (10. 481)

distressed property: no interested buyers for North Hollywood Crypto House—via Miss Cellania  

rabbit on the moon: some communities following the luni-solar calendar readying for the Year of the Cat

cartoon dynamo: a century later, a 1923 editorial foreshadows automated art 

high stakes brinksmanship: the US Treasury turns to extraordinary measures to avoid default on debt repayments  

peer-reviewed: many scientists disapprove of ChatGPT cited as a contributing author on research papers  

unbuilt: rendered images of Frank Lloyd Wright’s unrealised architecture  

childhood lottery dream home achieved: a selection of properties on the market, courtesy of Zillow Gone Wild

9x9 (10. 479)

under the gavel: a distressed Twitter is auctioning off office furnishings from its San Francisco headquarters 

best mates: a meta-study of attracting and retaining intimate partners  

demidecimate: Microsoft announces layoff five percent of its workforce 

from permacrisis to polycrisis: selection of global buzzwords for 2023  

style guide: an eccentric alternate spelling circulated in a newspaper for three decades—without explanation or apology 

wellipets: frog-faced galoshes make a haute couture return 

©: Getty Images is filing suite against an AI art tool for scraping its content—via the new shelton wet/dry

fechtbücher: early Renaissance depicts of duels between men and women 

silicon valley: a tech bust might be a net positive for the city

6x6 (10. 389)

third estate: Twitter begins suspending the accounts of many high profile journalists  

that went places: this wordless Scotch advertisement is really moving 

i love paris when it’s deco: revisiting the landmark Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes held along the Seine in 1925 

united states of pop: DJ Earworm (previously) remixes the year in music  

this christmas ad broke me: a somewhat cynical though more accurate seasonal supermarket commercial 

i expect these will sell out soon: Trump launches a collection of NFT trading cards

 

 

6x6 (10. 329)

turkey in the straw: Thanksgiving with Liberache (1952)  

the blockchain eight: post-mortem of the collapse of FTX  

woty: the short-list for the publicly juried OED word of the year includes metaverse, #istandwithX and goblin mode 

ooh directory: an omnibus of blogs on every subject—via Waxy  

what sophistry is this: Facebook’s artificial intelligence labs design a negotiator called CICERO to gameify diplomacy—see also 

gratitude, don’t give me no attitude: the nine best Thanksgiving songs that I definitely didn’t just make up

8x8 (10. 321)

yotta, yocto: prolific data generation drives the need for uniform names for extremely large and extremely small numbers—see previously—via Marginal Revolution  

quarantine caper: narrow escape from Jingdezhen just before lock-down  

a classic non-equilibrium thermodynamic reaction: a demonstration of a Belousov-Zhabotinsky oscillation in a Petri dish—via Nag on the Lake’s Sunday Links  

don’t copy that floppy: an overview of a few anti-piracy schemes of the late 1970s and early 80s  

jpeg morgan: the rise and fall (and broader fall-out) of crypto bank and exchange FTX 

infantry: Academy Award winning Czechoslovakian animated short Munro (1960) about a four-year old drafted into the army  

fangcang: artist, after being identified as a “close contact” is confined in a remote hospital and transforms room into exhibition space  

euler equations: computers make break-throughs in understanding fluid dynamics